Organizational Behavior and Management: A Comprehensive Guide

Posted on Sep 14, 2024 in Other subjects

Organizational Behavior and Management

Introduction

An organization is a place where two or more people work together in a structured way to achieve a specific goal. Organizational behavior is the study of actions made by individuals, systems, or artificial entities in conjunction with themselves or their environment. In enterprises, it has to be managed to optimize productivity goals. Organizational structures are the formal pattern of interactions and coordination designed by management to link the tasks in achieving organizational goals.

Leadership

Leadership is different from management: it inspires trust, motivation, and responsibility by having a sense of urgency and good communication of motivations and goals using networks. Leaders see learning as a lifelong process, are not driven by perfection, and use failure to improve.

Leadership Styles

  • Egocentric: Competent, self-promoting, self-serving, competes, builds silos, sees knowledge as power, tears down.
  • Humanistic: Competent, humble, serves others, collaborates, builds teams, shares knowledge, supports, and teaches.

Learning and Improvement

Learning is a lifelong process that requires experimentation and evaluation.

Continuous improvement is the essential method to create and maintain high quality via Plan, Do, Check, and Act, consistently striving to improve.

Quality Management

Quality is the conformance of the characteristics of a product/service to specifications given by a customer.

Quality management includes all activities that organizations use to direct, control, and coordinate quality. These activities include formulating a quality policy and setting quality objectives. They also include quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement.

Management Decisions

Management decision-making is about selecting a preferred course of action from alternative actions and is, therefore, the most important part of a manager’s job. To avoid negative consequences, the decision has to follow a process (7 steps) and rely on unbiased data.

7 Steps:

  1. Identify the decision
  2. Gather relevant information
  3. Develop alternatives
  4. Evaluate alternatives
  5. Select an alternative
  6. Implement the solution
  7. Evaluate the outcome

Three decision-making environments: certainty, uncertainty, and risk. The criteria for the four types of decision-makers (maximin, maximax, minimax regret, and Expected-Value criterion) can be applied.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a data-driven method to optimize business processes in regard to customer satisfaction sustainably. It aims for breakthrough success by reducing variation and having a common understanding of quality in the corporate business.

DMAIC Cycle: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control

Decision-Making Theory

Decision-making theory is the study of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values and preferences of the decision-maker. A large variety of decision-making techniques can often be applied by individuals and groups.

Risk Management

The objective of risk management is to predict risks ahead of time to best deal with situations when they occur. This is usually done in five steps: planning, identification, analysis, mitigation planning, and risk control.

FMEA

The FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) is a formalized approach to define and assess failure modes to prevent failures or defects before their occurrence. It can be used for products before they are released to production and for the stabilization of manufacturing and transactional processes.

Project Management

 is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations from a project

COMPRESSION: 2 criticals must crash one from each equally
      TF=LF-EF,      FF=Lowest ES of post – EF,  ES=max EF(priors)
         EF=ES+duration,      LF=min LS(post),     LS=LF – duration
Target margin 30% = 1.3 * total cost                 
PERT(project duration) = (ST+(4*LiT)+Lot)/6 shortest,likely,longest time
5 Process Groups – Initiating, planning, executing, monitoring & controlling, Closing
Floats – length of time an activity can be delayed without delaying project
7 Steps Planning a project – Create planning documents, sequence activities, all normal schedule, critical paths, project compression, revisit RAM, Budgeting
Planning documents – WBS (work breakdown structure), OBS (organizational breakdown structure), RAM (responsibility assignment matrix)

Minimax (opportunist) – minimizing opponents maximum payoff
Maximin (pessimist) – maximizing own minimum gainMaximax (optimist) – best action to attain maximum gain
Expected Value (realist) – compute EV for all actions & choose highest EV

Expertise Power – The leader has special skills/knowledge that employees identify with and respect.
Charismatic Power – A Leader who brings new views (hopes) and ideas that people are willing to follow and work to make a success. This leader is highly personable.

Referent Power – Employees want to emulate the leader. This leader is like others (one of us, a peoples man, been there – done that)

Transactional Leadership spreads it’s influence permanantly 
Transformational Leadership empowers the employees
Leadership approaches – task oriented, people oriented