Organisational Behaviour Basics

Organisational Behaviour

• Organisational behaviour is the field of study that investigates the effect of individuals, groups, and structure on behaviour within organisations to improve organisational effectiveness.

Interpersonal Skills

• Interpersonal skills are the behaviours and tactics a person uses to interact with others effectively, including understanding others' emotions, working well with them, appreciating others, resolving disputes, and listening well.
• Managers need interpersonal skills to create a productive work environment, which leads to positive work outcomes, such as lower turnover of strong employees, improved recruitment pools, and better financial performance.

Managerial Functions, Roles, and Skills

• A manager is someone who gets things done through other people in organisations.
• Planning, Organising, Leading, and Controlling are some of the functions most often studied.
• Managerial roles include:
  • Interpersonal: symbolic head, performing routine duties of a legal or social nature.
  • Leader: responsible for motivating and directing employees.
  • Liaison: maintaining a network of outside contacts who provide favours and information.
  • Informational: receiving and transmitting information.
  • Disseminator: transmitting information to members of the organisation.
  • Spokesperson: transmitting information to outsiders on organisation's plans, policies, actions, and results.
  • Decisional: searching for opportunities and initiating projects to bring about change.
  • Disturbance handler: responsible for corrective action when the organisation faces unexpected disturbances.
  • Resource allocator: making or approving significant organisational resource decisions.
  • Negotiator: representing the organisation at major negotiations or discussions to make an agreement.
• Managerial skills include:
  • Technical skills: applying specialized knowledge or experience in a particular industry.
  • Human skills: working with, understanding, and motivating other people.
  • Conceptual skills: using thinking, reasoning, and logic to make decisions.

Systematic Study of Behaviour

• The systematic study of OB aims to predict the behaviour of individuals and groups by understanding the situation and composition of the people.
• Organisations need to study individual and group behaviour to identify key elements to improve overall work environments.
• There are three ways to conduct this type of organisational behaviour study:
  • Systematic study: looking at relationships, attributing causes and effects, and drawing conclusions based on scientific evidence.
  • Intuition: a feeling, not necessarily supported by research, about why things are the way they are.
  • Evidence-based management: making decisions based on evidence, which complements systematic study.

Contributing Disciplines to OB

• Psychology: focuses on the individual level, studying learning, motivation, personality, emotions, perceptions, and training.
• Sociology: studies the relationship between individuals and their environment, looking at group behaviour, communication, power, conflict, and inter-group behaviour.
• Social Psychology: blends sociology and psychology, studying group behaviour and how individuals can influence and be influenced by others.
• Anthropology: studies human beings and their activities in their environment, focusing on values, attitudes, and cultural analysis.

Challenges and Opportunities for OB

• Responding to economic pressure: managers need to make decisions based on resource constraints, which can be challenging.
• Responding to globalisation: managers need to have a broader perspective when making decisions, and be able to manage a workforce that is different from what they may be used to.
• Managing Workforce Diversity: managers need to embrace diversity and find ways to manage it effectively.
• Improving Customer Service: OB helps identify the characteristics and situations that can be managed to make employees and managers more sensitive to customer satisfaction.
• Improving People Skills: OB provides concepts and theories that help predict behaviour to create a more effective organisation.
• Stimulating Innovation and Change: OB helps employees and managers suggest innovation and change to improve the organisation, its people, processes, and products.
• Creating a Positive Work Environment: creating a positive work environment has been found to be a basis for employee satisfaction, increased productivity, and longevity of skilled personnel.

Attitudes and Job Satisfaction

• An attitude is an evaluative statement or judgment concerning objects, people, or events, composed of three components: cognitive, affective, and behavioral.
• The cognitive component is made up of beliefs about the way things are.
• The affective component is the emotional or feeling aspect of an attitude.
• The behavioral component describes the intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something.

The Relationship between Attitudes and Behavior

• Sometimes, people change their attitudes to align with their behavior to avoid cognitive dissonance.
• Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling that arises from holding two conflicting attitudes or behaviors.
• The relationship between attitudes and behavior can be influenced by variables such as importance, correspondence, accessibility, social pressures, and personal experience.

Job Attitudes

• Job satisfaction is a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics.
• Job involvement is the degree of psychological identification with a job.
• Organizational commitment is identifying with a particular organization and its goals, with a desire to maintain membership.
• Perceived organizational support (POS) is the degree to which employees believe the organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being.
• Employee engagement is the degree of involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for the job.

Measuring Job Satisfaction

• Job satisfaction can be measured through single global ratings, where respondents rate their overall satisfaction on a scale.
• The summation of job facets is a more sophisticated method that identifies key elements in a job, such as the nature of the work, supervision, and pay.

Causes of Job Satisfaction

• Pay influences job satisfaction only to a point, and there is no direct relationship between amount of pay and job satisfaction.
• Interesting jobs that provide training, variety, independence, and control satisfy most employees.
• Social context, including interdependence, feedback, social support, and interaction with coworkers, is strongly related to job satisfaction.
• Personality also plays a role in job satisfaction, with people who have positive core self-evaluations being more satisfied with their jobs.

Employee Responses to Dissatisfaction

• Exit: behavior directed toward leaving the organization, including looking for a new position or resigning.
• Voice: actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions, including suggesting improvements and discussing problems with superiors.
• Loyalty: passively, but optimistically, waiting for conditions to improve, including speaking up for the organization in the face of external criticism.
• Neglect: passively allowing conditions to worsen, including chronic absenteeism or lateness, reduced effort, and increased error rate.

Implications for Managers

• Satisfied and committed employees have lower rates of turnover, absenteeism, and withdrawal behaviors.
• Managers should measure job attitudes effectively to understand how employees are reacting to their work.
• Focusing on the intrinsic parts of the job, such as making the work challenging and interesting, can raise employee satisfaction.
• While paying employees poorly may not attract high-quality employees or keep high performers, high pay alone is unlikely to create a satisfying job.

Test your understanding of organisational behaviour, including the impact of individuals, groups, and structure on behaviour within organisations and the importance of interpersonal skills.