Introduction TO Organizational Behavior PDF

Preview

Summary

Download Introduction TO Organizational Behavior PDF

Description

INTRODUCTION TO ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR John A. Wagner III & John R. Hollenbeck Defining Organizational Behavior Organizational behavior is a field of study that endeavors to understand, explain, predict, and change human behavior as it occurs in the organizational context. Underlying this definition are three important considerations: 1. Organizational behavior focuses on observable behaviors, such as talking in a meeting, running production equipment, or writing a report. It also deals with the internal states, such as thinking, perceiving, and deciding, that accompany visible actions. 2. Organizational behavior involves the analysis of how people behave both as individuals and as members of groups and organizations. 3. Organizational behavior also assesses ^"behavior" of groups and organizations per se. Neither groups nor organizations "behave" in the same sense that people do. Nevertheless, some events occur in organizations that cannot be explained in terms of individual behavior. These events must be examined in terms of group or organizational processes. Research in organizational behavior traces its roots to the late 1940s, when researchers in psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and other social sciences joined together in an effort to develop a comprehensive body of organizational knowledge. As it has developed, the field of organizational behavior has grown into three distinct subfields, delineated in Table 1.1: micro organizational behavior, meso organizational behavior, and macro organizational behavior. Micro Organizational Behavior Micro organizational behavior is concerned mainly with the behaviors of individuals working alone. Three subfields of psychology were the principal contributors to the beginnings of micro organizational behavior. Experimental psychology provided theories of learning, motivation, perception, and stress. Clinical psychology furnished models of personality and human development. Industrial psychology offered theories of employee selection, workplace attitudes, and performance assessment. Owing to this heritage, micro organizational behavior has a distinctly psychological 2 \ ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR Table 1.1 Subfields of Organizational Behavior Subfield Focus Origins Micro Experimental, clinical, and organizational behavior Individuals organizational psychology Groups Communication, social Meso psychology, and interactionist organizational sociology, plus the origins of behavior the other two subfields Macro Organizatio Sociology, political science,

organizational ns anthropology, and economics behavior orientation. Among the questions it examines are the following: How do differences in ability affect employee productivity? What motivates employees to perform their jobs? How do employees develop perceptions of their workplace, and how do these perceptions in turn influence their behavior? Meso Organizational Behavior Meso organizational behavior is a middle ground, bridging the other two subfields of organizational behavior. It focuses primarily on understanding the behaviors of people working together in teams and groups. In addition to sharing the origins of the other two subfields, meso organizational behavior grew out of research in the fields of communication, social psychology, and interactionist sociology, which provided theories on such topics as socialization, leadership, and group dynamics. Meso organizational behavior seeks answers to questions such as the following: What forms of socialization encourage co-workers to cooperate? What mix of skills among team members increases team performance? How can managers determine which prospective leader will be the most effective? Macro Organizational Behavior Macro organizational behavior focuses on understanding the "behaviors" of entire organizations. The origins of macro organizational behavior can be traced to four disciplines. Sociology provided theories of structure, social status, and institutional relations. Political science offered theories of power, conflict, bargaining, and control. Anfhropo/ogy contributed theories of symbolism, cultural influence, and comparative analysis. Economics furnished theories of competition and efficiency. Research on macro organizational behavior considers questions such as the following: How is power acquired and retained? How can conflicts be resolved? What mechanisms can be used to coordinate work activities? How should an organization be structured to best cope with its surrounding environment? Contemporary Issues Considered both individually and collectively, the three subfields of organizational behavior offer valuable information, insights, and advice to managers facing the challenge of understanding and reacting to a broad range of contemporary management issues. According to a variety of sources, today's managers find five of these issues especially important: workforce diversity, team INTRODUCTION TO ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR £ 3 productivity, organizational adaptability, international growth and development, and ethical concerns. Workforce Diversity Within the societal cultures of the United States and Canada, subcultural differences once ignored by many managers now command significant attention and sensitivity. Historically, the North American workforce has consisted primarily of white males. Today, however, white males make up far less than 50 percent of business new hires in the United States, whereas

