SUBJECT TITLE: ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

TUTORIAL QUESTIONS

Tutorial 1 : Introduction to Organisational Behaviour

1. Organisational behaviour courses are useful only to people who will enter management
careers. Discuss the accuracy of this statement.

2. A young student from the United States is interested in doing international business
across China, India, Brazil, and Russia. Discuss how the knowledge of OB can be
useful to the student.

Tutorial 2 - Topic 1 – Introduction to the Field of Organisational Behaviour

- Topic 2 – Individual Behaviour and Processes

1. The changing workforce is one of the emerging trends in organisational behaviour.

Describe how the workforce is changing and briefly identify two consequences of these
changes for organisations.

Answer:
(a) more ethnic diversity
(b) visible minorities (women) represent a large percentage of the workforce and are
entering occupations previously held mostly by men
(c) younger people (Generation X and Generation Y) are bringing somewhat different
values and needs to the workforce.

2. A courier service lay off a large percentage of its production staff during last year's
recession. These low-skilled employees performed routine tasks filling orders. The
company now wants to rehire them. However, most of the unskilled employees have since
found employment in other companies and industries. Do you think the courier company
lost much intellectual capital in this situation? Explain your answer.

Answer:
Intellectual capital refers to the storage and preservation of the company’s stock of
knowledge — in other words, the knowledge that the organization possesses. The courier
company has lost some organizational memory, but probably not a great deal. The amount
of organizational memory lost may be fairly small in this situation. These are unskilled
employees, some of whom have moved to other industries. This suggests that they might
have been fairly replaceable and do not have much unique knowledge for the
organization. Similarly, the tasks are fairly routine, suggesting that most knowledge is
established within the task routines and thereby documented in procedures manuals.

However, some organizational memory loss has occurred because every employee
possesses some unique knowledge that is of value to the organization. For instance, the
laid off employees may have had undocumented knowledge about the preferences of
certain customers or the operation of certain equipment. When employees leave the firm,
they take this knowledge with them unless it is clearly documented or retained in other
ways within the organization.

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3. Store #34 of CDA Hardware Associates has had below average sales over the past few
years. As head of franchise operations, you are concerned with the continued low sales
volume. The store manager wants you to diagnose the problem and recommend possible
causes. Use the MARS model of individual behaviour and performance to provide four
different types of reasons why employees at Store #34 might be performing below
average. Provide one example for each type of explanation.

4. As the district manager responsible for six stores in a large electronics retail chain, you
have had difficulty with the performance of some sales staff. Although they are initially
motivated and generally have good interpersonal skills, many have difficulty with the
complex knowledge of the diverse range of store products, ranging from computers to
high fidelity sound systems. Describe three strategies you might apply to improve the
match between the competencies of new sales staff and the job requirement.

Tutorial 3 – Topic 3 – Perception and Learning in Organisations

1. You are manager of a district that has just hired several recent university and college
graduates. Most of these people are starting their first full-time job, though most of
them have held part-time and summer positions in the past. They have general
knowledge of their particular skill area (accounting, engineering, marketing, etc.) but
know relatively little about specific business practices and developments. Explain how
you would nurture the self-concepts in these new hires to strengthen their performance
and maintain their psychological wellbeing. Also explain how you might reconcile the
tendency for self-enhancement while preventing the new employees from forming a
negative self-evaluation.

Complexity

Well-being and likely performance can be enhanced by encouraging employees to

develop diverse strengths. Within the organization, manager might be employees to
become better technically as well as nurture their leadership talents. Managers should
also encourage employees to develop personal strengths outside of work, such as
sports and volunteering, and to recognize/ reward these outside interests.

2. NuGas Corp. has just sent a dozen (mostly white male) managers from Germany to its
exploration site in a remote area of Indonesia. Few of these managers have worked
with Indonesian employees, so the company has asked you to design an on-site one-
day experiential training program to help these managers to minimize perceptual
problems that might otherwise occur. The program must be experiential (i.e.
participants interact with each other rather than attend an awareness lecture) and the
activities must help the managers to discover biases that may be hidden or unknown to
them. Describe the key features of this training program and discuss its conceptual
foundations.

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 3. During a diversity management session, a manager suggests that stereotypes are a
necessary part of working with others. “I have to make assumptions about what’s in
the other person’s head, and stereotypes help me do that,” she explains. “It’s better to
rely on stereotypes than to enter a working relationship with someone from another
culture without any idea of what they believe in!” Discuss the merits of and problems
with the manager’s statement.

Answer:
This question raises the fundamental dilemma that stereotyping is both a necessary and
a troublesome activity in the perceptual process. On the one hand, the manager is
correct that stereotyping helps us to fill in missing information, such as the non-
observable characteristics of a person that only become apparent after a long time.
Also, stereotyping helps us to organize information more efficiently by placing people
into predetermined categories.

Although most stereotypes have some truth to them, there is also plenty of error and
distortion which could lead to employment discrimination. It is unlikely that someone
perfectly fits the stereotype category, so we tend to assign traits that are untrue.
Stereotyping makes it difficult for people to alter their beliefs about a person regarding
traits that conflict with the stereotype.

Tutorial 4 – Topic 4 – Workplace Emotions, Attitudes and Stress

Case study - Odd Couples

A 29-year old man and a 68 year old are paired together to learn from each other. How much could
they possibly have in common? At Randstad USA’s Manhattan office, such employee pairings are
common. Randstad Holding NV, a Dutch company, has used this pairing idea since its founding over
40 years ago. The founder’s motto was “Nobody should be alone.” The original intent was to boost
productivity by having sales agents share one job and trade off job responsibilities. Today, these
partners in the home office have an arrangement where one is in the office one week while the other
one is out making sales calls, then the next week, they switch.
Randstad executives figured that if they shared a job with someone whose own success depended on
theirs, they were certain to get all the nurturing they required.” The company looks for people who
will work well with others by conducting extensive interviews and requiring job applicants to shadow
a sales agent for half a day. “Everything about our organization is based on the team and group.” One
of the most interesting elements of Randstad’s program is that neither person is “the boss.”

a. What topics of individual behaviour do you see in this case? Explain.

b. What do you think about this pairing-up idea? Would you be comfortable with such an
arrangement? Why or why not?

c. What personality traits would be most needed for this type of work arrangement? Why?

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Tutorial 5 – Topic 5 – Foundation of Employee Motivation

1. A large organization has hired you as a consultant to identify day-to-day activities for
middle managers to minimize distributive and procedural injustice. The company
explains that employees have complained about distributive injustice because they have
different opinions about what is fair (equity, equality, need) and what outcomes and
inputs have the greatest value. They also experience procedural injustice due to
misperceptions and differing expectations. Given these ambiguities, what would you
recommend to middle managers?

2. Your organisation wants to improve employee motivation. Employees already have

strong P-to-O expectancies and the outcome valences are quite favourable for strong
performance, but they seem to have a low E-to-P expectancy. Identify three distinct
types of strategies that would potentially increase employee motivation by improving
the E-to-P expectancy.