Organizational Behaviour: Attitudes and Job Satisfaction

• Organizational behaviour (OB) studies the impact of individuals, groups, and structures on behaviour within organizations.
• Its goal is to apply such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness.
• OB is an applied behavioural science built on contributions from psychology, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and political science.
• There are three levels of analysis in OB: individual, group, and organizational.

Attitudes and Job Satisfaction

• Attitudes are evaluative statements – either favourable or unfavourable – about objects, people, or events.
• Attitudes have three components: cognition, affect, and behaviour.
• Cognitive component: the opinion or belief segment of an attitude.
• Affective component: the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude.
• Behavioural component: an intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something.
• Job satisfaction: a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics.
• Job involvement: the degree to which a person identifies psychologically with a job, actively participates in it, and considers performance important for self-worth.
• Organizational commitment: the degree to which an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and wishes to maintain membership in the organization.
• Perceived organizational support (POS): the degree to which employees believe the organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being.
• Employee engagement: an individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for the work they do.
• Measuring job satisfaction: single global rating (one question: "How satisfied are you with your job?") and summation of job facets (identifies key elements in a job and asks for specific feeling about them).
• Causes of job satisfaction: job conditions, personality, pay, corporate social responsibility.
• Outcomes of job satisfaction: job performance, organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), customer satisfaction, life satisfaction.
• Dissatisfaction can be expressed through exit, voice, loyalty, or neglect.

Personality and Values

• Personality: the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine their unique adjustments to their environment.
• Personality traits: enduring characteristics that describe an individual’s behaviour.
• Measuring personality: self-report surveys and observer-report surveys.
• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality assessment that taps four characteristics and classifies people into 1 of 16 personality types.
• The Big Five Personality Model: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience.
• Conscientiousness predicts job performance.
• Other personality traits relevant to OB: core self-evaluation, Machiavellianism, narcissism, self-monitoring, risk taking, proactive personality.
• Values: basic convictions that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence.
• Value system: a hierarchy based on a ranking of an individual’s values in terms of their intensity.
• Terminal values: desirable end-states of existence; the goals a person would like to achieve during their lifetime.
• Instrumental values: preferable modes of behaviour or means of achieving one’s terminal values.
• Person-job fit: a theory that identifies six personality types and proposes that the fit between personality type and occupational environment determines satisfaction and turnover.
• Person-organization fit: a theory that people are attracted to and selected by organizations that match their values, and leave when there is no compatibility.
• Hofstede’s framework for assessing cultures: power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, masculinity vs. femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term vs. short-term orientation, indulgence vs. restraint.
• The GLOBE framework for assessing cultures: similar to Hofstede’s, with some added dimensions.

Perception and Individual Decision Making

• Perception: a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.
• Factors that influence perception: the perceiver, the target, the situation.
• Attribution theory: an attempt to determine whether an individual’s behaviour is internally or externally caused.
• Determination depends on: distinctiveness, consensus, consistency.
• Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behaviour of others.
• Self-serving bias: the tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors and put the blame for failures on external factors.
• Selective perception: the tendency to selectively interpret what one sees on the basis of one’s interests, background, experience, and attitudes.
• Halo effect: the tendency to draw a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic.
• Contrast effects: evaluation of a person’s characteristics that is affected by comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank higher or lower on the same characteristics.
• Stereotyping: judging someone on the basis of one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs.
• Decisions: choices made from among two or more alternatives.
• Problem: a discrepancy between some current state of affairs and some desired state.
• Rational decision-making model: a decision-making model that describes how individuals should behave in order to maximize some outcome.
• Bounded rationality: a process of making decisions by constructing simplified models that extract the essential features from problems without capturing all their complexity.
• Intuitive decision making: an unconscious process created out of distilled experience.
• Common biases and errors in decision making: overconfidence bias, anchoring bias, confirmation bias, availability bias, escalation of commitment, randomness error, risk aversion, hindsight bias.
• Reducing biases and errors: focus on goals, look for information that disconfirms beliefs, don’t try to create meaning out of random events, increase your options.
• Individual differences: personality, gender, mental ability, cultural differences, nudging.
• Organizational constraints: performance evaluation, reward systems, formal regulations, system-imposed time constraints, historical precedents.
• Ethics in decision making: utilitarianism, rights, justice.
• Improving creativity in decision making: emphasis on ethical behaviour.

