TOPIC
INTRODUCING ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
Ing. Pavel Adámek, Ph.D.
adamek@opf.slu.cz

•Definitions and Importance
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•A field map of the organizational behaviour terrain
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•Human resource management: OB in action
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•Discretionary behaviour
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Content

What´s Organizational behaviour?
Organizational behaviour the study of the structure and
management of organizations, their environments, and the actions and interactions of their
individual members and groups.
Organizational behaviour – Definitions and Importance

•Organizations affect everything that you do – sleeping, eating, travelling, working, relaxing,
studying – everything.
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•Organizational behaviour covers environmental (macro) issues and group and individual (micro)
factors. We live in an organized world.
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•Take a look at your clothes, food, computer – we are affected in many ways by organizations of
different kinds.
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Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance

FORBES
THE WORLD'S BEST EMPLOYERS 2019 LIST
Source: https://www.forbes.com/lists/worlds-best-employers/#628ddc1a1e0c

Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance



How can we explain your experience in the café?
We can blame the personality and skills of the individual who served you. However, there are many
other possible explanations such as:
–inadequate staff training;
–staff absences increasing working pressure;
–long hours, fatigue, poor work-life balance;
–equipment not working properly;
–anxiety about anticipated organizational changes;
–domestic difficulties – family feuds, ill-health;
–low motivation due to low pay;
–an autocratic supervisor;
–a dispute with colleagues creating an uncomfortable working atmosphere;
–timing – you came in at the wrong moment.
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Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance

•Your experience could be explained by contextual, individual, group, structural, and managerial
process factors, in and beyond the workplace. The explanation could come from any one of those
factors.
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In many cases, a combination of factors will explain the behaviour in question.
•The customer walks away.
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•As a member of that organization, you have to live with these issues.
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•As a manager, you may be responsible for solving the problem.
Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance

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•The study of organizational behaviour has direct practical implications for those who work in,
manage, seek to subvert, or interact in other ways with organizations, whether they are small and
local, or large and international.
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•A ‘multiple-stakeholders-inclusive-agenda’ view of Organizational behaviour, developing a broad
social science perspective.
•The term organizational behaviour was first used by Fritz Roethlisberger in the late 1950s,
because it suggested a wider scope than human relations.
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•The term behavioural sciences was first used to describe a Ford Foundation research programme at
Harvard in 1950, and in 1957 the Human Relations Group at Harvard (previously the Mayo Group)
became the Organizational Behavior Group.
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Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance

•Organizations do not ‘behave’. Only people can be said to behave. Organizational behaviour is
shorthand for the activities and interactions of people in organizations.
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•Organizations populate our physical, social, cultural, political and economic environment,
offering jobs, providing goods and services, creating our built environment, and contributing to
the existence and fabric of communities.
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•The products and services of McDonald’s, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Ford, and Sony shape our
existence and our daily experience.
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Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance

Think!



What is an organization?
Organization a social arrangement for achieving controlled performance in pursuit of collective
goals.
Social arrangements
•To say that organizations are social arrangements is simply to observe that they are groups of
people who interact with each other as a consequence of their membership.
Collective goals
•Common membership implies shared objectives. Organizations are more likely to exist where
individuals acting alone cannot achieve goals that are considered worthwhile pursuing.
Controlled performance
•The performance of an organization as a whole determines its survival. The performance of a
department determines the resources allocated to it. The performance of individuals determines pay
and promotion prospects.
Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance

Controlled performance
•Admission to membership of organizations is controlled, usually with reference to standards of
performance – will the person be able to do the job?
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•The price of failure to perform to standard is loss of membership.
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•The need for controlled performance leads to the establishment of authority relationships.
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•The controls only work where members comply with the orders of those responsible for performing
the control functions.
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•Summary, controlled performance setting standards, measuring performance, comparing actual with
standard, and taking corrective action if necessary.
Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance

