Challenges and Opportunities of OB

1. Responding to Economic Pressure

2. Responding to Globalization
○ Manager's job has changed.
■ Increased Foreign Assignments
■ Working with People from different cultures
■ Overseeing Movement of Jobs to Countries with low-cost labor

3. Managing Workforce Diversity

○ workforce diversity The concept that organizations are becoming more
heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and
inclusion of other diverse groups
4. Improving Customer Service
5. Improving People Skills
6. Stimulating Innovation and Change
7. Coping with "Temporariness"
8. Working in Networked Organizations
9. Helping Employees balance work-life conflicts
10. Creating a Positive Work Environment
○ positive organizational scholarship (also called positive organizational
behavior), studies how organizations develop human strengths, foster vitality
and resilience, and unlock potential.
○ Some key independent variables in positive OB research are engagement, hope,
optimism, and resilience in the face of strain.
○ “reflected best-self”—asking employees to think about when they were at their
“personal best” in order to understand how to exploit their strengths.
11. Improving Ethical Behavior

Developing an OB Model

● A model is an abstraction of reality, a simplified representation of some real world

phenomenon.

● 3 types of variables: inputs, processes and outcomes

○ Inputs - Variables that lead to processes.
○ processes - Actions that individuals, groups, and organizations engage in as a
result of inputs and that lead to certain outcomes.
○ outcomes - Key factors that are affected by some other variables.
● 3 levels of analysis: individual, group and organizational
 ● goals of OB:
1. attitudes and stress
2. task performance - The combination of effectiveness and efficiency at doing your core
job tasks
3. Citizenship Behavior - The discretionary behavior that is not part of an employee’s
formal job requirements, and that contributes to the psychological and social
environment of the workplace
4. Withdrawal behavior - the set of actions that employees take to separate themselves
from the organization
5. group cohesion - The extent to which members of a group support and validate one
another while at work.
6. Group Functioning - The quantity and quality of a work group’s output.
7. productivity - The combination of the effectiveness and efficiency of an organization.
productivity requires both effectiveness and efficiency .
○ effectiveness - The degree to which an organization meets the needs of its
clientele or customers
○ efficiency - The degree to which an organization can achieve its ends at a low
cost.
8. organizational survival - The degree to which an organization is able to exist and grow
over the long term.

Implications:
Here are a few specific implications for managers:
● Some generalizations provide valid insights into human behavior, but many are erroneous.
Organizational behavior uses systematic study to improve predictions of behavior over intuition
alone.
● Because people are different, we need to look at OB in a contingency framework, using
situational variables to explain cause-and-effect relationships.
● Organizational behavior offers specific insights to improve a manager’s people skills.
● It helps managers to see the value of workforce diversity and practices that may need to be
changed in different countries.
● It can improve quality and employee productivity by showing managers how to empower their
people, design and implement change programs, improve customer service, and help
employees balance work–life conflicts.
● It can help managers cope in a world of temporariness and learn how to stimulate innovation.
● Finally, OB can guide managers in creating an ethically healthy work climate.