Motivation Concepts

• Motivation: the processes that account for an individual’s intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal.
• Hierarchy of needs theory (Maslow): physiological, safety, social, esteem, self-actualization.
• Two-factor theory (Herzberg): relates intrinsic factors to job satisfaction and extrinsic factors to job dissatisfaction.
• Hygiene factors: factors, such as company policy and administration, supervision, and salary, that, when adequate in a job, placate workers. When these factors are adequate, people will not be dissatisfied.
• McClelland’s theory of needs: achievement, power, affiliation.
• Self-determination theory: a theory of motivation that is concerned with the beneficial effects of intrinsic motivation and the harmful effects of extrinsic motivation.
• Cognitive evaluation theory: a version of self-determination theory which holds that allocating extrinsic rewards for behaviour that had been previously intrinsically rewarding tends to decrease the overall level of motivation if the rewards are seen as controlling.
• Self-concordance: the degree to which peoples’ reasons for pursuing goals are consistent with their interests and core values.
• Goal-setting theory: a theory that says that specific and difficult goals, with feedback, lead to higher performance.
• Management by objectives (MBO): a program that encompasses specific goals, participatively set, for an explicit time period, with feedback on goal progress.
• Self-efficacy theory: an individual’s belief that they are capable of performing a task.
• Reinforcement theory: a theory that says that behaviour is a function of its consequences.
• Equity theory: a theory stating that individuals compare their job inputs and outcomes with those of others and then respond to eliminate any inequities.
• Organizational justice: an overall perception of what is fair in the workplace, composed of distributive, procedural, informational, and interpersonal justice.
• Distributive justice: perceived fairness of the amount and allocation of rewards among individuals.
• Procedural justice: perceived fairness of the process used to determine the distribution of rewards.
• Interactional justice: perceived degree to which an individual is treated with dignity, concern, and respect.
• Expectancy theory: a theory stating that the strength of a tendency to act in a certain way depends on the strength of an expectation that the act will be followed by a given outcome and on the attractiveness of that outcome to the individual.

Motivation: From Concepts to Applications

• Job design: the way elements in a job are organized.
• Job characteristics model (JCM): skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, feedback.
• Motivating potential score (MPS): a predictive index suggesting the motivating potential in a job.
• Job rotation: periodic shifting of an employee from one task to another.
• Job enrichment: increasing the degree to which the worker controls the planning, execution, and evaluation of the work.
• Relational job design: constructing jobs so employees see the positive difference they can make in the lives of others through their work.
• Alternative work arrangements: flextime, job sharing, telecommuting.
• Employee involvement and participation (EIP): a participative process that uses the input of employees to increase their commitment to the organization’s success.
• Variable-pay program: a pay plan that bases a portion of an employee’s pay on some individual and/or organizational measure of performance.
• Types of variable-pay programs: piece-rate pay, merit-based pay, bonuses, skill-based pay, profit-sharing plans, gainsharing.
• Employee stock ownership plan (ESOP): a company-established benefits plan in which employees acquire stock, often at below-market prices, as part of their benefits.
• Evaluating variable pay: link pay to performance.
• Flexible benefits: a benefits plan that allows each employee to put together a benefits package individually tailored to their own needs and situation.
• Intrinsic rewards: employee recognition programs.