women and African American, Hispanic, and Asian men account for increasingly large segments of the U.S. workforce. Moreover, in the last ten years the number of women and minorities assuming managerial positions in the U.S. workforce has grown by over 25 percent. It is becoming—and will continue to become—even more important for managers to know about and be ready to respond to the challenges deriving from individual differences in abilities, personalities, and motives. Knowledge about the workplace consequences of these differences, drawn from the subfield of micro organizational behavior, can provide managers with help in this regard. Team Productivity Management is becoming less of a process relying on top-down command and control, where managers have all the power and nonmanage- rial employees have little say in what they do. For various reasons organizations now use greater amounts of empowerment—the delegation to nonmanagers of the authority to make significant decisions on their jobs. Often, empowerment is accomplished by grouping employees into teams and then giving those teams responsibility for selfmanagement activities such as hiring, firing, and training members, setting production targets, and assessing output quality. Guidance from meso organizational behavior precepts can help managers establish realistic expectations about the implementation difficulties and probable effects of team-based empowerment. Organizational Adaptability In today's business world, emphasis is shifting from the mass production of low-cost, interchangeable commodities to the production of high-quality goods and services, made individually or in small batches and geared to meet the specific demands of small groups of consumers. This shift requires greater flexibility than ever before and necessitates that quality receive greater emphasis than it has in the past. Companies are reacting by implementing programs that require new ways of dividing an organization's work into jobs and coordinating the efforts of many employees. Implementations of this sort benefit from insights derived from macro organizational behavior. International Growth and Development Fewer firms today limit their operations to a single national or cultural region than was once the case. Instead, multinationalism or even statelessness has become the norm.The resulting globalization is changing the way business is conducted, and it promises to continue to do so at an increasing pace. Managers facing this massive change must develop increased sensitivity to international 4 \ ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR cultural differences. All three subfields of organizational behavior have valuable advice to offer managers confronted with this challenge. Ethical Concerns Managing organizational behavior inevitably involves the acquisition and use of power. Thus, managers continually face the issue of determining whether

the use of power in a given instance is effective and appropriate. One approach in dealing with this issue is to adopt the utilitarianist perspective and judge the appropriateness of the use of power in terms of the consequences of this use. Does using power provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people? If the answer to this question is "yes," then the utilitarian perspective would suggest that power is being used appropriately. A second perspective, derived from the theory of moral rights, suggests that power is used appropriately only when no one's personal rights or freedoms are sacrificed. It is certainly possible for many people to derive great satisfaction from the use of power to accomplish some purpose, thus satisfying utilitarian criteria, while simultaneously causing the rights of a few individuals to be abridged. According to the theory of moral rights, the latter effect is an indication of inappropriateness. Power holders seeking to use their power appropriately must therefore respect the rights and interests of the minority as well as look after the well-being of the majority. MANAGEMENT AND MANAGERS John A. Wagner III & John R. Hollenbeck Although managers and managerial jobs are ubiquitous in contemporary life, few people really understand what managers do as they perform their jobs. Could you tell someone what management is? What skills and abilities managers need to succeed in their work? How today's management practices have developed? Modern societies depend on the well-being of organizations ranging from industrial giants like General Electric and IBM to local businesses like the corner grocery store. In turn, all of these businesses depend on the expertise of managers. It is therefore important that members of modern societies, including you, know what management is, what managers do, and how contemporary practices have developed. This chapter introduces management theory and practice. It begins by defining the concept of management in terms of the various functions that managers perform in organizations. Next, it describes the job of a manager in greater detail, focusing on the skills managers use and the roles they fill as they perform their jobs every day. The chapter then examines how modern management theory has evolved, discussing several key schools of thought about management and managers that have developed between the late 1800s and the present. Defining Management Management, defined most simply, is the process of influencing behavior in organizations such that common purposes are identified, worked toward, and achieved. To define management in greater detail, we must consider a closely related question: What is an organization? Three Attributes of Organizations An organization is a collection of people and materials brought together to accomplish purposes not achievable through the efforts of individuals working alone. Three attributes enable an organization to achieve this feat: a mission, division of labor, and a hierarchy of authority.

6 \ ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR Table 2.1 Sample Mission Statements Company Mission Hershey Foods'basic business mission is to Hershey become a major, diversified food company. ... A Foods basic principle that Hershey will continue to embrace is to attract and hold customers with products and services of consistently superior quality and value. Polaroid Polaroid designs, manufactures, and markets worldwide a variety of products based on its inventions, primarily in the photographic field. These products include instant photographic cameras and films, light-polarizing filters and lenses, and diversified chemical, optical, and commercial products. The principal products of the company are used in amateur and professional photography, industry, science, medicine, and education. Source: Excerpted from annual stockholder reports. Mission Each organization works toward a specific mission, which is its purpose or reason for being. As illustrated in Table 2.1, a mission statement identifies the primary goods or services that the organization is intended to produce and the markets that it hopes to serve. An organization's mission helps hold it together by giving members a shared sense of direction. Division of Labor In every organization, difficult work is broken into smaller tasks. This division of labor can enhance efficiency by simplifying tasks and making them easier to perform. A classic example of this effect can be seen in the following analysis of the pin-making process by the eighteenth-century Scottish economist Adam Smith: One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving a head. To make the head requires two or three more operations. [Using a division of labor such as this,] ten persons could make among them upward of forty-eight thousand pins a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently they certainly could not each of them have made twenty; perhaps not one pin in a day. The division of labor enables organized groups of people to accomplish tasks that would be beyond their physical or mental capacities as individuals. Few people can build a car by themselves, yet companies like Nissan turn out thousands of cars each year by dividing the complex job of building a car into a series of simple assembly-line tasks. Hierarchy of Authority

