Organizational Behavior
Here are some of the many definitions of OB:
According to Businessdictionary.com:
actions and attitudes of individuals and groups toward one another and towards the organization as a whole, and its effect on the organization's functioning and performance.
According to Answers.com:
academic field of study concerned with human behavior in organizations; also called organizational psychology. It covers topics such as Motivation, Group Dynamics, leadership, organization structure, decision making, careers, conflict resolution, and Organizational Development.
According to Nwlink.com:
is the study and application of knowledge about how people, individuals, and groups act in organizations. It does this by taking a system approach.
According to our reference book:
it is the field study that draws on theory, methods, and principles from various disciplines to learn about individuals perceptions, values, learning capacities, and actions while working in groups and within the organization and to analyze the external environment's effect on the organization and its human sources, missions, objectives and strategies. This still-emerging field attempts to help managers understand people better so that productivity improvements, customer satisfaction, and a better competitive position can be achieved through better management practices. Organizational Behavior illustrates a number of points namely: behaviors, multidisciplinary, humanistic orientation, performance oriented and lastly environment. Effectiveness of any organization is influenced greatly by human behavior.
To sum it up, Organizational Behavior is the study of various individual or group characters, and the application of those knowledge in the development and improvement of the organization.
Contingency Approach
It is also known as the situational approach this is approach to management that believes there's no one best way to manage in every situation and managers must find different ways that fit different situations.
This kind of approach only means that no two organizations is exactly the same. One particular approach that becomes effective to one organization is not necessarily mean that it will be effective in all other organizations. It is because different organizations have different groups and individuals composing it, so it only means techniques and approaches towards each organization should be suitable on the people within that organization.
Why managing workplace behavior in the Philippines is likely to be different from managing workplace behavior in another country, such as Germany?
-because there is no set of universal prescription that can predict every behavior, team outcome, or organizational phenomenon People are typically unique and unpredictable in some aspect of their behavior. So each organizations have different assumptions in different behaviors.
The pattern of basic assumptions used by individuals and groups to deal with organization and its environment is called "culture." The organization's culture is its personality, atmosphere, or feel.
It only means that different country has its own culture in their workplace, and this is one of those reasons why managing workplace behavior in the Philippines is different from other countries.
Comparison between goal, systems, and multiple-constituency approaches to effectiveness
When we say effectiveness according to Encarta Dictionary means something that causing the desired result. But effectiveness means different things to different people, whether in a theoretical or practical sense. There are 3 different approaches to effectiveness namely: goal approach, systems theory approach and the multiple-constituency approach.
The goal approach to effectiveness, according to this approach, an organization exists to accomplish goals. It only explains that the idea that organizations, as well as individuals and groups, should be evaluated in terms of goal accomplishment. The goal approach exerts a powerful influence on the development of management and organizational behavior theory and practice. It's easy to say that managers should achieve the organization's goal but more difficult to figure out how to do it, while system theory approach to effectiveness, says that it organizations has systems, and each system consists of elements that interact. It also assumes that organizations are social entities existing as parts of larger environment and that, to survive, they function to satisfy the demands of those environments. System theorist propose that systems can be categorized in three ways: language, machines and the culture of an organization. Systems theory enables us to describe organization's internal and external behavior. Internally we can see how and why people inside the organizations perform their individual and group tasks. Externally we can assess organizations' perform with other organizations and institutions. On the other hand, multi-constituency approach to effectiveness or the stakeholder approach emphasizes the relative importance of different groups' and individuals' interests in an organization. It means achieving balance among various parts of the systems by satisfying the interests of the individuals or groups who have a stake in the organization. Each constituency has expectations that the organization must satisfy through its performance.
Environmental Forces that Initiate Changes
First, successful change is associated with a multistep process that creates power and motivation to continue. Second, the change process is driven by top-quality leader who exert a lasting influence on the changes being made.
Changes occur in workforce technology, the economy, competition, social trends, and world politics it is inevitable that leaders will have to initiate organizational development interventions.
Organizational Culture
According to businessdictionary.com:
Pervasive, deep, largely subconscious, and tacit code that gives the 'feel' of an organization and determines what is considered right or wrong, important or unimportant, workable or unworkable in it, and how it responds to the unexpected crises, jolts, and sudden change. All new employees must assimilate this code ('learn the ropes') to know the correct way to behave and what to expect from other employees. Organizational culture is the sum total of an organization's past and current assumptions, experiences, philosophy, and values that hold it together, and are expressed in its self-image, inner workings, interactions with the outside world, and future expectations.
