Unit 4

PMOB
Meaning, Need of understanding human
behavior in organization
• One of the challenges in understanding organizational behavior is that
it addresses issues that aren’t obvious. Like an iceberg, OB has a small
visible dimension and a much larger hidden portion.
• What we see when we look at an organization is its visible aspects:
strategies, objectives, policies and procedures, structure, technology,
formal authority relationships, and chain of command.
• But under the surface are other elements that managers need to
understand—elements that also influence how employees behave at
work.
• OB provides managers with considerable insights into these
important, but hidden, aspects of the organization
Meaning, Need of understanding human
behavior in organization
• Organizational behavior focuses on three major areas.
• First, OB looks at individual behavior. Based predominantly on
contributions from psychologists, this area includes such topics as
attitudes, personality, perception, learning, and motivation.
• Second, OB is concerned with group behavior, which includes norms,
roles, team building, leadership, and conflict. Our knowledge about
groups comes basically from the work of sociologists and social
psychologists.
• Finally, OB also looks at organizational aspects including structure,
culture, and human resource policies and practices.
Meaning, Need of understanding human
behavior in organization
• The goals of OB are to explain, predict, and influence
behavior.
• Managers need to be able to explain why employees engage
in some behaviors rather than others, predict how
employees will respond to various actions and decisions, and
influence how employees behave.
Models of OB
• The five models of organisational behaviour are the:
• Autocratic model
• Custodial model
• Supportive model
• Collegial model
• System model.
Models of OB
• Autocratic model is the model that depends upon strength, power
and formal authority.
• In an autocratic organisation, the people (management/owners) who
manage the tasks in an organisation have formal authority for
controlling the employees who work under them.
• Employees have little control over the work function.
• Their ideas and innovations are not generally welcomed, as the key
decisions are made at the top management level.
Models of OB
• The custodial model is based around the concept of providing
economic security for employees – through wages and other benefits
– that will create employee loyalty and motivation.
• In some countries, many professional companies provide health
benefits, corporate cars, financial packaging of salary, and so on –
these are incentives designed to attract and retain quality staff.
Models of OB
• Supportive model Unlike the two earlier approaches, the supportive
model is focused around aspiring leadership.
• It is not based upon control and authority (the autocratic model) or
upon incentives (the custodial model), but instead tries to motivate
staff through the manager-employee relationship and how employees
are treated on a day-to-day basis.
Models of OB
• The collegial model is based around teamwork – everybody working
as colleagues (hence the name of the model).
• The overall environment and corporate culture need to be aligned to
this model, where everybody is actively participating – is not about
status and job titles – everybody is encouraged to work together to
build a better organisation.
Models of OB
• The final organisational model is referred to as the system model.
• In the system model, the organisation looks at the overall structure
and team environment, and considers that individuals have different
goals, talents and potential.
• The intent of the system model is to try and balance the goals of the
individual with the goals of the organisation.
Attitudes
• Attitudes are evaluative statements, either favorable or
unfavorable, concerning objects, people, or events.
• They reflect how an individual feels about something. When
a person says, “I like my job,” he or she is expressing an
attitude about work.
Attitude
• To better understand attitude, we need to look at its three
components: cognition, affect, and behavior.
• The cognitive component of an attitude is made up of the beliefs,
opinions, knowledge, and information held by a person.
• The affective component is the emotional or feeling part of an
attitude. This component would be reflected in the statement, “I
don’t like Ishan because he smokes.”
• Cognition and affect can lead to behavioral outcomes.
• The behavioral component of an attitude refers to an intention to
behave in a certain way toward someone or something.
Attitudes
• Managers are not interested in every attitude an employee might
hold. Rather, they’re specifically interested in job-related attitudes,
and the three most important and most studied are job satisfaction,
job involvement, and organizational commitment.
Personality
• When we describe people using terms such as quiet, passive, loud,
aggressive, ambitious, extroverted, loyal, tense, or sociable, we’re
describing their personalities.
• An individual’s personality is a unique combination of emotional,
thought, and behavioral patterns that affect how a person reacts to
situations and interacts with others.
