管理学大师

斯蒂芬·P·罗宾斯

《组织行为学》MBA授课讲义

CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION TO ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter students should be able to:

1. Define organizational behavior (OB).
2. Identify the primary behavioral disciplines contributing to OB.
3. Describe the three goals of OB.
4. List the major challenges and opportunities for managers to use OB concepts.
5. Describe how OB concepts can help make organizations more productive.
6. Discuss why work force diversity has become an important issue in management.
7. Explain how managers and organizations are responding to the problem of employee ethical dilemmas.
8. Discuss how knowledge of OB can help managers stimulate organizational innovation and change.

LECTURE OUTLINE

1. THE FIELD OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
   1. Definition
      1. Organizational behavior is the systematic study of the actions and attitudes that people exhibit within organizations. (ppt 4)
      2. Key parts of the definition
         1. Systematic study (ppt 5)
            1. The use of scientific evidence gathered under controlled conditions and measured and interpreted in a reasonably rigorous manner to attribute cause and effect. (ppt 6)
            2. OB—its theories and conclusions—is based on a large number of systematically designed research studies.
         2. Systematic study of actions (or behaviors) and attitudes include three areas: productivity, absenteeism, and turnover. (ppt 7)
            1. Managers clearly are concerned with the quantity and quality of output that each employee generates.
            2. Absence and turnover—particularly excessively high rates—can adversely affect this output.
            3. Organizational citizenship—discretionary behavior that is not part of an employee’s formal job requirements but promotes effective organizational functioning—is a fourth type of behavior that has recently been found to be important in determining employee performance. (ppt 8-9)
            4. Organizational behavior is also concerned with employee job satisfaction, which is an attitude. (ppt 10)
            5. Job satisfaction is a concern for three reasons.
               1. There may be a link between satisfaction and productivity.
               2. Satisfaction appears to be negatively related to absenteeism and turnover.
               3. It can be argued that managers have a humanistic responsibility to provide their employees with jobs that are challenging, intrinsically rewarding, and satisfying.
         3. Systematic study of people within an organization
            1. OB is specifically concerned with work-related behavior.
            2. An organization is a consciously coordinated social unit, which comprises two or more people and functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals. (ppt 11)
            3. OB is characterized by formal roles that define and shape the behavior of its members.

1. Contributing Disciplines (ppt 12)
   1. Organizational behavior is applied behavioral science.
      1. The predominant contributing disciplines are psychology, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and political science.
      2. Psychology contributes mainly at the individual/micro level of analysis, whereas the latter disciplines contribute on the group/macro level of analysis.
   2. Psychology is the science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other animals.
      1. Psychologists concern themselves with studying and attempting to understand individual behavior.
      2. Contributors are learning theorists, personality theorists, counseling psychologists, and, most important, industrial and organizational psychologists.
      3. Early industrial psychologists concerned themselves with problems of fatigue, boredom, and any other factor relevant to working conditions that could impede efficient work performance.
      4. More recently, their contributions have been expanded to include learning, perception, personality, emotions, training, leadership effectiveness, needs and motivational forces, job satisfaction, decision-making processes, performance appraisals, attitude measurement, employee-selection techniques, job design, and work stress.
   3. Sociology studies people in relation to their fellow human beings.
      1. Greatest contribution has resulted from their study of group behavior in organizations, particularly formal and complex organizations.
      2. Areas of valuable input include group dynamics, design of work teams, organizational culture, formal organization theory and structure, bureaucracy, communications, status, power, conflict, and work/life balance.
   4. Social psychology is an area within psychology, blending concepts from psychology and sociology.
      1. It focuses on the influence of people on one another.
      2. A major area of concern—change—how to implement it and how to reduce barriers to its acceptance.
      3. Areas of significant contributions are in measuring, understanding, and changing attitudes, communication patterns, the ways in which group activities can satisfy individual needs, and group decision-making processes.
   5. Anthropology is the study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities.
      1. It includes human physical character, evolutionary history, geographic distribution, group relationships, and cultural history and practices.
      2. This has helped us understand differences in fundamental values, attitudes, and behavior between people in different countries and within organizations.
   6. Political science, the study of the behavior of individuals and groups within a political environment, is frequently overlooked.
      1. Specific topics of concern to political scientists include structuring of conflict, allocation of power, and how people manipulate power for individual self-interest.

2. GOALS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
   1. What three goals does OB seek (ppt 13)

1. Explanation
   1. Seek to answer why an individual or a group of individuals did something.
   2. Explanation is the least important of the three goals, from a management perspective, because it occurs after the fact.

