Organizational Behaviour: Understanding and

Managing Life at Work

Twelfth Edition

Chapter 1
Organizational Behaviour and
Management

Copyright © 2023 Pearson Canada Inc.

Tell me something good!

3
 Learning Objectives
LO1.1 Define organizations and describe their basic characteristics.
LO1.2 Explain the concept and meaning of organizational behaviour.
LO1.3 Describe the goals of organizational behaviour.
LO1.4 Contrast the classical viewpoint of management with that
advocated by the human relations movement.
LO1.5 Describe the contingency approach to management.
LO1.6 Explain what managers do—their roles, activities, agendas for
action, and thought processes.
LO1.7 Describe the five contemporary management concerns facing
organizations and how organizational behaviour can help
organizations understand and manage these concerns.
What Are Organizations?
Organizations are social
inventions for accomplishing
common goals through group
effort.

Key characteristics of
organizations:

Goal
Social inventions Group effort
accomplishment
 The attitudes and behaviours of
individuals and groups in organizations.
What Is
Organizational How organizations can be structured
Behaviour? more effectively.

How events in the external

environment affect organizations.
 Programs, practices, and systems to
acquire, develop, motivate, and retain
employees in organizations.
What Is Human
Resources Recruitment, selection, compensation, and
training and development are common
Management? human resources practices.

Knowledge of organizational behaviour will

help you understand the use and
effectiveness of human resources practices.
Why Study Organizational Behaviour?

• Organizational behaviour:
• Is Interesting. It is about people and human nature, and
explains the success and failure of organizations.
• Is Important. It has a profound impact on managers,
employees, and consumers.
• Makes a difference. It affects individuals’ attitudes and
behaviour as well as the competitiveness and effectiveness
of organizations.
• Human capital
• Social capital (internal and external)
Management Practices of the Best
Companies to Work for in Canada

• Flexible work schedules

• Stock options, profit-sharing plans, and bonuses
• Opportunities for learning and development
• Family assistance programs
• Career development programs
• Wellness and stress reduction programs
• Employee recognition and reward programs
Activity
1. In pairs, open a blank page in Word, Pages, Notes, etc…

2. Together, respond to the questions on the slide as being either

TRUE or FALSE

3. Write a sentence to justify your response.

How Much Do You Know About Organizational Behaviour?

1. Effective leaders tend to possess identical personality traits.

2. Nearly all workers prefer stimulating, challenging jobs.
3. Managers have a very accurate idea about how much their peers
and superiors are paid.
4. Workers have a very accurate idea about how often they are
absent from work.
5. Pay is the best way to motivate most employees and improve job
performance.
6. Women are just as likely to become leaders in organizations as
men.
How Much Do You Know About Organizational Behaviour?

• People are very good at giving sensible reasons why the same
statement is either true or false.

• Common sense develops through unsystematic and incomplete

experiences with organizational behaviour.

• Management practice should be based on informed opinion and

systematic study.
Goals of Organizational
Behaviour

• The field of organizational behaviour has three

commonly agreed-upon goals:

• Predicting organizational behaviour and

events.
• Explaining organizational behaviour and
events in organizations.
• Managing organizational behaviour.
Evidence-Based Management

Involves translating principles based on the best scientific evidence into

organizational practices.

Making decisions based on the best available scientific evidence from

social science and organizational research rather than personal preference
and unsystematic experience.

The use of evidence-based management is more likely to result in the

attainment of organizational goals.
The Classical View

To maintain control, it suggests

The classical view advocates a
that managers have fairly few
high degree of specialization of
workers, except for lower-level
labour, intensive coordination,
jobs where machine pacing
and centralized decision
might substitute for close
making.
supervision.
 Scientific
Management
• Scientific management is Frederick
Taylor’s system for using research to
determine the optimum degree of
specialization and standardization of
work tasks.
• Mainly concerned with job design and
the structure of work on the shop floor.
• Involves the use of research to determine
the optimum degree of specialization and
standardization.
 Bureaucracy
• Bureaucracy is Max Weber’s ideal type of organization that
includes:
• Strict chain of command
• Selection and promotion criteria based on technical
competence
• Detailed rules, regulations, and procedures
• High specialization
• Centralization of power at the top of the organization
• Weber saw bureaucracy as an “ideal type” that would
standardize behaviour in organizations and provide workers with
security and a sense of purpose.
• The classical view of management seemed to take for granted an
essential conflict of interest between managers and employees.
The Human Relations
Movement and a Critique of
Bureaucracy

