INTRODUCTION TO THE FIELD OF ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

Organisational behaviour (OB)—the study of what people think, feel, and do in

and around organisations

Organisations—groups of people who work interdependently towards some

purpose

 Structured patterns of interaction—expect each other to complete certain

tasks in a coordinated way
 Organisations have purpose—e.g. producing oil from oil sands or selling
books on the Internet

WHY STUDY ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR?

1. Satisfy the need to understand and predict

 Helps us figure out why organisational events happen.
2. Test personal theories
 Helps us to question and rebuild personal theories.
3. Influence behaviour
 Improves our ability to work with people and influence organisational
events.

OB makes a difference to the bottom line—companies are more effective when

applying several OB concepts and theories.

ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR TRENDS

1. Globalisation
 Many firms operate in a global economy
o Activities in other parts of the world, participates in other markets,
competes against organisations located elsewhere
 Requires new organisational structures and different forms of
communication
 Adds more diversity to the workforce
 Increases competitive pressures, mergers, work intensification and
demands for work flexibility from employees

2. Changing workforce
 More diversity:
o Primary categories—gender, age, ethnicity, etc.
o Secondary categories—some control over (e.g. education, marital
status)
o Increased racial and ethnic diversity
o More women in workforce
o Generational diversity, new age cohorts (e.g. generation X,
generation Y)

3. Evolving employment relationships

  Work–life balance
o Number one indicator of career success
o Priority for young people when considering jobs
 Employability
o Many tasks, not a specific job
o Need to continuously learn skills

 Contingent (casual) work

o No explicit or implicit contract for long-term employment, or
minimum hours of work can vary in a nonsystematic way

4. Virtual work
 Use of information technology to perform one’s job away from the
traditional physical workplace
 Telework (telecommuting)—alternative work arrangement
o Working from home, usually with a computer connection to the
office
o Need to replace face time with performance output
o Changes employment relationship expectations
 Virtual teams
o Operate across space, time, and organisational boundaries with
members who communicate mainly through electronic
technologies

5. Workplace values and ethics

 Values—stable, long-lasting beliefs about what is important
 Ethics—the study of moral principles or values that determine whether
actions are right or wrong and outcomes are good or bad

> CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (CSR)

 Corporate social responsibility—an organisation’s moral obligation to all

of its stakeholders

 Stakeholders—shareholders, customers, suppliers, governments, and any

other groups with a vested interest in the organisation

 Triple bottom line

o Part of corporate social responsibility
o Supporting economic, social, and environmental spheres of
sustainability

 Various stakeholders (job applicants, current employees, and suppliers)

associate with firms based on their CSR
 Many firms talk about their CSR, but few practise CSR or have their
actions evaluated
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Any structured activity that improves an organisation’s capacity to acquire,
share, and use knowledge for its survival and success

Intellectual capital
 Knowledge residing in the organisation—sum of its human, structural,
and relationship capital:
1. Human capital—possessed and generated by employees
2. Structural capital—captured in systems and structures
3. Relationship capital—value derived from external stakeholders
(e.g. customer loyalty)

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

1. Knowledge acquisition—organisations’ ability to extract information and ideas

from its environment as well as through insight
 Absorptive capacity—recognising the value of new information,
assimilating it and applying it
 Affects how quickly organisations can grow and prosper

2. Knowledge sharing—distributing knowledge to where it is needed in the

organisation
 Communication—intranets, face-to-face, teams, etc.
o Communities of practice—informal groups bound together by
shared expertise and passion for a particular activity or interest
 Rewards—encourage info sharing

3. Knowledge use
 Knowledge awareness—knowing that relevant knowledge is available
 Freedom to apply that knowledge

Organisational memory—storage and preservation of intellectual capital—

includes employee knowledge and embedded knowledge

Retaining intellectual capital

 Keeping good employees
 Transferring knowledge from one person to the next
 Transferring human capital to structural capital

Organisations also need to ‘unlearn’

 Cast off routines and patterns of behaviour that are no longer appropriate