Riassunto esame Organizational behavior, Prof. Muzzi Caterina, libro consigliato Organizational Behavior, Stephen P. Robbins, Timothy A. Judge

Lezione 1

Attending students

• Small group of max 3 people, project with final presentation (20 minutes).
• 65% of the final mark: project and send the written project 10 days after that.
• 35% of the final mark: exam with multiple-choice and one open question.

Organizational behavior

OB Model: There are 3 different levels in order to analyze organization + 3 types of variables:

Individual

Psychology:

Inputs: Inputs are variables that set the stage for what will occur in an organization later. Many are determined in advance of the employment relationship. For example, individual diversity characteristics, personality, and values are shaped by a combination of an individual's genetic inheritance and childhood environment.

• Personalities (don't change over time).
• Values (principles that guide our actions and tend to remain stable over time).
• Diversities.

Processes: Actions that individuals, groups, and organizations engage in as a result of inputs and that lead to certain outcomes:

• Emotions and moods (come from the interaction of the individual and the environment and the relationships).
• Motivation (process and not a state).
• Perception (everyone has a different perception).
• Decision making.

Outcomes: Mixing up inputs and see what the result is:

• Attitudes and stress (if the level of stress is high, it means that there is something wrong in the work and organization). Attitudes are evaluations that employees make, ranging from positive to negative, about objects, people, or events, whereas stress is an unpleasant psychological process that occurs in response to environmental pressures. Attitudes often have behavioral consequences that directly relate to organizational effectiveness. Ample evidence shows that employees who are more satisfied and treated fairly are more willing to engage in the above-and-beyond citizenship behavior so vital in the contemporary business environment.
• Task performance.
• Citizenship behavior: Discretionary behavior that contributes to the psychological and social environment of the workplace, that is not part of an employee's formal job requirements. Successful organizations have employees who will do more than their usual job duties: today employees who engage in "good citizenship" behaviors help others on their team, volunteer for extra work, avoid unnecessary conflicts, respect the spirit as well as the letter of rules and regulations, and gracefully tolerate occasional work-related impositions and nuisances. Organizations want and need employees who will do things that aren’t in any job description.
• Withdrawal behavior: It is the set of actions that employees take to separate themselves from the organization. There are many forms of withdrawal, ranging from showing up late or failing to attend meetings to absenteeism and turnover. Employee withdrawal can have a very negative effect on an organization.

Group

Inputs: In this case, they are typically assigned immediately before or after a group is formed:

• Structure.
• Role.
• Team responsibilities (these deal with organizational design).

Processes:

• Communication.
• Leadership.
• Power.
• Politics (everyone inside a company has different ideas).
• Conflict and negotiation (very difficult to deal with conflicts inside a company).

Outcomes:

• Group cohesion: Having a high level of cohesion is not always good. It is the extent to which members of a group support and validate one another at work. In other words, a cohesive group is one that sticks together. When employees trust one another, seek common goals, and work together to achieve these common ends, the group is cohesive; when employees are divided among themselves in terms of what they want to achieve and have little loyalty to one another, the group is not cohesive. There is ample evidence showing that cohesive groups are more effective.
• Group functioning: It refers to the quantity and quality of a group’s work output. In some organizations, an effective group is one that stays focused on a core task and achieves its ends as specified. Other organizations look for teams that are able to work together collaboratively to provide excellent customer service. In each case, different types of activities will be required to get the most from the team.

Organizational

Inputs: Result of years of development and change as the organization adapts to its environment and builds up customs and norms:

• Structure.
• Culture (exogenous, something embedded in organization and strongly related to the history of a company and the mentality of the founders, difficult to change).

Processes:

• Human resource management.
• Change practices (how to lead a company from state A to B).

Outcomes:

• Productivity: An organization is productive if it achieves its goals by transforming inputs into outputs at the lowest cost. Thus productivity requires both effectiveness and efficiency. Popular measures of organizational efficiency include return on investment, profit per dollar of sales, and output per hour of labor. Service organizations must include customer needs and requirements in assessing their effectiveness.
• Survival: It is simply evidence that the organization is able to exist and grow over the long term. The survival of an organization depends not just on how productive the organization is, but also on how well it fits with its environment. Resilience is something between processes and outcomes.

