Organizational Behavior: Understanding People and Performance

Posted on Aug 27, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

1. Define Organizational Behavior and Organizations

• Organizational Behavior (OB) is the study of what people think, feel, and do in and around organizations.

  • Employee behaviors, decisions, perceptions, and emotions
  • How employees interact
  • How employees interact with the external environment: serving and collaborating with customers, suppliers, and the community
  • Researched at different levels: individual, team, organization

• Organizations are groups of people who work interdependently toward some purpose.

  • Collective entities
  • Collective sense of purpose

2. Explain Why Organizational Behavior Knowledge Is Important

Why is OB Important to You?

• OB skills are critical to everyone’s career: making sound decisions, interacting effectively with others, understanding social networks and power dynamics
• Important skills for new hires relate to OB topics
  
• Comprehend and predict workplace behavior and events
• Influence workplace behavior and events
• OB is for everyone

Why is OB Important to Organizations?

• Vital to organizational survival and success
  • Improves: higher financial performance, higher employee engagement, more profitable
• Makes organizations more effective
  • Effective when they have a good fit with the external environment, effectively transform inputs to outputs through human capital, and satisfy the needs of stakeholders

Organizations as Open Systems

Organizations are dependent on the external environment for resources (inputs), consist of internal subsystems that transform inputs to outputs, and affect the environment through those outputs.

• OB knowledge helps the organization maintain a good fit with the external environment, which exists when: the organization’s inputs, processes, and outputs are aligned with the resources available in the external environment. For example, how specific organizational structures, organizational cultures, and leadership behaviors are more appropriate for some environments than others.
• OB theories identify ways for companies to develop and maintain optimal transformational processes. For example, how internal subsystems coordinate with one another, conditions for teams to perform effectively, how employees influence each other, and how successful companies improve coordination through strong organizational culture.

Human Capital as the Organization’s Competitive Advantage

• The most important ingredient in the organization’s process of transforming inputs to outputs
• Human capital: knowledge, skills, abilities, creativity, etc.
• Essential for organizational survival and success
• Talents are difficult to find, copy, and replace with technology
• Effective organizations introduce workplace practices that introduce and maintain human capital
• OB helps to: identify ways to strengthen employee motivation, rewards, feedback, and fair work practices, employee involvement, effective self-directed work teams, and minimizing employee turnover
• By enhancing human capital, organizations become effective in three ways: job performance improves (employees acquire more skills and knowledge), they adapt more efficiently in changing environments, and there is greater effort in jobs and assistance to coworkers

Organizations and Their Stakeholders

• As open systems, organizations are more effective when they understand, manage, and satisfy stakeholder needs and expectations.
• Stakeholders = customers, suppliers, local community, national society, interest groups, shareholders, government, and other entities that affect/are affected by the company’s objectives and actions
• OB topics help to provide guidance to maintain favorable stakeholder relations
• Corporate Social Responsibility (Triple Bottom Line): Aim to survive and be profitable in the marketplace (economic), but they also intend to maintain and improve conditions for society (social) as well as the environment. Companies with positive CSR have better financial performance, loyal employees, and better relations with customers, job applicants, and other stakeholders.

Integrative Model

3. Describe the Anchors on Which Organizational Behavior Knowledge Is Based

4. Summarize Workplace Trends

Workplace Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

• Diversity
  • Surface-level: Observable demographic and other overt differences among members of a group (race, ethnicity, sex, age, physical capabilities)
  • Deep-level: Can’t see but evident in a person’s words, decisions, and actions
• Equity: Treating everyone fairly/organizational justice
  • Applying appropriate rules to decide how organizational benefits and burdens are distributed among employees
  • Important rules when making decisions: consistent, neutral, and receptive to information from employees
  • Treating employees politely, respectfully, and honestly
• Inclusivity: How well the organization values diversity and allows people of all identities to be fully themselves while contributing to the organization
  • Inherently more receptive to and supportive of people with different surface and deep-level characteristics

Work-Life Integration

The extent to which people are effectively engaged in their various work and non-work roles and have a low degree of role conflict across those domains.

