TEAM 1

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR?

individual/ team-group/ org behaviors
Organizational behavior (OB) is the study of effects for improving organizational effectiveness.
According to the successful performance of huge organizations, most results depend on how the leaders
coordinate their staff to achieve goals. Therefore, professional management and leadership are extremely
crucial. Managers do not need to be excellent among others, but they are the pioneers converging at the
essentials of a leader. Especially, interpersonal skills are the main approach that all managers have to
improve themselves every day.
Generally, relational abilities are not just the delicate aptitudes, social abilities, relationship-
building abilities, or fundamental abilities and so forth yet additionally the best approach to assist
individuals with understanding the system of working environment they are enduring . Particularly, these
skills are the concepts that a manager can use to understand OB. Nonetheless, not only knowing about the
mathematical functions including planning, organizing, leading and controlling, but also professional
managers should better utilize Mintzberg’s managerial roles. Indeed, administrative roles to be
considered such as interpersonal, informational and decisional that correspond to do the multi-tasking
mission, observe the external & internal resources, have the skill of synthesis and analysis data, and finally
make the decisions. Besides, Luthan’s concept demonstrates four principal missions including traditional
management, communication, human resource management and net-working. All leaders are believed
to possess a trio of skillfulness consisting of technical, human and conceptual skills. Conclusively, not
having the perfect manager but they just are successful leaders thanks to their techniques to effectively
assign the workload.
Behavior prediction can be made in two different ways which are intuition and systematic study.
Intuition is the natural ability of humans to predict something based on the instinctive feeling rather than
being supported by conscious research. It can be true or not because people naturally make decisions based
on their “gut feelings” or their observation. On the other hand, to make the prediction more reliable, people
tend to use systematic study. It is used to analyze people’s thinking and to predict their behaviors or what
they do in several situations. Moreover, it explains the fundamental consistency of individuals’ behaviors
and distinguishes the differences between people and people. This approach is made based on relationships
between gathered scientific evidence to make conclusions. Additionally, a systematic study is
complemented by using evidence-based management (EBM) which selects the most important evidence
to make decisions. OB helps not only individuals but also managers by providing them tools to enhance the
ability to predict other people's behavior to make the groups and organizations more productive.
Four main behavioral science disciplines are contributing to OB classified as psychology, social
psychology, sociology, and anthropology respectively. Additionally, three different levels of analysis in
the OB model are the individual level, group level, and organizational level. All these levels contribute
to achieving the final goal: organizational effectiveness.
Firstly, psychology plays the most individual level of OB analysis with an emphasis on learning
theorists, personality theorists, counseling psychologists, and, most crucial, industrial and organizational
psychologists. Specifically, various psychological factors can be named such as learning, motivation,
leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction, employee selection, work stress,... To achieve organizational
effectiveness, managers should understand thoroughly their employees because they are the majority in an
organization. Being taken care of, employees will have better performance, higher motivation as well as
satisfaction. This level involves the characteristics and behaviors of employees, such as ability, personality,
values, emotions, and moods, motivation, perception, task performance, citizenship, and withdrawal
behavior.
Secondly, since social psychology is a mixture of psychology and sociology, this study is
expanded to group behavior demonstrating influences of one to another. People have to deal with
implementing changes whilst reducing barriers, finding out communication patterns, and building trust
during the making-decision process. This level includes behavior and attitude changes, communication,
decision making, conflict and negotiation, power and intergroup behavior.
Thirdly, due to featuring the relationships between individuals and their environment, sociology
targets culture as a vital element contributing to the organizational system. Whereas this discipline
scrutinizes intergroup behavior such as communication, it also analyzes the whole system based on formal
organization theory, organizational technology, change, and culture.
Lastly, in contrast to psychology, anthropology, the most social level of OB analysis, centers
human beings and their activities to delineate the diversity among different people, groups, and
organizations from various countries in terms of their values, attitudes, and behaviors. At the
organizational level of analysis, OB draws heavily upon sociology, anthropology and political science.
Understanding this level, managers design a better structure for the organization, build up a good culture so
that employees can work together and easily achieve organizational goals. Major variables for this level are
competitive values, cross-cultural analysis, organizational culture & environment, structure, human
resource management, change practices, productivity, and survival.
Managers face many challenges and opportunities in the field of OB concepts: 1 Under economic
pressures, managers have to make decisions such as reduce employees when organizations face the
consequences of natural disasters or economic problems. Besides, they also motivate and encourage
employees when they are considering their future. 2 In the globalization century, managers will need to
understand many different cultures to work with them, divide assignments, oversee the movement of jobs
with low-cost-labor countries between the profit of their organizations and responsibility of communities,
and aware of different cultural and legal norms 3 OB analyzes what factors affect their decision in the
workplace to manage workforce demographics, besides it can help predict outcomes of organizations 4
Managers have to consider more about workforce diversity. Projects will be observed from many views,
so there are many better performances 5 Customer-responsive culture has to improve to care of potential
customers and attract new customers 6 Managers understand and predict behaviors of individuals at the
workplace through OB which helps managers improve people skills and perform better in their job 7
Managers create opportunities for employees to work remotely through networked organizations, which
requires a lot of skills to link individuals in several locations 8 OB is trying to set up many policies to
tighten using social media, this means helping employees work more productively and optimistically 9
Improve employee well-being at work, managers help employees handle work-life conflicts to include
flexible hours or workplace 10 OB helps create a positive work environment for employees to expose
their ability as much as possible 11 Managers face ethical dilemmas and ethical choices, they need to
care about ethical behavior at the workplace and help employees clear right and wrong conduct.
In Reflection, we can better realize interpersonal skills play a vital role to help organizations run
smoothly and us effectively achieve the targets. Although there are so many opportunities and challenges
in real-world business today, understanding clearly organizational behavior leads managers to enhance
productivity, job satisfaction and reduce absenteeism, turnover rate and deviant workplace behavior.
Therefore, being IU sophomores, learning OB prepares us the background knowledge to be the successful
leaders in any working environment through understanding of how organizations behave on an individual,
group, and organizational level.