Groups and Teams

• Group: two or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular objectives.
• Formal group: a designated work group defined by an organization’s structure.
• Informal group: a group that is neither formally structured nor organizationally determined; such a group appears in response to the need for social contact.
• Social identity theory: perspective that considers when and why individuals consider themselves members of groups.
• Ingroup favouritism: perspective in which we see members of our ingroup as better than other people, and people not in our ingroup as all the same.
• Stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning.
• Punctuated-equilibrium model: a set of phases that temporary groups go through that involves transitions between inertia and activity.
• Role: a set of expected behaviour patterns attributed to someone occupying a given position in a social unit.
• Role perception: an individual’s view of how they are supposed to act in a given situation.
• Role expectation: how others believe one should act in a given situation.
• Role conflict: a situation in which an individual is confronted by divergent role expectations.
• Norms: acceptable standards of behaviour within a group that are shared by the group’s members.
• Conformity: the adjustment of one’s behaviour to align with the norms of the group.
• Reference groups: important groups to which individuals belong or hope to belong and with whose norms individuals are likely to conform.
• Deviant workplace behaviour: voluntary behaviour that violates significant organizational norms and, in so doing, threatens the well-being of the organization or its members.
• Status: a socially defined position or rank given to groups or group members by others.
• Social loafing: the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when working individually.
• Cohesiveness: the degree to which group members are attracted to each other and are motivated to stay in the group.
• Diversity: the extent to which members of a group are similar to, or different from, one another.
• Group decision making: strengths (more complete information, increased diversity of views, higher quality of decisions, increased acceptance of a solution) and weaknesses (time-consuming, conformity pressures, ambiguous responsibility).
• Groupthink: a phenomenon in which the norm for consensus overrides the realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action.
• Groupshift: a change between a group’s decision and an individual decision that a member within the group would make; the shift can be toward either conservatism or greater risk.
• Group decision-making techniques: interacting groups, brainstorming, nominal group technique.
• Team: a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.
• Types of teams: problem-solving, self-managed, cross-functional, virtual.
• Creating effective teams: context, composition, process.
• Team context: adequate resources, leadership and structure, climate of trust, performance evaluation and reward system.
• Team composition: abilities of members, personality, allocation of roles, diversity, size of teams, member preferences.
• Team processes: common plan and purpose, specific goals, team efficacy, mental models, conflict levels, social loafing.
• Turning individuals into team players: selecting, training, rewarding.
• Beware! Teams aren’t always the answer.

Communication

• Communication: the transfer of understanding and meaning from one person to another.
• Functions of communication: management, feedback, emotional sharing, persuasion, information exchange.
• The communication process: the steps between a source and a receiver that result in the transfer and understanding of meaning.
• Formal channels: communication channels established by an organization to transmit messages related to the professional activities of members.
• Informal channels: communication channels that are created spontaneously and that emerge as responses to individual choices.
• Direction of communication: downward, upward, lateral.
• Oral communication: advantages and disadvantages.
• Written communication: advantages and disadvantages.
• Nonverbal communication: body language, tone of voice.
• Channel richness: the amount of information that can be transmitted during a communication episode.
• Choosing communication methods: depends on whether the message is routine.
• Barriers to effective communication: filtering, selective perception, information overload, emotions, language, silence, communication apprehension, lying.
• Cultural barriers: semantics, word connotations, tone differences, differences in tolerance toward conflict and directness.
• Reducing misinterpretations: know yourself, foster a climate of mutual respect, use a person’s name frequently, be clear and concise, state things in a way anyone can understand, when you speak, project sincerity.
• A cultural guide: assume differences until similarity is proven, emphasize description rather than interpretation or evaluation, practice empathy, treat your interpretations as a working hypothesis.
• Communication technology: email, instant messaging (IM), text messaging, social networking, videoconferencing.
• Knowledge management (KM): the process of organizing and distributing an organization’s collective wisdom so the right information gets to the right people at the right time.
• Fostering ethical communication: present true facts.
• Keep communication channels open.