1. Prediction
   1. The goal of prediction focuses on future events to determine what outcomes will result from a given action.
   2. There are various ways to implement a major change, so the manager is likely to assess employee responses to several change interventions. Such information can be used in making the decision as to which change effort to use.

1. Control
   1. The most controversial goal is to control behavior because most of us live in democratic societies, which are built upon the concept of personal freedom.
   2. OB does offer technologies that facilitate the control of people.
      1. Whether those technologies should be used in organizations becomes an ethical question.

3. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB: A MANAGERIAL PERSPECTIVE
   1. The ability to explain, predict, and control organizational behavior has never been more important to managers because of changing workforce demographics; global competition which require flexibility, rapid change and innovation; and organizational commitment and loyalty changes. (ppt 14-15)

1. Increased Foreign Assignments
   1. Organizations are no longer constrained by national borders, which means as a manager, you're increasingly likely to find yourself in a foreign assignment.

1. Working with People from Different Cultures
   1. Globalization also means that you will be working with bosses, peers, and other employees that were raised in different cultures.

1. Coping with Anti-Capitalism Backlash
   1. Capitalism's focus on efficiency and growth is not accepted worldwide.

1. Overseeing Movement of Jobs to Countries with Low-Cost Labor
   1. Management is under pressure to keep labor costs down, yet moving jobs to lower labor cost countries also gets criticized.
   2. Workforce diversity means that organizations are becoming a more heterogeneous mix of people.
   3. Workforce diversity means that organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity.
      1. Encompasses anyone who varies from the norm. In addition to the more obvious groups—women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans—it also includes the physically disabled, homosexuals, and the elderly.

1. Embracing Diversity (ppt 16-17)
   1. Traditional melting pot approach to differences in organizations assumed that people who were different would somehow automatically want to assimilate.
   2. Now the challenge for organizations is to make themselves more accommodating to diverse groups.

1. Changing U.S. Demographics
   1. Diverse groups were such a small percentage of the U.S. workforce.
      1. The bulk of the pre-1980s workforce was male Caucasians working full time to support a non-employed wife and school-aged children.
      2. Currently, 46.6 percent of the U.S. labor force are women. Minorities and immigrants make up 23 percent.
   2. Workforce diversity has important implications for management practice.
      1. Managers need to recognize differences and respond to them.
         1. Diversity, if positively managed, can increase creativity and innovation in organizations as well as improve decision making by providing different perspectives on problems.

1. Improving Quality and Productivity (ppt 18)
   1. Managers are facing constant challenges to improve quality and productivity.  To do this, they are implementing programs such as quality management and process reengineering, which require extensive employee involvement. (ppt 19-20)
      1. See Exhibit 1-3, What Is Total Quality Management?
   2. Process reengineering asks managers to reconsider how work would be done and how would their organization be structured if they were to start over.

1. Improving People Skills (ppt 21-22)
   1. People skills are critical to managerial effectiveness.
   2. There are specific people skills that managers can use on the job.
      1. The text will raise this as you read.

1. Improving Customer Service
   1. The majority of employees in developed countries work in service jobs, which requires substantial interaction with an organization's customers.
   2. OB can contribute to performance by showing how employee attitudes and behavior are associated with customer satisfaction.

1. Empowering People
   1. The reshaping of the relationship between managers and those they are supposedly responsible for managing.
      1. Decision-making is being pushed down to the operating level.
      2. Managers are allowing employees full control of their work.
      3. An increasing number of organizations are using self-managed teams.
   2. Managers are empowering employees.
   3. 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.

1. Working in Networked Organizations
   1. Technology has allowed people to communicate and work together even though they may be thousands of miles apart.

1. Stimulating Innovation and Change
   1. Today’s successful organizations must foster innovation and master the art of change or they will become candidates for extinction.
   2. 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.
   3. The challenge for managers is to stimulate employee creativity and tolerance for change.
      1. The field of OB provides a wealth of ideas and techniques to aid in realizing these goals.

1. Coping with “Temporariness”
   1. Managers have always been concerned with change. What is different is the amount of time between change implementations.
   2. Today, change is an ongoing activity for most managers. The concept of continuous improvement, for instance, implies constant change.
   3. Managing used to be characterized by long periods of stability interrupted occasionally by short periods of change.
      1. That is reversed today.
   4. Managers and employees face a world of permanent “temporariness.”
      1. Workers need to continually update their knowledge and skills to perform new job requirements.
      2. Work groups are also increasingly in a state of flux. In the past employees were assigned to a specific department, and that assignment was relatively permanent.
      3. Organizations themselves are in a state of flux. They continually reorganize their various divisions, sell off poorly performing businesses, downsize operations, and replace permanent employees with temporaries.