CHAPTER I • WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR?

What Managers Do

Managers get things done through other people. They make decisions, allocate resources, and direct the
activities of others to attain goals. Managers do their work in an organization.The people who oversee the
activities of others and who are responsible for attaining goals in these organizations are their managers.

Management Functions

In the early part of this century, a French industrialist by the name of Henri Fayol wrote that all managers
perform five management functions: They plan, organize, command, coordinate, and control. Today,
we've condensed these down to four: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.
The planning function encompasses defining an organization's goals, establishing an overall strategy for
achieving these goals, and developing a comprehensive hierarchy of plans to integrate and coordinate
activities.

Organizing includes the determination of 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.

Every organization contains people, and it is management's job to direct and coordinate these people.
This is the leading function. When managers motivate subordinates, direct the activities of others, select
the most effective communication channel, or resolve conflicts among members, they are engaging in
leading

To ensure that things are going as they should, management must monitor the organization's performance.
Actual performance must be compared with the previously set goals. If there are any significant deviations,
it is management's job to get the organization back on track. This monitoring, comparing, and potential
correcting is what is meant by the controlling function.

So, using the functional approach, the answer to the question of what managers do is that they plan,
organize, lead, and control.

Management Roles

In the late 1960s, Henry Mintzberg, undertook a careful study of five executives to determine what
these managers did on their jobs. Based on his observations of these managers, Mintzberg concluded that
managers perform ten different highly interrelated roles, or sets of behaviors, attributable to their jobs.
These ten roles can be grouped as being primarily concerned with interpersonal relationships, the transfer
of information, and decision making.

INTERPERSONAL ROLES All managers are required to perform duties that are ceremonial and
symbolic in nature. When the president of a college hands out diplomas at commencement or a factory
supervisor gives a group of highschool students a tour of the plant, he is acting in a figurehead role. All
managers have a leadership role. This role includes hiring, training, motivating, and disciplining
employees.Liaison role includes activities such as contacting outsiders who provide the manager with
information. These may be individuals or groups inside or outside the organization. The sales manager
whb obtains information from the personnel manager in his own company has an internal liaison
relationship. When that sales manager has contacts with other sales executives through a marketing trade
association, he has an outside liaison relationship.

INFORMATIONAL ROLES All managers wills to some degree, receive and collect information from
organizations and institutions outside their own. Typically, this is done through reading magazines and
talking with others to learn of changes in the pubtic's tastes, what competitors may be planning, and the
like.This is the monitor role. Managers also act as a conduit to transmit information to organizational
members. This is the diseminator role. Managers additionally perform a spokesperson role when they
represent the organization to outsiders.

DECISIONAL ROLES Finally, Mintzherg identified four roles that revolve around the making of choices.In
the entrepreneur role, managers initiate and oversee new projects that will improve their organization's
performance. As disturbance handlers, managers take corrective action in response to previously
unforeseen problems As resource allocators, managers are responsible for allocating human, physical,
and monetary resources.As negotiator role, managers discuss and bargain with other units to gain
advantages for their own unit.

Management Skills

Robert Katz has identified three essential management skills: technical, human, and conceptual.

Technical skills encompass the ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise.Skills held by
professiorials such as civil engineers, tax accountants, or oral surgeons, you typically focus on their
technical skills. Through extensive formal education, they have learned the special knowledge and
practices of their field. Of course, professional don't have a monopoly on technical skills and these skills
don't have to be learned in schools or formal training programs. All jobs require some specialized
expertise and many people develop their technical skills on the job.

The ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people, both individually and in groups,
describes human skills. Many people are technically proficient but interpersonally incompetent. They
might, for example, be poor listeners, unable to understand the needs of others, or have difficulty
managing conflicts. Since managers get things done through other people, they must have good human
skills to communicate, motivate, and delegate.

Managers must have the mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations. These are conceptual
skills. Decision making, for instance, requires managers to spot problems, identify alternatives that can
correct them, evaluate these alternatives, and select the best one. Managers can be technically and
interpersonally competent, yet still fail because of an inability to rationally process and interpret
information.

illustrating the importance that social and political skills play in getting ahead in organizations.

Enter organizational behavior

Organizational behavior (OR) is a field of study which investigates the impact that individuals,
groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations for the purpose of applying such knowledge
toward improving an organization’s effectiveness.

Organizational behavior is a field of study. What does it study? It studies three determinants of behavior
in organizations: individuals, groups, and structure. Additionally, 0B applies the knowledge gained about
individuals, groups, and the effect of structure on behavior in order to make organizations work more
effectively.
In short, OB is concerned with the study of what people do in an organization and how that behavior
affects the performance of the organization.