Leadership

• Leadership: the ability to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or set of goals.
• Trait theories of leadership: theories that consider personal qualities and characteristics that differentiate leaders from non-leaders.
• Behavioural theories of leadership: theories proposing that specific behaviours differentiate leaders from non-leaders.
• Initiating structure: the extent to which a leader is likely to define and structure their role and those of employees in the search for goal attainment.
• Consideration: the extent to which a leader is likely to have job relationships characterized by mutual trust, respect for employees’ ideas, and regard for their feelings.
• Contingency theories: the Fiedler model, situational leadership theory, path-goal theory, leader-participation model.
• Fiedler contingency model: the theory that effective groups depend on a proper match between a leader’s style of interacting with subordinates and the degree to which the situation gives control and influence to the leader.
• Least preferred co-worker (LPC) questionnaire: an instrument that purports to measure whether a person is task- or relationship-oriented.
• Situational leadership theory (SLT): a leadership theory that focuses on the follower; successful leadership is achieved by selecting the right leadership style, which is contingent on the level of the followers’ readiness.
• Path-goal theory: a leadership theory that says it is the leader’s job to assist followers in attaining their goals and to provide the necessary direction and/or support to ensure that their goals are compatible with the overall objectives of the group or organization.
• Leader-participation model: a leadership theory that provides a set of rules to determine the form and amount of participative decision making in different situations.
• Leader-member exchange (LMX) theory: a theory that supports leaders’ creation of ingroups and outgroups; subordinates with ingroup status will have higher performance ratings, less turnover, and greater job satisfaction.
• Charismatic leadership theory: a leadership theory stating that followers make attribution of heroic or extraordinary leadership abilities when they observe certain behaviours.
• Transformational leadership: leaders who inspire followers to transcend their own self-interests and who are capable of having a profound and extraordinary effect on followers.
• Transactional leadership: leaders who guide or motivate their followers in the direction of established goals by clarifying role and task requirements.
• Authentic leadership: leaders who know who they are, know what they believe in, and act on those values and beliefs openly and candidly.
• Ethical leadership: leadership that is directed by respect for ethical beliefs and values for the dignity and rights of others.
• Servant leadership: leadership based on a reciprocal obligation between leader and follower.
• Trust: a positive expectation that another will not act opportunistically.
• Mentoring: a senior employee who sponsors and supports a less-experienced employee (a protégé).
• Self-leadership: a set of processes through which individuals control their own behaviour, influencing and leading themselves through the use of specific sets of behavioural and cognitive strategies.
• Online leadership: leadership at a distance.
• Challenges to the leadership construct: leadership as attribution, substitutes for and neutralizers of leadership.
• Finding and creating effective leaders: selecting leaders, training leaders.
• Implications for managers: use personality tests and consider situation to assess leadership.

Power and Politics

• Power: a capacity that A has to influence the behaviour of B so that B acts in accordance with A’s wishes.
• Dependence: B’s relationship to A when A possesses something that B requires.
• Bases of power: formal power (coercive, reward, legitimate) and personal power (expert, referent).
• Coercive power: a power base that is dependent on fear of the negative results from failing to comply.
• Reward power: compliance achieved based on the ability to distribute rewards that others view as valuable.
• Legitimate power: the power a person receives as a result of their position in the formal hierarchy of an organization.
• Expert power: influence based on special skills or knowledge.
• Referent power: influence based on possession by an individual of desirable resources or personal traits.
• Power tactics: ways in which individuals translate power bases into specific actions.
• Influence tactics: legitimacy, rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation, exchange, personal appeals, ingratiation, pressure, coalitions.
• Political skill: the ability to influence others in such a way as to enhance one’s objectives.
• Sexual harassment: any unwanted activity of a sexual nature that affects an individual’s employment and creates a hostile work environment.
• Politics: behaviour that is not required as part of one’s formal role but that influences, or attempts to influence, the distribution of advantages and disadvantages within the organization.
• Political behaviour: legitimate political behaviour and illegitimate political behaviour.
• Causes and consequences of political behaviour: individual factors and organizational factors.
• Impression management (IM): the process by which individuals attempt to control the impression others form of them.
• Techniques: conformity, favour doing, excuses, apologies, self-promotion, enhancement, flattery, exemplification.
• Is political behaviour ethical: framing political skills.