• Personality is most often described in terms of measurable traits that
a person exhibits. We’re interested in looking at personality because
just like attitudes, it affects how and why people behave the way they
do
Personality
• One of the more widely used methods of identifying personalities is
the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
• The MBTI® assessment uses four dimensions of personality to identify
16 different personality types based on the responses to an
approximately 100-item questionnaire.
• It’s used in such companies as Apple, Hallmark, AT&T, Exxon, 3M, as
well as many hospitals, educational institutions.
Personality
• The 16 personality types are based on four dimensions:
• Extraversion versus Introversion (EI)
• Sensing versus Intuition (SN)
• Thinking versus Feeling (TF)
• Judging versus Perceiving (JP)
Personality
• Another way of viewing personality is through a five-factor model of personality—more
typically called the Big Five model.
• The Big Five factors are:
• Extraversion: A personality dimension that describes the degree to which someone is
sociable, talkative, and assertive.
• Agreeableness: A personality dimension that describes the degree to which someone is
good-natured, cooperative, and trusting.
• Conscientiousness: A personality dimension that describes the degree to which someone
is responsible, dependable, persistent, and achievement oriented.
• Emotional stability: A personality dimension that describes the degree to which someone
is calm, enthusiastic, and secure (positive) or tense, nervous, depressed, and insecure
(negative).
• Openness to experience: A personality dimension that describes the degree to which
someone is imaginative, artistically sensitive, and intellectual.
Perception
• Perception is a process by which we give meaning to our environment by
organizing and interpreting sensory impressions.
• Research on perception consistently demonstrates that individuals may look at
the same thing yet perceive it differently.
• One manager, for instance, can interpret the fact that her assistant regularly takes
several days to make important decisions as evidence that the assistant is slow,
disorganized, and afraid to make decisions. Another manager with the same
assistant might interpret the same tendency as evidence that the assistant is
thoughtful, thorough, and deliberate.
• The first manager would probably evaluate her assistant negatively; the second
manager would probably evaluate the person positively.
• The point is that none of us see reality. We interpret what we see and call it
reality. And, of course, as the example shows, we behave according to our
perceptions.
Perception
• Attribution theory helps explain how we judge people differently. It
depends on three factors.
• Distinctiveness is whether an individual displays different behaviors in
different situations (that is, is the behavior unusual).
• Consensus is whether others facing a similar situation respond in the same
way.
• Consistency is when a person engages in behaviors regularly and
consistently.
• Whether these three factors are high or low helps managers determine
whether employee behavior is attributed to external or internal causes.
Perception
Perception
Learning
• Learning occurs all the time as we continuously learn from our
experiences.
• A workable definition of learning is any relatively permanent change
in behavior that occurs as a result of experience.
• Two learning theories help us understand how and why individual
behavior occurs.
Learning
• Operant conditioning argues that behavior is a function of its
consequences.
• People learn to behave to get something they want or to avoid something
they don’t want.
• Operant behavior is voluntary or learned behavior, not reflexive or
unlearned behavior.
• The tendency to repeat learned behavior is influenced by reinforcement or
lack of reinforcement that happens as a result of the behavior.
• Reinforcement strengthens a behavior and increases the likelihood that it
will be repeated. Lack of reinforcement weakens a behavior and lessens
the likelihood that it will be repeated.
Learning
• Individuals can also learn by observing what happens to other people
and just by being told about something as well as by direct
experiences.
• Much of what we have learned comes from watching others
(models)— parents, teachers, peers, television and movie actors,
managers, and so forth.
• This view that we can learn both through observation and direct
experience is called social learning theory.
Learning
• Four ways can be used to shape behavior: positive reinforcement, negative
reinforcement, punishment, or extinction.
• When a response is followed with something pleasant, such as when a manager
praises an employee for a job well done, it is called positive reinforcement.
• Rewarding a response with the termination or withdrawal of something pleasant
is called negative reinforcement. Managers who habitually criticize their
employees for taking extended coffee breaks are using negative reinforcement.
The only way these employees can stop the criticism is to shorten their breaks.
• Punishment penalizes undesirable behavior. Suspending an employee for two
days without pay for showing up drunk is an example of punishment.
• Eliminating any reinforcement that is maintaining a behavior is called extinction.