Organizational Behavior Overview

Organizational Behavior (OB)

• OB is the study of how individuals, groups, and structures impact behavior within organizations.

Levels of Analysis

• Individual level
• Group level
• Organizational system level

Evidence-Based Management

• Decisions in OB should rely on scientific evidence, not intuition, personal experience, or trends.
• Strong evidence comes from rigorous scientific methods, large samples, and replicated findings across different companies and industries.
• Weak evidence comes from intuition, anecdotes, case studies, and observed trends.

Personality

• Personality is a set of characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
• The interactionist perspective highlights that both personality and situational factors predict behavior.

Situation Strength Theory

• The theory posits that the influence of personality on behavior depends on the strength of the situation.

The Big Five Model

• Openness: Practical, conventional, and prefers routine (low) vs. curious, creative, and imaginative (high). Predicts creativity and adaptability to change.
• Conscientiousness: Impulsive, careless, disorganized (low) vs. hardworking, dependable, organized, and persistent (high). Strongest predictor of job performance.
• Extraversion: Quiet, thoughtful, reserved, withdrawn (low) vs. outgoing, gregarious, assertive, and sociable (high). May be better leaders.
• Agreeableness: Critical, uncooperative, and skeptical (low) vs. helpful, trusting, and empathetic (high). Associated with being liked by co-workers, helpful behavior, and less deviant behavior.
• Neuroticism: Anxious, nervous, insecure, prone to negative emotions (high) vs. calm, even-tempered, relaxed, and secure (low). Predicts less job and life satisfaction, more stress, and negative feelings.

Myers-Briggs

• Not recommended due to low reliability, categorical nature, lack of scientific basis, and lack of predictive validity.

Culture and Values

• Culture encompasses learned and shared ways of thinking and acting within a group.
• The Hofstede Study highlights cultural dimensions for management, including individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity-femininity.
• These dimensions are important in hiring, promotion, leadership, and CEO compensation.

Perception and Decision Making

• Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory impressions to understand the environment.
• Factors influencing perception include the perceiver's attitudes and experiences, the target's appearance and social group, and the situation's context, social setting, and time.

Rational Decision-Making Model

• A theoretical model that is rarely used in practice.
• Steps include: define the problem, generate alternatives, identify relevant criteria, assign weights to criteria, evaluate alternatives, and compute the optimal decision.

Cognitive Biases

• Bounded Rationality: People make decisions using simplified models due to limited cognitive capacity.
• Fundamental Attribution Error: Overemphasizing personal characteristics and underestimating situational factors in explaining others' behavior.
• Halo Effect: Generalizing from one positive trait to other unrelated traits.
• Overconfidence Bias: Overestimating one's abilities or the accuracy of one's judgments.
• Anchoring Bias: Relying too heavily on initial information when making decisions.
• Confirmation Bias: Seeking information that confirms existing beliefs and ignoring contradictory information.
• Availability Bias: Overestimating the likelihood of events that are easily recalled.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: Continuing to invest in a losing course of action because of prior investments.
• Loss Aversion: Experiencing the pain of a loss more strongly than the pleasure of an equivalent gain.

Emotions and Motivation

• Affect: Broad range of feelings encompassing emotions and moods.
• Emotions: caused by specific events, brief in duration, and action-oriented. Moods: general causes, unclear, and linger longer than emotions.

Emotional Labor

• The effort required to manage emotions and express organizationally desired emotions.
• Emotional dissonance refers to the conflict between felt emotions and displayed emotions.

Motivation

• Motivation is the force that drives effort in action.
• Components include activation (initiating action), intensity (amount of effort), and persistence (duration of effort).
• Intrinsic motivation comes from the task itself and extrinsic motivation comes from external rewards or punishments.
• Important strategies include training, clear goals, building confidence, and reward/recognition.

Goal Setting

• Goals: Cognitive representations of targets for behavior.
• Strong goal setting can enhance performance.
• Effective goals are specific, measurable, challenging but attainable, and important.

Principles of Persuasion

• Reciprocity: The obligation to return favors.
• Social Proof: Looking to others' behavior to guide our own.
• Consistency: The desire to be consistent with past commitments
• Authority: Deferring to those in positions of authority.
• Scarcity: Valuing things that are rare or in limited supply.

Power and Influence

• Power is the control over resources and the ability to influence others.
• Sources of power include formal power (position); informal power (personal characteristics or relationships); reward power (ability to provide rewards), coercive power (ability to punish), expert power (knowledge or skills), and referent power (admiration or respect).
• Hierarchies can reduce uncertainty, facilitate coordination, and increase motivation, but can also hinder communication and decision-making, leading to resentment and competition.

Groups and Teams

• Diversity includes differences in demographics, experience, and perspective.
• Social loafing is the tendency to exert less effort in a group setting.
• Groupthink is the desire for group harmony resulting in poor decision-making.
• Effective teams share a common goal and work interdependently.

Organizational Culture

• Definition: A system of shared meaning that distinguishes an organization from others and defines what is important and appropriate.
• Strong cultures promote shared values, influence behavior, and increase cohesiveness.
• The dark side of strong cultures may include lack of diversity and stifling dissenting opinions.
• Consideration of organizational culture should be included when assessing organizational behavior. Effective culture can motivate and increase job satisfaction.

Diversity, Inclusion, & Equity

• Diversity: Representing different people and perspectives..
• Inclusion: Fostering a culture where everyone feels valued and respected.
• Equity: Provides fair and impartial access to opportunities and resources.
• Trends: Increasing ethnic/racial diversity; more women/older workers; pay/wage gaps across gender/racial groups.
• Factors (e.g., visible and invisible attributes): age, gender, race, religion, cultural background.