Challenges and Opportunities for OB

There are a lot of challenges and opportunities today for managers to use OB concepts. They are:

Improving Quality and Productivity

More and more managers are confronting the challenges to improve their organization's productivity and
the quality of the products and services they offer. Toward improving quality and productivity, they are
implementing programs like total quality management and reengineering—programs that require
extensive employee involvement.

TQM is driven by the constant attainment of customer satisfaction through the continuous improvement of
all organizational processes.It has implications for 0B because it requires employees to rethink what they
do and become more involved in workplace decisions.

In times of rapid and dramatic change, it's sometimes necessary to approach improving quality and
productivity from the perspective of “How would we do things around here if we were starting over from
scratch?" That, in essence, is the approach of reengineering. It asks managers to reconsider how work
would be done and their organization structured if they were starting over.

Today's managers understand the success of any efforts at improving quality and productivity must
include their employees. These employees will not only be a major force in carrying out changes but
increasingly will participate actively in planning those changes. OB offers important insights into helping
managers work through these changes.

Improving People Skills

We opened this chapter by demonstrating how important people skills are to managerial effectiveness.
We said, "This book has been written to help both managers and potential managers develop those people
skills.' As you proceed through this text, we present relevant concepts and theories that can help you explain
and predict the behavior of people at work. In addition, you'll also gain insights into specific people skills
that you can use on the job. For instance, you'll learn how to be an effective listener, the proper way to
give performance feedback, how to delegate authority, and how to create effective teams. Moreover,
you'll have the opportunity to complete exercises that will give you insights into your own behavior, the
bel,avioi of others, and practice at improving your interpersonal skills.

Managing Work Force Diversity

Work force diversity has important implications for management practice.Diversity, if positively
managed, can increase creativity and innovation in organizations as well as improve decision making by
providing different perspectives on problems.When diversity is not managed properly, there is potential
for higher turnover, more difficult communication, and more interpersonal conflicts.

Responding to Globalization

Management is no longer constrained by national borders.The world has become a global village. In
turn, managers have to become capable of working with people from different cultures. Globalization
affects a manager's people skills in at least two ways. First, if you're a manager you're increasingly likely to find
yourself in a foreign assignment. You'll be transferred to your employer's operating division or subsidiary
in another country. Once there, you'll have to manage a work force that is likely to be very different in
needs, aspirations, and atlitudes from the ones you were used to back home. Second, even in your own
country, you're going to find yourself working with bosses, peers, and subordinates who were born and
raised in different cultures. What motivates you may not motivate them.. While your style of
communication may be straightforward and open, they may find this style uncomfortable and threatening.

Empowering People

Managers are empowering employees. They are putting employees in charge of what they do. And in so
doing, managers are having to learn how to give up control and employees are having to learn how to take
responsibility for their work and make appropriate decisions.

Stimulating Innovation and Change

Today's successful organizations must foster innovation and master the art of change or they will become
candidates for extinction. Victory will go to those organizations that maintain their flexibility continually
improve their quality and beat their competition to the marketplace with a constant stream of innovative
products and services.An organization's employees can be the imputs for innovation and change, or they can
be a major stumbling block. The challenge for managers is to stimulate employee creativity and tolerance
for change. The field of organizational behavior provides a wealth of ideas and techniques to aid in
realizing these goals.

Coping with "Temporariness"

Work groups are also increasingly in a state of flux. In the past, employees were assigned to a specific
work group and that assignment was relatively permanent. There was a considerable amount of security
in working with the same people day in and day out. That predictablity has been replaced by temporary
work groups, teams that include members from different departments and whose members change all the
time, and the increased use of employee rotation to fill constantly changing work assignments. Finally,
organizations themselves are in a state of flux. They continually reorganize their various divisions, sell off
poor-performing businesses, downsize operations, and replace permanent employees with temporary
workers.

Today's managers and employees must learn to cope with temporariness. They have to learn to live with
flexibility, spontaneity, and unpredictability. The study of OB can provide important insights into helping
you better understand a work world of continual change, how to overcome resistance to changer and how
best to create an organizational culture that thrives on change.

Improving Ethical Behavior

In an organizational world characterized by cutbacks, expectations of increasing worker productivity, and

tough competition in the marketplace, it's not altogether surprising that many employees feel pressured to
cut corners, break rules, and engage in other forms of questionable practices.

Members of organizations are increasingly finding themselves facing ethical dilemmas, situations where
they are required to define right and wrong conduct.