The hierarchy of authority is another common organizational attribute. In very small organizations, all members of the organization may share equally the authority to make decisions and initiate actions. In contrast, in larger organizations authority is more often distributed in a pyramidal hierarchical pattern like that shown in Figure 2.1. At the top of this hierarchy, the chief executive officer (CEO) has the authority to issue orders to every other member of the organization and to expect these orders to be obeyed. At successively lower levels, managers direct the activities of MANAGEMENT AND MANAGERS 3# 7

Figure 2.1 Briggs & Stratton Organization Chart. An organization chart is a graphic representation of a firm's hierarchy of authority. The organization chart in this figure shows the top and middle management of Briggs & Stratton, a manufacturer of small gasoline engines used in lawn mowers, snow blowers, and similar equipment. Note that the company is divided horizontally into various functional departments—such as manufacturing and sales—whose efforts are unified through authority relations that extend vertically between vice presidents and the CEO. Source: Based on information contained in annual stockholder reports. people beneath them and are constrained by the authority of managers above them. Formal Definition The three attributes of organizations just described help clarify the role of management in organizational life. In a sense, the first two attributes are discordant, as the mission assumes the integration of effort whereas the division of labor produces a differentiation of effort. As a result, an organization's members are simultaneously pushed together and pulled apart. Managerial influence, derived partly from the third attribute of hierarchical authority, reconciles this conflict and balances the two opposing attributes. This balancing act is what managers do and what management is all about. Management is thus a process of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling organizational behaviors to accomplish a mission through the

division of labor. This definition incorporates several important ideas. First, management is a process—an ongoing flow of activities—rather than something that can be accomplished once and for all. Second, managerial activities affect the behaviors of an organization's members and the organization itself. Third, to accomplish a firm's mission requires organization. If the mission could be accomplished by individuals working alone, neither the firm nor its management would be necessary. Fourth, the process of 8 \ ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

Figure 2.2 The Four Management Functions management can be further divided into the four functions shown in Figure 2.2: planning, organizing, directing, and controlling. Planning is a forward-looking process of deciding what to do. Managers who plan try to anticipate the future, setting goals and objectives for a firm's performance and identifying the actions required to attain these goals and objectives. For example, when Robert Iger meets with other Walt Disney Company executives to develop specifications for the attractions and concessions at theme parks under construction, he is engaged in planning. In planning, managers set three types of goals and objectives: 1. Strategic goals are the outcomes that the organization as a whole expects to achieve by pursuing its mission. 2. Functional or divisional objectives are the outcomes that units within the firm are expected to achieve. 3. Operational objectives are the specific, measurable results that the members of an organizational unit are expected to accomplish. As shown in Figure 2.3, these three types of goals and objectives are linked together.The focus of lower-order objectives is shaped by the content of higher-level goals, and achieving higher-level goals depends on the fulfillment of lower-level objectives. Goals and objectives are performance targets that the members of an organization seek to fulfill by working together—for instance, gaining control over 15 percent of the firm's market, or manufacturing less than one defective product for every thousand produced. Setting such goals and objectives helps managers plan and implement a sequence of actions that will lead to their attainment. For example, financial objectives growing out of Iger's planning meetings at Disney become targets that newly opened theme parks are expected to meet or exceed during their first few years in

operation. Goals and objectives also serve as benchmarks of the success or failure of organizational behavior. When they review past performance, managers can judge the company's effectiveness by assessing its goal attainment. For example, Disney theme park managers can assess the success of their operations by comparing actual revenue and cost data with corporate profitability goals. As part of the organizing function, managers develop a structure of interrelated tasks and allocate people and resources within this structure. Organizing begins when managers divide an MANAGEMENT AND MANAGERS 3# 9 Strategic Goal Functional Objectives Operational Objectives

Figure 2.3 The Hierarchy of Goals and Objectives. An organization's strategic goals set boundaries within which functional objectives are established. In turn, functional objectives shape the objectives of operational units. Accomplishing operational objectives therefore contributes to the attainment of functional objectives and strategic goals. organization's labor and design tasks that will lead to the achievement of organizational goals and objectives. In companies such as Whirlpool, Boeing, and IBM, assembly operations are devised and builtduring this phase. Next, managersdecide who will perform these tasks. To make this determination, they analyze the tasks to identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to perform them successfully. They can then select qualified employees or train other employees who lack the necessary qualifications to carry out these tasks. Grouping tasks and the people who perform them into organizational units is another step in the organizing process. One type of organizational unit, a department, includes people who perform the same type of work. For instance, all employees who market an organization's goods or services can be brought together in a marketing department. Another type of unit, a division, includes people who do the company's work in the same geographic

territory, who work with similar kinds of clients, o...