•Groups can achieve more than individuals acting alone.
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•We achieve psychological satisfaction and material gain from organized activity.
•Senior managers may decide on objectives and try to get others to agree by calling them the
‘organization’s mission’ or ‘corporate strategy’; but they are still the goals of the people who
determined them in the first place.
Organizations can mean different things to those who use them and who work in them, because they
are significant personal and social sources of
•money, physical resources, other rewards;
•meaning, relevance, purpose, identity;
•order and stability;
•security, support, protection;
•status, prestige, self-esteem, self-confidence;
•power, authority, and control.
Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance

The goals pursued by individual members of an organization can be quite different from the
collective purpose of their organized activity.
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This creates an organizational dilemma – how to design organizations that are effective in
achieving overall objectives, while also meeting the needs of those who work for them.
Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance

How can behaviour in organizations be explained?
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•To answer this question systematically we - develop a ‘field map’ of the organizational behaviour
terrain.
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•The map shows that we want to explain two sets of outcomes: organizational effectiveness, and
quality of working life.
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•Organizations and their members have plans for the future which influence actions today.
A field map of the organizational behaviour terrain

Organizational Behaviour – Definitions and Importance



Remember the rude and unhelpful person serving in your café?
Consequences with a field map of the Organizational behaviour…
•Context factors (PESTLE): Maybe the store is facing competition, sales have collapsed, the store
is closing next month, and the loyal shop assistant is bitter about being made redundant (economic
factors). Perhaps closure is threatened because the local population is falling, and reducing sales
(social issues).
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•Individual factors: Maybe the shop assistant is not coping with the demands of the job because
training has not been provided (learning deficit). Maybe this assistant is not suited to work that
involves interaction with a demanding public (personality traits). Or perhaps the shop assistant
finds the job boring and lacks challenge (motivation problem).
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A field map of the organizational behaviour terrain

Remember the rude and unhelpful person serving in your café?
Consequences with a field map of the Organizational behaviour…
•Group factors: Maybe the employees in this part of the organization have not formed a cohesive
team (group formation issues). Maybe this shop assistant is excluded from the group for some reason
(a newcomer, perhaps) and is unhappy (group structure problems). The informal norm for dealing with
awkward customers like you is to be awkward in return, and this assistant is just ‘playing by the
rules’ (group norms).
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•Structural factors: Perhaps the organization is bureaucratic and slow, and our assistant is
anxiously waiting for a long-standing issue to be resolved (hierarchy problems). Maybe there is
concern about the way in which work is allocated (work design problems). Perhaps the unit manager
cannot deal with problems without referring them to a regional manager who doesn’t understand local
issues (decision-making issues).
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•Management process factors: Maybe the shop assistant is annoyed at the autocratic behaviour of the
unit manager (inappropriate leadership style), or is suffering ‘initiative fatigue’ following
organizational changes (change problems). Perhaps the assistant feels that management has made
decisions without consulting employees who have useful information and ideas (management
decision-making problems).

A field map of the organizational behaviour terrain

• The term organizational effectiveness is controversial, because different stakeholders have
different ideas about what counts as ‘effective’. A stakeholder is anyone with an interest, or
stake, in the organization.
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•For commercial companies, effectiveness usually means ‘profit’, but this raises other issues.
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•Some organizations forgo profit temporarily, in order to increase market share, which contributes
to corporate survival and growth.
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•Shareholders want a return on investment; customers want quality products or services at
reasonable prices; managers want high-flying careers; most employees want decent pay, good working
conditions, development and promotion opportunities, and job security.
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•Environmental groups want organizations to protect wildlife, reduce carbon dioxide emissions and
other forms of pollution, reduce traffic and noise levels, and so on.
A field map of the organizational behaviour terrain

•Quality of working life is linked to organizational effectiveness, and also to most of the other
factors on the left-hand side of our map.
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It is difficult to talk about quality of working life without considering an
•individual’s overall assessment of satisfaction with their job,
•working conditions,
•pay,
•colleagues,
•management style,
•organization culture,
•work-life balance,
•and training, development, and career opportunities.
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A field map of the organizational behaviour terrain

