Unit 1: Organizational Behavior and Foundations of Individual Behavior

Organizational Behavior (OB) is the systematic study of how individuals and groups act within organizations, applied to improve organizational effectiveness. It emerged as a distinct field around the 1950s, building on the Hawthorne studies (1924–1932) that first exposed the human side of work.

• Definition: OB is a field that investigates the impact individuals, groups and structure have on behavior within organizations for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving effectiveness.
• Three levels of analysis: the individual (personality, perception), the group (norms, teams), and the organizational system (structure, culture).
• Goals: to describe, explain, predict and control human behavior at work.
• Systematic study assumption: behavior is not random; it follows patterns that can be identified through evidence rather than intuition (the "evidence-based management" stance).
• Interdisciplinary character: OB borrows from psychology, sociology, anthropology, social psychology and political science.

II. Relationship Between Management and Organizational Behavior

How managerial roles depend on behavioral understanding.

Management supplies the practical arena in which OB knowledge is applied, so the two are complementary rather than identical.

A. Management functions and OB

The functions managers perform each rest on behavioral insight.

• Planning: setting goals requires understanding employee motivation and goal-commitment theory.
• Organizing: designing structure draws on group dynamics and division-of-labor effects on satisfaction.
• Leading: directing and motivating people is almost wholly OB territory (leadership, communication, conflict).
• Controlling: monitoring performance uses feedback and reinforcement principles.

B. Mintzberg's managerial roles

Henry Mintzberg (1973) grouped managerial activity into ten roles, each behaviorally grounded.

• Interpersonal roles: figurehead, leader, liaison — rely on interpersonal skills.
• Informational roles: monitor, disseminator, spokesperson — rely on communication.
• Decisional roles: entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, negotiator — rely on judgment and conflict management.

C. Management skills and the OB contribution

Robert Katz identified three essential skills; OB strengthens the "soft" ones.

• Technical skills: job-specific expertise.
• Human skills: ability to work with people — the direct payoff of OB study.
• Conceptual skills: analyzing complex situations.
• Luthans' finding: "successful" managers (rapidly promoted) spent most time networking, while "effective" managers (satisfied, performing units) spent most time on communication — showing human skills separate the two.

III. Model of OB and Contributing Disciplines

The variables that structure the field and its academic roots.

A. The basic OB model

The model organizes study into inputs, processes and outcomes across three levels.

• Inputs: antecedents such as personality, group structure and organizational culture, largely set before employment or on entering a group.
• Processes: actions individuals, groups and organizations take as a result of inputs — emotions, motivation, communication, leadership.
• Outcomes: key result variables the model tries to explain.
  • Individual level: attitudes, task performance, citizenship behavior, withdrawal.
  • Group level: cohesion, functioning.
  • Organizational level: productivity, survival.

B. Contributing disciplines to the OB field

OB is an applied behavioral science drawing on several parent disciplines.

• Psychology: the individual level — learning, motivation, personality, perception, job satisfaction, training, work stress.
• Social psychology: blends psychology and sociology — attitude change, communication, group decision making, building trust.
• Sociology: the group and system level — team dynamics, communication, power, organizational culture and structure.
• Anthropology: cross-cultural comparison — organizational culture and environment, differences in values between nations.
• Political science: behavior in a political environment — conflict, intra-organizational power, coalition formation.

IV. Foundations of Individual Behavior: Values, Attitude and Job Satisfaction

The stable inner dispositions that shape how a person acts at work.

Individual behavior rests on relatively enduring evaluative frames — values shape attitudes, and attitudes toward the job crystallize as satisfaction.

A. Values

Values are basic convictions that a specific mode of conduct or end-state is personally or socially preferable to its opposite.

• Two attributes (Rokeach): content (what is important) and intensity (how important).
• Rokeach Value Survey: distinguishes two sets.
  • Terminal values: desirable end-states, e.g. a comfortable life, freedom, self-respect.
  • Instrumental values: preferable modes of conduct, e.g. honesty, ambition, helpfulness.
• Function: values lay the foundation for attitudes and motivation and cloud objectivity by carrying "what ought to be."
• Hofstede's cultural dimensions: values differ by nation along power distance, individualism–collectivism, masculinity–femininity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation.

