three levels of OB study. The outline of the text is described in relation to these three levels.

Copyright ©2018 Pearson Education, Inc.

Chapter 1

What Is Organizational Behavior?

Chapter Overview

This chapter introduces the concept of organizational behavior. The focus of the text is that coupling individual understanding of behavior gained through experience with that gained through systematic organizational behavior (OB) analysis will help managers become more effective.

Many of the important challenges being faced by today’s managers are described, as are the three levels of OB study. The outline of the text is described in relation to these three levels.

Chapter Objectives

After studying this chapter, the student should be able to:

• Define organizational behavior (referred to as OB

throughout the text).

• Show the value of systematic study to OB.
• Identify the major behavioral science disciplines that contribute to OB.
• Demonstrate why few absolutes apply to OB.
• Identify managers’ challenges and opportunities in applying OB concepts.
• Compare the three levels of analysis in this text’s OB model.

Suggested Lecture Outline

I. INTRODUCTION

• Until the late 1980s, business school curricula emphasized the technical aspects of

management, focusing on economics, accounting, finance, and quantitative techniques.

• Course work in human behavior and people skills received relatively less

attention.

• During the past three decades, however, business faculty have come to realize

the role that understanding human behavior plays in determining a manager’s effectiveness, and required courses on people skills have been added to many curricula.

• Developing managers’ interpersonal skills also helps organizations attract and keep

high-performing employees.

• Regardless of labor market conditions, outstanding employees are always in

short supply.

• Companies known as good places to work have a big advantage.

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• A recent survey of hundreds of workplaces and over 200,000 respondents

showed the social relationships among co-workers and supervisors were strongly related to overall job satisfaction.

• Positive social relationships also were associated with lower stress at work

and lower intentions to quit.

• Having managers with good interpersonal skills is likely to make the

workplace more pleasant, which in turn makes it easier to hire and keep qualified people.

• Increasing the OB element in organizations can foster social responsibility

awareness.

• We have come to understand that in today’s competitive and demanding

workplace, managers can’t succeed on their technical skills alone.

• They also have to have good people skills.
• This book has been written to help both managers and potential managers

develop those people skills.

II. MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

• The roles of a manager — and the necessary skills to

perform as one — are constantly evolving.

• Yet, more than ever, individuals are placed into management positions without

management training or informed experience.

• Furthermore, a Gallup poll found that organizations chose the wrong candidate

for management positions 82 percent of the time.

• Organizational Behavior (OB) Defined.
• Organizational behavior (OB) studies the influence that

individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations. The chief goal of OB is to apply that knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness.

2. OB studies three determinants of behavior in organizations:

• individuals
• groups
• structure
• OB applies the knowledge gained from this study to make organizations work

more effectively.

4. This text will focus on:

• motivation
• leader behavior and power
• interpersonal communication
• group structure and processes
• attitude development and perception
• change processes
• conflict and negotiation
• work design
• Effective versus Successful Managerial Activities.
• What makes one manager more effective than another? To answer the question,

Fred Luthans, a prominent OB researcher, and his associates looked at what managers do from a unique perspective.

• Luthans and his associates studied more than 450 managers. All engaged in four

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managerial activities:

• Traditional management. Decision making, planning, and controlling.
• Communication. Exchanging routine information and processing paperwork.
• Human resources (HR) management. Motivating, disciplining, managing

conflict, staffing, and training.

• Networking. Socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders.
• Among managers who were successful (defined in terms of speed of promotion

within their organizations), networking made the largest relative contribution to success and HR management activities made the least relative contribution, which is the opposite of the average manager.

III. COMPLEMENTING INTUITION WITH SYSTEMATIC STUDY

• People develop intuitive understandings of the behaviors of other people through

experience. This experiential, common sense method of “reading” human behavior can often lead to erroneous predictions.

• You can improve your predictive ability by taking the

systematic approach to the study of human behavior.

• The fundamental assumption of the systematic approach is

that human behavior is not random. There are fundamental consistencies that underlie the behavior of all individuals, and these fundamental consistencies can be identified and then modified to reflect individual differences.

1. Systematic study of behavior means: examining

relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects, and basing our conclusions on scientific evidence — that is, on data gathered under controlled conditions and measured and interpreted in a reasonably rigorous manner.

2. Evidence-based Management (EBM): This

complementary approach to systematic study involves basing managerial decisions on the best available scientific evidence. Managers must become more scientific about how they think about managerial problems and not rely on instinct.

• Intuition: your “gut feelings” about “what makes others tick.” This natural

ability to guess how people will react is most accurate when coupled with systematic thinking and evidence-based management.

• Big Data.
• Big data is the extensive use of statistical compilation and analysis—didn’t

become possible until computers were sophisticated enough to both store and manipulate large amounts of information. The use of big data began with online retailers but has since permeated virtually every business.

• Current Usage: The reasons for data analytics include: predicting events,

detecting how much risk is incurred at any time, and preventing catastrophes large and small.

3. New Trends: The use of big data for understanding, helping, and managing

people is relatively new but holds promise. A manager who uses data to define objectives, develop theories of causality, and test those theories can determine which employee activities are relevant to the objectives. Big data has implications for correcting management assumptions and increasing positive performance outcomes.

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• Limitations: As technological capabilities for handling big data have increased,

so have issues of privacy and appropriate application. This is particularly true when data collection includes surveillance instruments.

• We are not advising you to throw intuition out the window. In dealing with

people, leaders often rely on hunches, and sometimes the outcomes are excellent. At other times, human tendencies get in the way. What we are advising is to use evidence as much as possible to inform your intuition and experience. The prudent use of big data, along with an understanding of human behavioral tendencies, can contribute to sound decision making and ease natural biases. That is the promise of OB.

IV. DISCIPLINES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE OB FIELD

• Organizational behavior is an applied behavioral science

built on contributions from a number of behavioral disciplines, mainly psychology and social psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

• Psychology’s contributions have been mainly at the individual or micro level of

analysis, while the other disciplines have contributed to our understanding of macro concepts such as group processes and organization.

• Exhibit 1-1 is an overview of the major contributions to the study of

organizational behavior.

• Psychology: seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change behavior of humans

and other animals.

1. Those who have contributed and continue to add to the knowledge of OB are:

• learning theorists
• personality theorists
• counseling psychologists
• industrial and organizational psychologists.

1) Early industrial/organizational psychologists studied the problems of fatigue, boredom, and other working conditions that could impede efficient work performance.2) More recently, their contributions have expanded to include learning, perception, personality, emotions, training, leadership effectiveness, needs and motivational forces, job satisfaction, decision-making processes, performance appraisals, attitude measurement, employee- selection techniques, work design, and job stress.

• Social psychology: generally considered a branch of psychology; blends concepts

from both psychology and sociology to focus on peoples’ influence on one another.

• One major study area is change—how to implement it and how to reduce

barriers to its acceptance.

• Social psychologists also contribute to measuring, understanding, and changing

attitudes; identifying communication patterns; and building trust.

• Finally, they have made important contributions to our study of group behavior,

power, and conflict.

• Sociology: studies people in relation to their social environment or culture.
• While psychology focuses on the individual, sociology studies people in relation

to their social environment or culture.

• Sociologists have contributed to OB through their study of group behavior in

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