Task performance (individual level, outcomes): The combination of effectiveness and efficiency at doing your core job tasks is a reflection of your task performance. We have to find a balance between the two, according to the strategic decisions of a company.

Efficiency: Reaching a given result by using the lowest amount of resources as possible, given object and you are efficient if you use the lowest amount of resources.

Effectiveness: Founding the best combination of our resources in order to get to the best result we can by employing our resources. They are in a trade-off in our company; while one is increasing, the other is decreasing and vice versa (e.g., high quality means high price, but high price may not be efficient).

Lezione 2

Sustainability

Attention on the environment and on people wellbeing.

Green people management: Support the environmental awareness. Company can design HR policy and training and development and recruitment in order to improve the company overall sustainability and the attention on the environment.

Company that pays no attention to workers causes social costs; we should be sustainable at managing people, in order to avoid all the dangerous effects on the working environment.

What is organizational behavior?

Until the late 1980s, business schools emphasized the technical aspects of management, focusing on economics, accounting, finance, and quantitative techniques. Coursework in human behavior and people skills received relatively less attention. Then, business schools realized the significant role that interpersonal skills play in determining a manager’s effectiveness. Incorporating OB principles into the workplace can yield many important organizational outcomes:

• Good places to work have better financial performance.
• Better interpersonal skills result in lower turnover of quality employees and higher quality applications for recruitment, increasing the value of the company in regard of human capital.
• Quality of workplace relationships: job satisfaction (one of the best indicators), stress, and turnover have a strong relationship; it increases the quality of people’s work. One very large survey showed that social relationships among coworkers and supervisors were strongly related to overall job satisfaction. Positive social relationships also were associated with lower stress at work and lower intentions.
• It fosters social responsibility awareness.
• Developing managers’ interpersonal skills helps organizations attract and keep high-performing employees, which is important since outstanding employees are always in short supply and are costly to replace.

Active listening: Pay attention to what others are saying.

What is management?

Manager: Someone who gets things done through other people in organizations (a consciously coordinated social unit composed of 2 or more people that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals). They make decisions, allocate resources, and direct the activities of others to attain goals.

Manager’s primary activities are:

• Planning: Defining an organization’s goals, establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals, and developing a comprehensive set of plans to integrate and coordinate activities.
• Decision making process.
• Organizing the processes: When managers engage in designing their work unit’s structure. It includes determining what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be grouped, who reports to whom, and where decisions are to be made.
• Motivating.
• Controlling and monitoring: To ensure things are going as they should, management must monitor the organization’s performance and compare it with previously set goals. If there are any significant deviations, it is management’s job to get the organization back on track.
• Being fair.
• Taking responsibility for the actions.
• Leading and guiding: Every organization contains people, and it is management’s job to direct and coordinate those people. When managers motivate employees, direct their activities, select the most effective communication channels, or resolve conflict.
• Solving conflicts.
• Communicating.
• Listening.

Nowadays, managers and middle-managers (those who manage the company units and have to make things done, from strategy to everyday life, they are in the middle of managers and business units), are in the most critical position inside a company; they have so many challenges and have many things to do; they become stressed. They have so many technical skills but they have a lack of soft skills.

According to Mintzberg, managers have 10 different roles or set of behaviors; they deal with practice.

Another way of considering what managers do is to look at the skills or competencies they need to achieve their goals. Researchers have identified a number of skills that differentiate effective from ineffective managers. Each of these skills is important, and all are needed. 3 different management skills:

• Technical skills: Apply specialized knowledge or expertise. All jobs require some specialized expertise and many people develop their technical skills on the job.
• Human skills: Ability to understand, communicate with, motivate, support, and work with other people, both individually and in groups. Because managers get things done through other people, they must have good human skills.
• Conceptual skills: Mental ability needed to analyze and diagnose complex situations. The ability to integrate new ideas with existing processes and innovate on the job are also crucial conceptual skills for today’s manager.

According to Luthans, managers are all engaged in 4 managerial activities:

• Traditional management: Average manager, it consists of decision making, planning, and controlling.
• Human resource management: It consists of motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, staffing, and training.
• Communication: Effective manager (person who has a lot of success for the company, someone who creates networks inside the company), it consists of exchanging routine information and processing paperwork.
• Networking: Successful manager (person who has a lot of personal success, can jump from a company to another really fast, can have a lot of power), it consists of networking, socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders.