B. Attitude

Attitudes are evaluative statements — favorable or unfavorable — about objects, people or events.

• Three components:
  • Cognitive: the belief or opinion ("my pay is low").
  • Affective: the emotional feeling ("I am angry about it").
  • Behavioral: the intention to act ("I will look for another job").
• Major job attitudes: job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment (affective, normative, continuance).
• Cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957): discomfort from inconsistency between attitudes, or attitude and behavior, which people are motivated to reduce.
• Attitude–behavior link: strongest when the attitude is specific, important, easily recalled and free from social pressure.

C. Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction is a positive feeling about a job resulting from evaluating its characteristics.

• Key determinants: the work itself (mentally challenging tasks), fair pay, supportive working conditions, and supportive colleagues; personality and person–job fit also matter.
• Effects on outcomes (behavioral responses):
  • Exit: leaving the organization — turnover.
  • Voice: actively and constructively trying to improve conditions.
  • Loyalty: passively waiting for conditions to improve.
  • Neglect: passively allowing conditions to worsen — absenteeism, errors.
• Consequences: satisfaction correlates positively with performance and organizational citizenship behavior, and negatively with absenteeism, turnover and workplace deviance.

V. Theories of Learning and Behavior Modification

How lasting behavior change occurs and how organizations engineer it.

Learning is any relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience.

A. Classical conditioning

A passive process in which a neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response by association.

• Pavlov's experiment (1890s): a dog salivates to meat (unconditioned stimulus); pairing a bell with meat makes the bell alone trigger salivation (conditioned response).
• Key terms: unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response.
• Limitation at work: explains reflexive, involuntary reactions but not the complex voluntary behavior most jobs require.

B. Operant conditioning

Behavior is a function of its consequences; people learn to behave to get something they want or avoid something they do not.

• B.F. Skinner: voluntary (operant) behavior is strengthened when reinforced and weakened when not.
• Four consequences:
  • Positive reinforcement: adding a pleasant stimulus to increase behavior (praise for a sale).
  • Negative reinforcement: removing an unpleasant stimulus to increase behavior (stopping nagging once a report is filed).
  • Punishment: adding an unpleasant consequence to decrease behavior (reprimand).
  • Extinction: withholding reinforcement to decrease behavior (ignoring a joker who seeks attention).

C. Social-learning theory

People learn through observation and direct experience, mediated by cognition.

• Albert Bandura: much learning comes from watching models and copying them.
• Four processes:
  • Attentional: recognizing and attending to a model's critical features.
  • Retention: remembering the model's action.
  • Motor reproduction: converting observation into performance.
  • Reinforcement: performing more often when incentives follow.

D. Behavior Modification (OB Mod)

The application of reinforcement concepts to shape work behavior systematically.

• Definition: OB Mod is a program applying operant principles to manage employee behavior on the job.
• Five-step process:
  1. Identify performance-related critical behaviors.
  2. Measure their baseline frequency.
  3. Analyze antecedents and consequences (functional analysis).
  4. Intervene by applying reinforcement to strengthen desirable behavior.
  5. Evaluate whether performance improved.
• Schedules of reinforcement: continuous (reinforce every instance) versus intermittent — the latter divides into:
  • Fixed-interval / variable-interval: based on elapsed time (weekly pay vs. random inspections).
  • Fixed-ratio / variable-ratio: based on number of responses (piece-rate vs. commission on unpredictable sales); variable schedules resist extinction best.
• Shaping behavior: reinforcing successive approximations that move an employee closer to the desired response rather than waiting for the whole behavior.
• Applications and limitations: widely used in training, wellness and safety programs producing measurable gains; criticized for ignoring feelings, thoughts and the possibility that recognition, not tangible reward, drives the effect.