• The human relations movement began with the

famous Hawthorne Studies of the 1920s and
1930s conducted at the Hawthorne plant of
Western Electric.
The Hawthorne
Studies
• Concerned with the impact of fatigue, rest pauses, and
lighting on employee productivity.
• The studies illustrated how psychological and social
processes affect productivity and work adjustment.
• Suggested there could be dysfunctional aspects to how
work was organized.
• One sign was resistance to management through
strong informal group mechanisms such as norms that
limited productivity.
Critique of Bureaucracy
• The human relations movement called attention to certain dysfunctional aspects of
classical management and bureaucracy and noted several problems:
• Employee alienation
• Limits innovation and adaptation
• Resistance to change
• Minimum acceptable level of performance
• Employees lose sight of the overall goals of the organization
The Human Relations
Movement
• Advocated more people-oriented and participative
styles of management that catered more to the social
and psychological needs of employees.
• The movement called for:
• More flexible systems of management
• The design of more interesting jobs
• Open communication
• Employee participation in decision making
• Less rigid, more decentralized forms of control
Contemporary Management—
The Contingency Approach

• The merits of both approaches are recognized today.

• Management approaches need to be tailored to fit the
situation.
• The complexity of human behaviour means that an
organizational behaviour text cannot be a “cookbook.”
• The general answer to many of the problems in
organizations is: “It depends.”
• Dependencies are called contingencies.
• The contingency approach to management recognizes
that there is no one best way to manage.
• An appropriate m management style depends on the
demands of the situation.
What Do Managers
Do?
• The field of organizational behaviour is concerned
with what happens in organizations and what
managers actually do in organizations.
• Research has focused on:
• Managerial roles
• Managerial activities
• Managerial agendas
• Managerial minds
• International managers
Managerial Roles

• Henry Mintzberg
discovered a rather
complex set of roles
played by managers:
• Interpersonal roles
• Informational roles
• Decisional roles
Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles
Exhibit 1.2 Mintzberg’s managerial roles.

Source: Dr. Henry Mintzberg.

Managerial Activities
• Fred Luthans, Richard Hodgetts, and Stuart Rosenkrantz found
that managers engage in four basic types of activities:
• Routine communication (formal sending and receiving
information)
• Traditional management (planning, decision making,
controlling)
• Networking (interaction with people outside of the
organization)
• Human resource management (motivating, reinforcing,
disciplining, punishing, managing conflict, staffing, training
and developing employees)
• All these managerial activities involve dealing with people.
 Summary of Managerial Activities
Exhibit 1.3 Summary of managerial activities.

Source: Adapted from Luthans, F., Hodgetts, R. M., & Rosenkrantz, S. A. (1988). Real managers. Cambridge, MA:
Ballinger. Reprinted by permission of Dr. F. Luthans on behalf of the authors.
Managerial Minds
• Herbert Simon and Daniel Isenberg explored how managers
think.
• Experienced managers use intuition to guide many of their
actions:
• To sense that a problem exists
• To perform well-learned mental tasks rapidly
• To synthesize isolated pieces of information and data
• To double-check more formal or mechanical analyses
• Good intuition is problem identification and problem solving
based on a long history of systematic education and experience.
• Enables the manager to locate problems within a network of
previously acquired information.
 International Managers
• The style in which managers do what they do and the emphasis
they give to various activities will vary greatly across cultures.
• Cultural variations in values affect both managers’ and
employees’ expectations about interpersonal interaction.
• Geert Hofstede showed how cross-cultural differences in values
leads to contrasts in the general role that managers play across
cultures.
• National culture is one of the most important contingency
variables in organizational behaviour.
• The appropriateness of various leadership styles, motivation
techniques, and communication methods depends on where
one is in the world.
Some Contemporary
Management Concerns

• Five issues with which organizations and

managers are currently concerned:

• Diversity—Local and Global

• Employee Health and Well-Being
• Talent Management and Employee
Engagement
• Alternative Work Arrangements
• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
Positive Organizational Behaviour (POB)
• The study and application of positively oriented human resource strengths and
psychological capacities that can be measured, developed, and effectively managed
for performance improvement.
• The psychological capacities that can be developed in employees are known as
psychological capital or PsyCap.
• An individual’s positive psychological state of development that is characterized by
self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience.
• Each of the components of PsyCap are states not traits; they are positive work-related
psychological resources that can be changed, modified, and developed.
• PsyCap interventions (PCI) can be used to develop employees’ PsyCap—they focus on
enhancing each of the components of PsyCap.
Model of Organizational Behaviour
Exhibit 1.7 Model of organizational behaviour.