Conflict and Negotiation

• Conflict: a process that begins when one party perceives that another party has negatively affected, or is about to negatively affect, something that the first party cares about.
• Types of conflict: task conflict, relationship conflict, process conflict.
• Loci of conflict: dyadic conflict, intragroup conflict, intergroup conflict.
• The conflict process: potential opposition or incompatibility, cognition and personalization, intentions, behaviour, outcomes.
• Intentions: competing, collaborating, avoiding, accommodating, compromising.
• Conflict-resolution techniques: problem solving, developing overarching goals, smoothing, compromising, avoiding.
• Negotiation: a process in which two or more parties decide how to allocate scarce resources.
• Bargaining strategies: distributive bargaining, integrative bargaining.
• Distributive bargaining: negotiation that seeks to divide up a fixed amount of resources; a win-lose situation.
• Integrative bargaining: negotiation that seeks one or more settlements that can create a win-win solution.
• The negotiation process: preparation and planning, definition of ground rules, clarification and justification, bargaining and problem solving, closure and implementation.
• Individual differences in negotiation effectiveness: personality, mood/emotions, gender.
• Third-party negotiations: mediator, arbitrator, conciliator.

Foundations of Organization Structure

• Organization structure: the way in which job tasks are formally divided, grouped, and coordinated.
• Work specialization: the degree to which activities in an organization are subdivided into separate jobs.
• Departmentalization: the basis by which jobs in an organization are grouped together.
• Chain of command: the line of authority extending from upper organizational levels to the lowest levels, which clarifies who reports to whom.
• Authority: the rights inherent in a managerial position to give orders and to expect the orders to be obeyed.
• Unity of command: the idea that a subordinate should have only one superior to whom they are directly responsible.
• Span of control: the number of subordinates a manager can efficiently and effectively direct.
• Centralization: the degree to which decision making is concentrated at a single point in an organization.
• Decentralization: the degree to which decision making is pushed down to the managers closest to the action or to workgroups.
• Formalization: the degree to which jobs within an organization are standardized.
• Boundary spanning: when individuals forming relationships with people outside formally assigned groups.
• Common organizational designs: simple structure, bureaucracy, matrix structure.
• Simple structure: an organization structure characterized by a low degree of departmentalization, wide spans of control, authority centralized in a single person, and little formalization.
• Bureaucracy: an organization structure with highly routine operating tasks achieved through specialization, very formalized rules and regulations, tasks that are grouped into functional departments, centralized authority, narrow spans of control, and decision making that follows the chain of command.
• Matrix structure: an organization structure that creates dual lines of authority and combines functional and product departmentalization.
• New design options: team structure, virtual organization, boundaryless organization.
• Team structure: an organization structure that replaces departments with empowered teams, and which eliminates horizontal boundaries and external barriers between customers and suppliers.
• Virtual organization: a small, core organization that outsources major business functions.
• Boundaryless organization: an organization that seeks to eliminate the chain of command, have limitless spans of control, and replace departments with empowered teams.
• The lean organization: an organization that minimizes bureaucracy.
• Why do structures differ: mechanistic model and organic model.
• Mechanistic model: a structure characterized by extensive departmentalization, high formalization, a limited information network, and centralization.
• Organic model: a structure that is flat, uses cross-hierarchical and cross-functional teams, has low formalization, possesses a comprehensive information network, and relies on participative decision making.
• Organization size: size affects structure.
• Technology: how an organization transfers its inputs into outputs.
• Environment: institutions or forces outside an organization that potentially affect the organization's performance.
• Organizational strategy: innovation strategy, cost-minimization strategy, imitation strategy.
• Innovation strategy: a strategy that emphasizes the introduction of major new products and services.
• Cost-minimization strategy: a strategy that emphasizes tight cost controls, avoidance of unnecessary innovation or marketing expenses, and price cutting.
• Imitation strategy: a strategy that seeks to move into new products or new markets only after their viability has already been proven.
• The strategy-structure relationship: structure should follow strategy.
• Organizational designs and employee behaviour: work specialization, span of control, centralization.