• Ways to practice:
  

Remote Work

5. Diagram the MARS Model and Describe the Four Factors That Directly Influence Individual Behavior and Performance

• Motivation: Direction, intensity, and persistence of effort for voluntary behavior
  • Direction: Goal-directed, not random
  • Intensity: Effort allocated to the goal; a certain level of intensity is required to achieve the goal
  • Persistence: Length of time that the individual continues to exert effort towards the goal; the employee must sustain effort until they reach their goal
• Ability: Includes the natural aptitudes, learned capabilities, and habits required to successfully complete tasks. An individual’s performance is dependent on how well their job matches their abilities.
  • Aptitudes: Inborn physical/cognitive talents that help employees learn specific tasks
  • Learned capabilities: Skills/knowledge acquired through training, practice, and learning
  • Habits: Tendencies to engage in specific behaviors in response to contextual cues and enacted with little conscious awareness/reflection
• Role Perception: Represents how well employees understand how they should direct their effort for accuracy and efficiency
  • Understand the specific duties or consequences for which they are accountable
  • Understand company expectations of task scheduling, priority, and performance criteria
  • Understand the preferred behaviors or procedures for accomplishing tasks
• Situational Factors: Any context beyond the employee’s immediate control
  • Work context either constrains or facilitates behavior/performance
  • The workplace provides cues to guide and motivate people. For example, warning signs

6. Summarize the 5 Types of Individual Behavior in Organizations

• Task Performance: The individual’s voluntary goal-directed behaviors that contribute to organizational objectives. 3 types:
  
• Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: Various forms of cooperation and helpfulness to others that support the organization’s social and psychological context.
  • Such as assisting coworkers with their problems, adjusting your work schedule to accommodate coworkers, showing genuine courtesy toward coworkers, sharing your work resources with coworkers, and going beyond job requirements
  • Employees receive more support from coworkers, which in turn supports their own task performance. However, engaging in OCBs can have negative consequences: they can take time and energy away from performing tasks, so employees who give more attention to OCBs risk lower career success in companies that reward task performance.
  • Can also create work-family conflict
• Counterproductive Work Behaviors
  • Have the potential to directly or indirectly harm the organization or its stakeholders
  • Such as harassing coworkers, creating unnecessary conflict, deviating from preferred work methods, being untruthful, stealing, sabotaging work, and wasting resources
• Joining and Staying with the Organization
  • Companies suffer and potentially fail if they can’t hire and retain enough people with the right skills and knowledge to perform the work
  • Even when companies can hire enough qualified staff, they need to ensure that these employees stay with the company. The importance of human capital is particularly apparent when employees quit; those who leave remove valuable knowledge, skills, and social networks, all of which take time for new staff to acquire.
• Maintaining Work Attendance
  • Organizations need everyone to be available to perform their work
  • Unscheduled absences can lead to increased workloads or overtime among coworkers, lower performance by temporary staff filling the vacant positions, poor coordination in the work process, poor customer service, and potentially more workplace accidents
  • Absences are mostly due to situational factors such as personal illness, family demands, and bad weather. Other absences occur because employees are motivated to distance themselves from workplace bullying, difficult customers, boring work, and other stressful conditions. Absences are more common with generous sick leave and can vary due to personal values and personality.
  • Most companies focus on minimizing absences, but another serious issue is presenteeism: showing up for work when unwell, injured, preoccupied by personal problems, or facing dangerous conditions getting to work. It is more common with employees with low job security.

7. Define Personality and Discuss How the Big Five Personality Factors Relate to Workplace Behavior and Performance

• Personality refers to the relatively enduring pattern of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize a person, along with the psychological processes behind those characteristics.
• Big Five:
  • Conscientiousness: Characterizes people who are organized, dependable, goal-focused, thorough, disciplined, methodical, and industrious. People with low conscientiousness tend to be careless, disorganized, and less thorough.
  • Agreeableness: People who are trusting, helpful, good-natured, considerate, tolerant, selfless, generous, and flexible. People with low agreeableness tend to be uncooperative and intolerant of others’ needs, as well as more suspicious and self-focused.
  • Neuroticism: Refers to people who tend to be anxious, insecure, self-conscious, depressed, and temperamental. In contrast, people with low neuroticism (high emotional stability) are poised, secure, and calm.
  • Openness to Experience: People who are imaginative, creative, unconventional, curious, non-conforming, autonomous, and aesthetically perceptive. Those with low scores on this factor tend to be more resistant to change, less open to new ideas, and more conventional and fixed in their ways.
  • Extroversion: People who are outgoing, talkative, energetic, sociable, and assertive. The opposite is introversion, which characterizes those who are quiet, cautious, and less interactive with others.