Organizational behavior

Organizational behavior is a field of study that investigates the impact individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness. OB is a field of study, meaning that it is a distinct area of expertise with a common body of knowledge. It studies three determinants of behavior in organizations: individuals, groups, and structure. In addition, it applies the knowledge gained about individuals, groups, and the effect of structure on behavior in order to make organizations work more effectively. To sum up our definition, OB is the study of what people do in an organization and the way their behavior affects the organization’s performance.

Complementing intuition with systematic study:

• Systematic Study of Behavior: 1. Understand how a person is perceiving a situation, 2. What is important/values. Behavior generally is predictable if we know how the person perceived the situation and what is important to him/her; everyone has a different perception of things. This study is a means to making reasonably accurate predictions. When we use the term systematic study, we mean looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects, and basing our conclusions on scientific evidence.
• Evidence-Based Management: Complements systematic study and argues for managers to make decisions based on evidence.
• Intuition: Systematic study and EBM add to intuition, or those gut feelings about why I do what I do and what makes others tick. If we make all decisions with intuition or gut instinct, we’re likely working with incomplete information.

Big data in managing people behaviors: Data should be reliable, collected in the right way, and stored in the right way. Usually, companies collect too many data but what is important is to well analyze data.

• Background: The use of Big Data for managerial practices is a relatively new area, but one that holds convincing promise.
• Current usage: Predicting any event, detecting the risk, and preventing large and small catastrophes.
• New trends.
• Limitations: As technological capabilities for handling big data have increased, so have issues of privacy and, in particular, when data collection includes surveillance instruments.

Organizational behavior includes many disciplines because we need many analyses, we need different contributions:

• Psychology: Seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other animals.
• Social psychology: Contributes to measuring, understanding, and changing attitudes; identifying communication patterns; and building trust. They have also made important contributions to our study of group behavior, power, and conflict.
• Sociology: Studies people in relation to their social environment or culture.
• Anthropology: The study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities. It helps us to understand the differences in fundamental values, attitudes, and behavior among people in different countries and within different organizations.

There are some principles/absolutes that explain OB:

• Independent variables: Equal for all the workers.
• Dependent variables: Depends on the actions of the worker and of mine, different level of happiness.
• Contingency variables: Situational factors are variables that moderate the relationship between independent and dependent variables; they are not predictable, it may change the result and the outcomes.

What are the challenges and the opportunities of OB concepts?

• Responding to economic pressure: In tough economic times, effective management is an asset; in good times, understanding how to reward, satisfy, and retain employees is at a premium; and in bad times, issues like stress, decision making, and coping come to the forefront.
• Responding to globalization: Increased foreign assignments, working with people from different cultures, overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labor and adapting to differing cultural and regulatory norms.
• Managing workforce diversity: Workforce diversity: organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and inclusion of other diverse groups.
• Improving customer service: Service employees have substantial interaction with customers. Employee attitudes and behavior are associated with customer satisfaction. Need a customer-responsive culture.
• Improving people skills: People skills are essential to managerial effectiveness. OB provides the concepts and theories that allow managers to predict employee behavior in given situations.
• Working in networked organizations: Networked organizations are becoming more pronounced. A manager’s job is fundamentally different in networked organizations. Challenges of motivating and leading “online” require different techniques.
• Using social media at work: Policies on accessing social media at work. When, where, and for what purpose. Impact of social media on employee well-being.
• Enhancing employee well-being at work: Creation of the global workforce means work no longer sleeps. Communication technology has provided a vehicle for working at any time or any place. Employees are working longer hours per week. The lifestyles of families have changed, creating conflict. Balancing work and life demands now surpasses job security as an employee priority.
• Creating a positive work environment: Positive organizational scholarship is concerned with how organizations develop human strength, foster vitality and resilience, and unlock potential. This field of study focuses on employees’ strengths versus their limitations, as employees share situations in which they performed at their personal best.
• Improving ethical behavior: Ethical dilemmas and ethical choices are situations in which an individual is required to define right and wrong conduct. Good ethical behavior is not so easily defined. Organizations distribute codes of ethics to guide employees through ethical dilemmas. Managers need to create an ethically healthy climate.