Organizational Culture

• Organizational culture: a system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes the organization from other organizations.
• Characteristics of organizational culture: innovation and risk taking, attention to detail, outcome orientation, people orientation, team orientation, aggressiveness, stability.
• Culture is a descriptive term.
• Do organizations have uniform cultures: dominant culture and subcultures.
• Dominant culture: a culture that expresses the core values that are shared by a majority of the organization’s members.
• Subcultures: mini cultures within an organization, typically defined by department designations and geographical separation.
• Strong vs. weak cultures: core values.
• Core values: the primary or dominant values that are accepted throughout the organization.
• Culture vs. formalization: high formalization creates predictability, orderliness, and consistency.
• Functions of culture: boundary-defining role, conveys a sense of identity for organization members, facilitates commitment to something larger than individual self-interest, enhances social system stability, sense-making and control mechanism.
• Organizational climate: the shared perceptions organizational members have about their organization and work environment.
• Culture as a liability: institutionalization, barriers to change, barriers to diversity, strengthening dysfunctions, barriers to acquisitions and mergers.
• How culture begins: philosophy of organization’s founders, selection criteria, top management, socialization.
• Keeping a culture alive: selection, top management, socialization.
• Socialization: a process that adapts employees to the organization’s culture.
• Stages: prearrival, encounter, metamorphosis.
• Entry socialization options: formal vs. informal, individual vs. collective, fixed vs. variable, serial vs. random, investiture vs. divestiture.
• How employees learn culture: stories, rituals, material symbols, language.
• Creating an ethical organizational culture: be a visible role model, communicate ethical expectations, provide ethical training, visibly reward ethical acts and punish unethical ones, provide protective mechanisms.
• Creating a positive organizational culture: building on employee strengths, rewarding more than punishing, emphasizing vitality and growth.
• Workplace spirituality: the recognition that people have an inner life that nourishes and is nourished by meaningful work that takes place in the context of community.
• Characteristics of a spiritual organization: benevolence, strong sense of purpose, trust and respect, open-mindedness.
• Implications for managers: manage culture and appreciate culture.

Organizational Change and Stress Management

• Forces for change: nature of the workforce, technology, economic shocks, competition, social trends, world politics.
• Resistance to change: individual sources and organizational sources.
• Overcoming resistance to change: communication, participation, building support and commitment, developing positive relationships, implementing changes fairly, manipulation and cooptation, selecting people who accept change, coercion.
• The politics of change: change threatens the status quo.
• Approaches to managing organizational change
• Lewin’s three-step model: unfreezing, movement, refreezing.
• Kotter’s eight-step plan for implementing change: build a coalition, form a vision, empower others.
• Organizational development (OD): a collection of planned change interventions, built on humanistic-democratic values, that seeks to improve organizational effectiveness and employee well-being.
• OD techniques or interventions: survey feedback, process consultation, team building, intergroup development, appreciative inquiry.
• Creating a culture for change: stimulating a culture of innovation, creating a learning organization.
• Innovation: a new idea applied to initiating or improving a product, service, or process.
• Idea champions: individuals who take an innovation and actively and enthusiastically promote the idea, build support, overcome resistance, and ensure that the idea is implemented.
• Learning organization: an organization that has developed the continuous capacity to adapt and change.
• Managing paradox: there is no final optimal status for an organization.
• Work stress and its management: stress, challenge stressors, hindrance stressors.
• Stress: an unpleasant psychological process that occurs in response to environmental pressures.
• Challenge stressors: stress associated with workload, pressure to complete tasks, and time urgency.
• Hindrance stressors: stress that keeps you from reaching your goals.
• Consequences of stress: physiological symptoms, psychological symptoms, behavioural symptoms.
• Managing stress: individual approaches and organizational approaches.
• Individual approaches: time-management techniques, physical exercise, relaxation techniques, social support.
• Organizational approaches: improved personnel selection and job placement, training, realistic goal setting, redesigning jobs, increased employee involvement, improved organizational communication, offering employee sabbaticals, wellness programs.
• Implications for managers: recognize cultural differences and understand change.