Organizational Behavior: Interpersonal Skills

• Chapter 1 focuses on what organizational behavior (OB) is.

Importance of Interpersonal Skills

• Interpersonal skills are important because workplaces with them tend to have better financial performance.
• Enhanced interpersonal skills lead to lower employee turnover and attract higher quality job applicants.
• A strong correlation exists between workplace relationships and job satisfaction, stress levels, and turnover rates.
• Fostering social responsibility awareness is another benefit of strong interpersonal skills.

Defining Organizational Behavior

• Organizational Behavior (OB) studies the impact of individuals, groups, and structures on behavior within organizations.
• Goal of OB is to apply its knowledge to improve the effectiveness of organizations.

Systematic Study vs. Intuition

• Behavior can be predicted if one knows how a person perceives a situation and what is important to them.
• Evidence-Based Management (EBM) enhances systematic study by grounding managerial decisions in scientific evidence.
• EBM advocates that managers should make decisions based on evidence.
• Systematic study and EBM complement intuition, which are those "gut feelings" about why people do what they do.
• Incomplete information is likely if all decisions are based on intuition or gut instinct.

Behavioral Science Disciplines in OB

• Organizational behavior incorporates insights from multiple behavioral disciplines.
• These disciplines include psychology, social psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
• Psychology seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change human behavior.
• Sociology studies people in relation to their social environment or culture.
• Social psychology integrates concepts from both psychology and sociology.
• Anthropology studies societies to understand human beings and their activities.

Challenges and Opportunities of OB Concepts

• Effective management is an asset during tough economic times.
• Good times require understanding how to reward, satisfy, and retain employees.
• Bad times bring issues like stress, decision making, and coping to the forefront.
• Working with people from different cultures is a challenge and opportunity due to globalization.
• Globalization means overseeing the movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labor.
• Adapting to differing cultural and regulatory norms in other countries is a challenge in globalization.

Managing Workforce Diversity

• Organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, race, and inclusion of diverse groups.

Improving Customer Service

• Front-line service employees typically have substantial interaction with customers.
• Employee attitudes and behavior are associated with customer satisfaction.
• A customer-responsive culture is needed.

Improving People Skills

• Essential to managerial effectiveness and success.
• OB provides concepts and theories for managers to predict employee behavior in various situations.

Networked Organizations

• Networked organizations are becoming increasingly common.
• Managing networked organizations fundamentally alters a manager's role.
• Motivating and leading "online" requires different techniques.

Social Media at Work

• Policies are needed for accessing social media at work, specifying when, where, and for what purpose.
• One must consider the impact of social media on employee well-being.

Enhancing Employee Well-Being

• The global workforce means work is no longer confined by time.
• Communication technology facilitates working at any time and in any place.
• Employees are working longer hours each week.
• Family lifestyles have changed, leading to conflict.
• Balancing work and life has become a higher priority for employees than job security.

Creating a Positive Work Environment

• Positive organizational scholarship explores how organizations develop human strengths, foster vitality and resilience, and unlock potential.
• Focuses on employees' strengths rather than limitations, encouraging them to share situations of peak performance.

Improving Ethical Behavior

• Ethical dilemmas and choices require individuals to distinguish between right and wrong conduct.
• Good ethical behavior isn't always easily defined.

Levels of Analysis in OB Model

• Inputs from the individual level include diversity, personality, and values.
• Inputs at the group level include group structure, roles, and team responsibilities.
• Organizational level inputs consist of structure and culture.
• Individual level processes incorporate emotions and moods, motivation, perception, and decision making.
• Group level processes include communication, leadership, power and politics, and conflict and negotiation.
• Organizational level processes are human resource management, and change practices.
• Individual level outcomes are attitudes and stress, task performance, citizenship behavior, and withdrawal behavior.
• Group level outcomes consist of group cohesion and group functioning.
• Organizational level outcomes are productivity and survival.

Inputs Defined

• They are variables like personality, group structure, and organizational culture.
• These factors lead to various organizational processes.
• Group structure, roles, and team responsibilities are typically assigned when a group is formed, or immediately prior.
• Organizational structure and culture evolve (change) over time.

Processes Defined

• Processes are the actions individuals, groups, and organizations take as a result of inputs, which lead to specific outcomes.

Outcome Variables Defined

• They are key variables that we aim to explain or predict, and are influenced by other variables.
• Employee attitudes are evaluations ranging from positive to negative.
• Stress describes negative psychological processes stemming from environmental pressures.
• Task performance is a mix of effectiveness and efficiency in one's core job tasks.
• Organizational citizenship behavior is discretionary behavior that contributes to the workplace's social and psychological environment.
• Withdrawal behavior encompasses actions employees take to separate themselves from the organization.
• Group cohesion is the degree to which group members support and validate one another at work.
• Group functioning relates to the quantity and quality of a group's work output.
• Productivity occurs when an organization achieves its goals by efficiently transforming inputs into outputs.
• Organizational survival is achieved when the organization can exist and grow over the long term.

Implications for Managers

• Avoid relying on generalizations.
• Use metrics and situational variables to understand cause-and-effect better than using "hunches."
• Develop interpersonal skills to boost leadership potential.
• Improve technical and conceptual skills through training.
• OB can improve employee work quality and productivity by:
  • Empowering employees.
  • Improving customer service.
  • Designing and implementing effective programs.
  • Helping employees to balance work-life conflicts.