8. Describe the Dark Triad of Personality and Identify Its Effects on Behavior in Organizations

• Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy
• Common dark core consisting of either low humility/honesty or a tendency to malevolently undermine others to maximize one’s own gain
• Machiavellianism: Demonstrate a strong motivation to get what they want at the expense of others. They believe that deceit is a natural and acceptable way to achieve their goals. They take pleasure in misleading, outwitting, and otherwise controlling others. They routinely use lies, manipulation, exploitation, and other undesirable influence tactics. They have a cynical disregard for moral discipline. They believe getting more than one deserves is acceptable and seldom empathize with or trust coworkers.
• Narcissism: Evident in people who have an obsessive belief in their superiority and entitlement. They have an excessive need for attention, so they aggressively engage in self-promotion, exhibitionism, and other attention-seeking behaviors. They are intensely envious of others, arrogant, and have low empathy.
• Psychopathy: The most sinister of the triad. Refers to social predators who ruthlessly dominate and manipulate others yet without empathy or any feelings of remorse or anxiety. They are selfish self-promoters who use superficial charm (called “The Mask”) yet engage in antisocial, impulsive, and often fraudulent thrill-seeking behavior. They do as they please and take what they want.
• In the workplace: Dishonesty is a core characteristic of the Dark Triad. It is associated with bullying and other forms of workplace aggression and dysfunctional team members. They have manipulative political skills, which some supervisors rate favorably in employee performance, which may help employees move into powerful positions in informal employee networks.

9. Summarize Psychological Types in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Discuss the Usefulness of This Model in Organizations

• Although Carl Jung’s MBTI test is the most popular, it fails to pass several important quality standards: created with little or no empirical validation, not recommended for hiring or promotion decisions. Studies suggest that it also has questionable value in leadership effectiveness and in predicting how well a team develops.
• Relies on a limited number of broadly defined types, which are ambiguous and might not even be mutually exclusive of each other
• Some opposing pairs of types are not necessarily opposites
• Dichotomizes people into distinct groups; in reality, people are located across a continuous range, many of whom are around the middle of that range
• Suffers from measurement flaws such as using forced-choice binary (either/or) scale items, which causes reliability and interpretation problems
• Positive functions: Modeled around perceiving and deciding, which are logical extensions of how people interact with their environment. Recognizes both the strengths and limitations of each type in different situations

10. Summarize Schwartz’s Model of Individual Values and Discuss the Conditions Where Values Influence Behavior

• Openness to Change: Refers to the extent to which a person is motivated to pursue innovative ways
  • Self-direction (creativity, independent thought)
  • Stimulation (excitement and challenge)
  • Hedonism (pursuit of pleasure, enjoyment, gratification of desires)
• Conservation: The extent to which a person is motivated to preserve the status quo
  • Conformity (adherence to social norms and expectations)
  • Security (safety and stability)
  • Tradition (moderation and preservation of the status quo)
• Self-Enhancement: Refers to how much a person is motivated by self-interest
  • Achievement (pursuit of personal success)
  • Power (dominance over others)
  • Hedonism (one value category shared with openness to change)
• Self-Transcendence: Refers to motivation to promote the welfare of others and nature
  • Benevolence (concerns for others in one’s life)
  • Universalism (concern for the welfare of all people and nature)

Values and Individual Behavior

• Values influence the attractiveness of choices
• Values frame our perceptions of reality
• Values help regulate the consistency of behavior

Disconnect from Values and Behavior

• A certain situation can prevent us from engaging in values-consistent behavior. For example, individuals with strong transcendent values are motivated to engage in recycling and other environmentally friendly behaviors, but a lack of recycling facilities prevents or severely limits this behavior.
• The presence of strong counter-motivational forces may be the reason why an individual’s behavior deviates. For example, employees caught in illegal business dealings attribute their unethical activities to pressure from management to achieve performance targets at any cost.
• A third reason why decisions and behaviors are inconsistent with our personal values is that we don’t actively think about them much of the time.

