Organizational Behavior Overview

Organizational Behavior (OB)

• Definition: The study of how people think, feel, and act within and around organizations.
• Organizations: Groups of people working together toward a shared purpose.
• Importance: Understanding and predicting workplace events, improving interpersonal influence and coordination, increasing organizational effectiveness (adapting to environments and satisfying stakeholders).

Key OB Concepts

• Organizations as Open Systems: Transforming inputs into outputs (products/services) and maintaining a dynamic fit with the external environment.
• Human Capital: Knowledge, skills, and abilities of employees, a source of competitive advantage.
• Stakeholders and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility): Entities affected by a firm's actions, focusing on economic, social, and environmental goals.
• Diversity and Inclusiveness: Benefits include better decisions, innovation, and increased representation. Challenges include longer team adaptation, conflict, and lower morale.

Emerging Workplace Trends

• Work-Life Integration: Balancing work-nonwork roles with flexible schedules and boundary management.
• Remote Work: Benefits include work-life balance, productivity, and environmental benefits. Disadvantages include social isolation, weakened team cohesion, and a weaker culture.
• Employment Relationships: Varying effects on job satisfaction, innovation, and teamwork, including direct, indirect, and contract employment.

MARS Model of Individual Behavior

• Motivation: Internal forces driving behavior; characterized by direction, intensity, and persistence.

Individual Differences - Personality and Values

• Personality: Enduring patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Influenced by nature and nurture, stabilizing in adulthood.
• The Big Five Personality Model (CANOE): Conscientiousness (organized, dependable), Agreeableness (trusting, helpful), Neuroticism (anxious, insecure), Openness (creative, curious), and Extraversion (outgoing, energetic).
  • Note: Higher scores aren't always better, context matters.
• Dark Triad: Machiavellianism (deceptive), Narcissism (obsessed with superiority), and Psychopathy (ruthless). Linked to organizational politics, risky decision-making, and team dysfunction.
• Values: Stable beliefs about right and wrong. Schwartz's Values Model - Openness to Change, Conservation, and Self-Enhancement are four quadrants.

Ethical Principles

• Utilitarianism: Greatest good for the greatest number.
• Individual Rights: Respecting basic rights.
• Distributive Justice: Fair allocation of benefits and burdens.
• Ethic of Care: Moral duty to help others.

Cultural Dimensions

• Individualism vs. Collectivism (self-sufficiency vs. group harmony)
• Power Distance (acceptance of unequal power distribution)
• Uncertainty Avoidance (comfort with ambiguity)
• Achievement vs. Nurturing (competition vs. relationships)

Diversity in Canada (specifics)

• Differences in Francophones, Indigenous Canadians, and regional variations.

Self-Concept and Processes

• 3 Cs: Self-Complexity (multiple self-concepts), Self-Consistency (similarities), and Self-Clarity (confidence in self-definition).
• Four Selves: Self-Enhancement, Self-Verification, Self-Evaluation, and Social Self.

Perceptual Process

• Perception: Interpreting sensory information; influenced by selective attention and expectations.
• Perceptual Biases and Errors: Stereotyping, self-serving bias, fundamental attribution error, halo effect, and false-consensus effect.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Supervisors' expectations influencing employee performance.

Workplace Emotions, Attitudes, and Stress

• Emotions: Brief psychological, behavioral, and physiological states.
• Attitudes: Judgments about objects.
• Emotional Labor: Effort to display organizationally desired emotions.
• Emotional Intelligence (EI): Awareness, management, and use of emotions.
• Job Satisfaction: Positive feelings toward a job; influenced by the EVLN model (Exit, Voice, Loyalty, Neglect).
• Organizational Commitment: Affective (emotional), continuance (calculative), and normative (moral) types.
• Workplace Stressors: Low task control, interpersonal conflicts, and work overload.

Team Dynamics

• Teams: Groups of two or more people working interdependently toward a shared purpose.
• Team Development Stages: Forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning.
• Team Processes: Norms, roles, cohesion, trust, and mental models.
• Challenges: Process losses, social loafing, issues around optimal team size and composition.
• Team Effectiveness Model: Task characteristics, size, and composition.
• The Five Cs of Effective Teamwork: Cooperating, coordinating, communicating.
• Self-Directed Teams and Remote Teams.

Team Decision-Making

• Constraints: Time, evaluation apprehension, peer pressure, and overconfidence.