•One area where organizational behaviour (OB) contributes to evidence-based practice is human
resource management (HRM – or personnel management).
•OB is concerned with understanding micro- and macro-organizational issues, at individual, group,
corporate, and contextual levels of analysis.
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•HRM develops and implements policies which enhance the quality of working life and encourage
commitment, engagement, flexibility, and high performance from employees in the context of
corporate strategy.
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•HRM can be seen as ‘organizational behaviour in practice’, and this applies to all stages of the
employment cycle.
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Human resource management: OB in action
The employment cycle

Human resource management and organizational behaviour



The basic model of HRM



•This approach focuses on the processes through which HR policies influence employee behaviour and
performance.
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•This model argues that, for people to perform beyond the minimum requirements of a job, three
factors, Ability, Motivation and Opportunity (AMO) are necessary:
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The Bath model of HRM

The Bath model of HRM



The policies central to this model are:
•recruitment and selection that is careful and sophisticated;
•training and development that equips employees for their job roles;
•career opportunities provided;
•communication that is two-way, and information-sharing;
•involvement of employees in management decision-making;
•teamworking;
•performance appraisal and development for individuals;
•pay that is regarded as equitable and motivating;
•job security;
•challenge and autonomy in jobs;
•work-life balance.
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The Bath model of HRM

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•Most employees have some choice over how, and how well, they perform their jobs. This is known as
discretionary behaviour.
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–Sales assistants, for example, can decide to adopt a casual and unsympathetic tone, or they can
make customers feel that their concerns have been handled in a competent and friendly way.
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•Negative, uncaring behaviours are often a response to an employee’s perception that the
organization no longer cares about them. When one member of staff annoys a customer, and management
finds out, then that employee has a problem.
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Discretionary behaviour

What encourages employees to ‘go the extra mile’?
The answer lies in the model’s process theory, which explains performance outcomes in terms of a
combination of factors:
1.Basic HR policies are required to produce the Ability, Motivation and Opportunity central to any
level of performance.
2.The line managers who ‘bring these policies to life’ have to communicate trust, respect and
encouragement. This is achieved through the way that they give directions, and respond to
suggestions.
3.The combination of HR policies with line management behaviours must lead to feelings of job
satisfaction and employee commitment. Otherwise, the policies themselves will have little impact on
behaviour and performance.
4.People tend to use positive discretionary behaviours when they experience pride in their
organization, and want to stay there. Commitment and job satisfaction thus encourage employees to
use discretionary behaviour to perform better.
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Discretionary behaviour

How does HR work in this situation?
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•The human resource (HR) function is traditionally the ‘employees’ champion’, but it is also
responsible for ensuring that employment practices fit the company’s commercial strategy. These
roles involve the use of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ HR practices.
•Hard HR aims to control or reduce costs.
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•Soft HR aims to maintain motivation and commitment.
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•In a recession, a company’s need to control costs can conflict with its employees’ desire for job
security.
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The ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ HR practices

Explain the importance of an understanding of organizational behaviour.
•Organizations influence almost every aspect of our daily lives in a multitude of ways.
•If we eventually destroy this planet, the cause will not lie with technology or weaponry, but with
ineffective organizations and management practices.
Explain and illustrate the central dilemma of organizational design.
•The organizational dilemma concerns how to reconcile the inconsistency between individual needs
and aspirations, and the collective purpose of the organization.
Understand the need for explanations of behaviour in organizations that take account of
relationships between factors at different levels of analysis.
•The study of organizational behaviour is multidisciplinary, drawing in particular from psychology,
social psychology, sociology, economics and political science.
•Organizational behaviour involves a multi-level study of the external environment, the internal
structure, functioning, and performance of organizations, and the behaviour of groups and
individuals.
•Organizational effectiveness and quality of working life are explained by a combination of
contextual, individual, group, structural, process, and managerial factors.
•In considering explanations of Organizational behaviour, systemic thinking is required, avoiding
explanations based on single causes, and considering a range of interrelated factors
RECAP

We can share our thoughts and ask questions
J
Pavel Adámek
adamek@opf.slu.cz