Value Congruence

• Refers to how similar a person’s values hierarchy is to the values hierarchy of another entity, such as the employee’s team or organization
• When personal values are congruent with the organization’s values, employees tend to have higher job satisfaction, loyalty, and organizational citizenship. They also have less stress and are less likely to quit. Employees are more likely to make decisions compatible with organizational expectations when their values are congruent with the organization’s shared values.
• While a large degree of value congruence is necessary for the reasons just noted, organizations also benefit from some incongruence. Employees with diverse values offer different perspectives, which potentially lead to better decision-making. Too much congruence can create a corporate cult.

11. Describe Four Ethical Principles and Discuss Three Factors That Influence Ethical Behavior

Four Ethical Principles

All four should be actively considered when making decisions that have ethical implications.

• Utilitarianism: This principle says the only moral obligation is to seek the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
  • One problem is that utilitarianism requires a cost-benefit analysis, yet many outcomes aren’t measurable.
  • Another problem is that utilitarianism focuses only on outcomes, whereas those outcomes may be considered unethical by other principles.
• Individual Rights: This principle says that everyone has the same set of natural rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of movement, the right to physical security, and the right to a fair trial.
  • One problem with this principle is that some individual rights may conflict with the rights of other people. For example, the shareholders’ right to be informed about corporate activities may ultimately conflict with an executive’s right to privacy.
• Distributive Justice: This principle says that appropriate decision criteria/rules should be applied to calculate how various benefits and burdens are distributed. These calculations may be based on equality (everyone gets the same benefits and burdens), equity (they vary with one’s contribution), or need (more benefits for those who need them).
  • The main problem with the distributive justice principle is that it is difficult to agree on the value of benefits and burdens and on the contribution or needs of the people affected.
• Ethic of Care: This principle states that everyone has a moral obligation to help others within their relational sphere to grow and self-actualize. Thus, caring for others is a fundamental characteristic of humanity and an ethical virtue. It includes being attentive to others’ needs, using one’s ability to give care to others, and being responsive to/having empathy for the person receiving care. This principle is found in writing about how organizations should serve stakeholders and how leaders should serve employees.

Three Factors That Influence Ethical Behavior

• Moral Intensity: The degree to which an issue demands applying ethical principles. The moral intensity of an issue increases with the severity of the decision’s consequences, the probability that the decision will have good or bad consequences, the number of people who will experience the decision’s good or bad consequences, and the level of agreement by others that the decision has good or bad consequences.
• Moral Sensitivity: A characteristic of the person, namely their ability to detect a moral dilemma and estimate its relative importance. This awareness does not necessarily translate into more ethical behavior; it just means they are more likely to be aware when unethical decisions and behavior occur.
  • Employees develop and maintain higher moral sensitivity under the following conditions:
    • Expertise or knowledge of prescriptive norms and rules
    • Previous experience with specific moral dilemmas
    • Ability to empathize with those affected by the decision
    • A strong self-view of being a morally sensitive person
    • A high degree of situational mindfulness
• Situational Factors: Along with moral intensity and moral sensitivity, ethical conduct is influenced by the situation in which the conduct occurs.

12. Describe Five Values Commonly Studied Across Cultures and Discuss the Diverse Cultures Within Canada

Diverse Cultures in Canada

• Canada is the first country in the world to officially embrace multiculturalism.
• Canadian Anglophones and Francophones. Francophones have significantly less deference to authority, less acceptance of Canada’s military activities abroad, and more tolerance and more permissive views regarding marriage, sexual activity, and non-married parenting.
• Indigenous communities and their businesses are far from homogeneous; hundreds of such communities have unique histories and experiences. Yet they share some cultural values: high collectivism, low power distance, non-interference, and natural time orientation.
• Canadians and Americans are similar in many ways but have consistently differed over the years on several key values. Canadians have significantly higher tolerance or moral permissiveness than Americans, reflected in greater acceptance of non-traditional families and multicultural immigration. Canadians are also more willing to allow collective rights over individual rights and are less accepting of large wealth differences within society. Canadians are much less likely than Americans to be associated with a religious institution and believe these institutions should influence public policy. Canadians are also much more likely to believe that organizations work better without a single leader.