Today's manager needs to create an ethically healthy climate for his or her employees, where they can do
their work productively and confront a minimal degree of ambiguity regarding what constitutes right and
wrong behaviors.

Contributing Disciplines to the OB Fleld

Organizational behavior is an applied behavioral science that is built on contributions from a number of
behavioral disciplines. The predominant areas are psychology, sociology, social psychology,
anthropology, and political science.Psychology's contributions have been mainly at the individual or
micro level of analysis; the other four disciplines have contributed to our understanding of macro
concepts such as group processes and organization.

Psychology:Psychology is the science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the
behavior of humans and other animals. Psychologists concern themselves with studying and attempting to
understand individual behavior.Their contribulions have been expanded to include learning, perception,
personality, training, leadership effectiveness, needs and motivational forces, job satisfaction, decision-
making processes, performance appraisals, attitude measurement, employee selection techniques, job
design, and work stress.

Sociology:Sociology studies people in relation to their fellow human being.Sociologist have made their
greatest contribution to OB through their study of group behavior in organizations, particularly formal
and complex organizations. Some of the areas within OB that have received valuable input from
sociologists are group dynamics, design of work teams, organizational culture, formal organization theory
and structure, organizational technology, communications, power, conflict, and intergroup behavior.

Social Psychology:Social psychology is an area within psychology, but blends concepts from both
psychology and sociology. It focuses on the influence of people on one another. One of the major areas
receiving considerable investigation from social psychologists has been change—how to implement it and
how to reduce barriers to its acceptance.

Anthropology: Anthropologists study societies to learn about human beings and their activities.Much
of our current understanding of organizational culture, organizational environments, and differences
between national cultures is the result of the work of anthropologists.

Political Science:Political scientists study the behavior of individuals and groups within a political
environment. Specific topics of concern here include structuring of conflict, allocation of power, and how
people manipulate power for individual self-interest.
Coming Attractions: Developing an OB Models

An Overview

A model is an abstraction of reality; a simplified representation of some real- world phenomenon. A

mannequin in a retail store is a model. So, too, is the accountants formula: Assets + Liabilities = Owners'
Equity.There are three levels of analysis in OR. As we move from the individual level to the organization
systems level, we add systematically to our understanding of behavior in organizations. The three basic
levels are analogous to building blocks—each level is constructed on the previous level. Group concepts
grow out of the foundation laid in the individual section; we overlay structural constraints on the
individual and group in order to arrive at organizational behavior.

The Dependent Variables

Dependent variables are the key factors you want to explain or predict. what and they are affected by
some other factor.The primary dependent variables in OB are: productivity, absenteeism, turnover, job
satisfaction, and organizational citizenship.

PRODUCTIVITY: An organization is productive if it achieves its goals, and does so by transferring

inputs to outputs at the lowest cost. As such, productivity implies a concern for both effectiveness and
efficiency.

A hospital, for example, is effective when it successfully meets the needs of its clientele. It is efficient
when it can do this at a low cost.

ABSENTEEISM:

Absenteeism is the failure to report.

It is obviously difficult for an organization to operate smoothly and to attain its objectives if employees
fail to report to their jobs. The work flow is disrupted, and often important decisions must be delayed. In
organizations that rely heavily on assembly-line technology, absenteeism can be considerably more than a
disruption— it can result in a drastic reduction in quality of output, and, in some cases, it can bring about
a complete shutdown of the production facility. But levels of absenteeism beyond the normal range in
any organization have a direct impact on that organization's effectiveness and efficiency.

Are all absences bad? Probably not! While most absences impact negatively on the organization, we can
conceive of situations where the organization may benefit by an employee voluntarily choosing not to
come to work. For instance, fatigue or excess stress can significantly decrease an employee's productivity, In
jobs where an employee needs to be alert—surgeons and airline pilots are obvious examples—it may well
be better for the organization if the employee does not report to work rather than show up and perform
poorly. The cost of an accident in such jobs could be prohibitive. Even in managerial lobs, where
mistakes are less spectacular, performance may be improved when managers absent themselves from
work rather than make a poor decision under stress. But these examples are clearly atypical. For the most
part, we can assume that organizations benefit when employee absenteeism is reduced.

TURNOVER:

A high rate of turnover in an organization means increased recruiting, selection, and training costs.It can
also mean a disruption in the efficient running of an organization when knowledgeable and experienced
personnel leave and replacements must be found and prepared to assume positions of responsibility.

All organizations have some turnover,In fact,if the right people are leaving the organization—the
marginal and submarginal employees—turnover can be positive. It may create the opportunity to
replace an underperlorming individual with someone with higher skills or motivation, open up
increased opportunities for promotions, and add new and fresh ideas to the organization.

But when turnover is excessive, or when it involves valuable performers, it can be a disrtiptive factor,
hindering the organization's effectiveness.

Job Satisfaction:

Job satisfaction is the difference between the amount of rewards workers receive and the amount they
believe they should receive.Job satisfaction represents an attitude rather than a behavior.

The belief that satisfied employees are more productive than dissatisfied employees has been a basic tenet
among managers for years. While much evidence questions this assumed causal relationship, it can be
argued that advanced societies should he concerned not only with the quantity of life—that is, concerns
such as higher productivity and material acquisitions—but also with its quality.Those researchers with
strong humanistic values argue that satisfaction is a legitimate objective of an organization. Not only is
satisfaction negatively related to absenteeism and turnover but, they argue, organizations have a
responsibility to provide employees with jobs that are challenging and intrinsically rewarding. Therefore,
although job satisfaction represents an attitude rather than a behavior, OR researchers typically consider
it an important dependent variable.

The Independent Variables

It is the presumed cause of some change in the dependent variable.It includes: Individual-Level Variables,
Group-Level Variables, and Organization Systems Level Variables.

INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL VARIABLES:

The people enter organizations with certain charactecistics that will influence their behavior at work. The
more obvious of these are personal or biographical characteristics such as age, gender, and marital status;
personality characteristics; values and attitudes; and basic ability levels. These characteristics are
essentially intact when an individual enters the work force, and, for the most part, management can do
little to alter them. Yet they have a very real impact on employee behavior.

GROUP-LEVEL VARIABLES

The behavior of people in groups is more than the sum total of each individual acting in his or her own
way. The complexity of our model is increased when we acknowledge that people's behavior when they are
in groups is different from their behavior when they are alone. Therefore, the next step in the
development of an understanding of OR is the study of group behavior.

ORGANIZATION SYSTEM-LEVEL VARIABLES

Organizational behavior reaches its highest level of sophistication when we add formal structure to our
previous knowledge of individual and group behavior. Just as groups are more than the sum of their
individual members, so are organizations more than the sum of their member groups. The design of the
formal organization, technology and work processes, and jobs; the organizationas human resource
policies and practices (that is. selection processes, training programs, performance appraisal methods); the
internal culture; and levels of work stress all have an impact on the dependent variables.
Toward a Contingency OB Model

Our final model is shown in Figure 1-7.It shows the four key dependent variables and a large number of
independent variables, organized by level of analysis, that research indicates have varying impacts on the
former.As complicated as this model is, it still does not do justice to the complexity of the OB subject
matter, but it should help explain why the chapters in this book are arranged as they are and help you
explain and predict the behavior of people at work.

For the most part, our model does not explicitly identify the vast number of contingency variables
because of the tremendous complexity that would be involved in such a diagram. Rather, throughout this
text we introduce important contingency variables that will improve the explanatory linkage between the
independent and dependent variables in our OB model.

Note that we've added the concepts of change and development to Figure 1-7, acknowledging the dynamics
of behavior and recognizing that there are ways for change agents or managers to modify many of the
independent variables ii they are having a negative impact on the key dependent variables. Specifically,
in Chapter 18 we discuss the change process and techniques for changing employee attitudes, improving
communication processes, modifying organization structures, and the like.

Also note that Figure 17 includes linkages between the three levels of analysis. For instance, organization
structure is linked to leadership. This is meant to convey that authority and leadership are related;
managcment exerts its influence on group behavior through leadership. Similarly, communication is the
means by which individuals transmit information; thus, it is the link between individual and group
behavior.
people skills if they're going to be effective in their job. Organizational behavior (OR) is a field of
study
that investigates the impact which individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within
organizations, then applies that knowledge to make organizations work more effectively.
Specifically, OB focuses on how to improve productivity, reduce absenteeism and turnover, and
increase employee lob satisfaction. We aH hold a number of generalizations about the behavior
of people. While some of these generalizations provide valid insights into human behavior,
many are often erroneous. OR uses systematic study to improve behavioral CHAPTER •
WHAT IS ORGANIzArIONAt BHAY1QR? .31 predictions that would be made from intuition
alone. But because people are different, we need to look at OR in a contingency framework,
using situational variables to moderate cause-effect relationships. Organizational behavior
offers a number of challenges and opportunities for managers. It can help improve quality and
employee productivity by showing managers how to empower their people as well as design and
implement change programs. It offers specific insights to improve a manager's people skills.