According to wikipedia.com:
is an idea in the field of organizational studies and management which describes the psychology, attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values (personal and cultural values) of an organization. It has been defined as "the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization."
According to our reference book:
Is what the employees perceive and how this perception creates a pattern of beliefs, and values, and expectations. It is also the pattern of assumptions that are invented, discovered, or developed to learn to cope with organizational life.
Socialization
According to businessdictionary.com:
Process by which individuals acquire the knowledge, language, social skills, and value to conform to the norms and roles required for integration into a group or community. It is a combination of both self-imposed (because the individual wants to conform) and externally-imposed rules, and the expectations of the others.
According to Encarta dictionary:
to take part in social activities, or behave in a friendly way to others
According to dictionary.com:
a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position.
According to our reference book:
It is the process by which organizations bring new employees into the culture. The socialization process goes on throughout an individual’s career. As the needs of the organization change the employees need to adapt to those changes.
Difference in how some employees talk about positive culture and negative culture
In negative culture, some employees dislike their jobs and view them as “have to” instead of “get to. And this creates negative culture excuses, whining and gossiping, according to Roxanne Emmerich in her new book, Thank God It’s Monday: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love. In positive culture, employees shared their thoughts, feelings and talk about the organization they have. There are employees bond together and create a feeling of togetherness. While
Impact of an Organization’s culture on individual and team behavior
A considerable amount of knowledge suggests that one of the most effective ways of changing people’s belief and values is first to change their behavior. However, behavior change does not necessarily produce culture change because of the process of justification. But culture sustains people throughout periods of difficulty and serves to ward off anxiety.
Spirituality
Spirituality they say have a positive effects in the workplace because the way a person feels and think about life and work is starting to be included in some optimizing performance and research results suggests that the encouragement and support of spirituality in the work setting can contribute to creativity, honesty, trust, commitment, personal need satisfaction, and improved organizational effectiveness. The spirituality benefits in attrition to improved effectiveness include attaining a broader word view; concern with working integrity; acquiring a strong sense of community; and willingness to work to make a positive difference by making contributions in society.
Practices and Programs used by organizations to facilitate Socializations
Stages of Socialization
Anticipatory Socialization- involves all those activities the individual undertakes prior to entering the organization or to taking a different job in the same organization. The primary purpose of these activities is to acquire information about the new organization and/or new job.
Accommodation- occurs after the individual becomes a member of the organization, after he or she takes the job. Individual sees the organization and the hob for what they actually are.
Role Management- this stage requires the individual to adjust to demands and expectations of the immediate work group, the role management stage takes on the broadest set of issues and problems.
Mentors
A friend, coach, adviser, or sponsor who supports, encourages and helps a less experienced person.
Globalization
Covering a wide range of distinct political, economic, and cultural trends, the term “globalization” has quickly become one of the most fashionable buzzwords of contemporary political and academic debate. In popular discourse, globalization often functions as little more than a synonym for one or more of the following phenomena: the pursuit of classical liberal (or “free market”) policies in the world economy (“economic liberalization”), the growing dominance of western (or even American) forms of political, economic, and cultural life (“westernization” or “Americanization”), the proliferation of new information technologies (the “Internet Revolution”), as well as the notion that humanity stands at the threshold of realizing one single unified community in which major sources of social conflict have vanished (“global integration”).
Globalisation (or globalization) describes the process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a global network of political ideas through communication, transportation, and trade. The term is most closely associated with the term economic globalization: the integration of national economies into the international economy through trade, foreign direct investment, capital flows, migration, the spread of technology, and military presence.
Why the study of Cross-cultural management is important?
When person from one cultural background, meet, interact with, understand and deal with person from other cultural background. That is cross-cultural management. It is important to study for a manager for example can easily adjust to different cultural backgrounds and for him to be more flexible in dealing with employees. It is also important for an individual so that he will become aware of different cultural management that we never know can be a great help for him in the future.
Learn, practice and refine
In this world of us there are lots of things that we need to know, so to become global skills managers, we need to learn and learn. We should never stop educating our selves. We need to know the modern trends that can help us in improving our organization. But learning those information is not enough, we need an application of it and that is how practice occur. Sometimes concepts and methods will not be proven effective unless we try to apply it in reality. And lastly refine, through the result of those applications we can now come up with the evaluation of the things we need to improve, change or totally not needed. These things are important for us to become global managers.
How characteristics of culture can influence the behavior and attitudes of employees
Like what we have studied previously, adaptation is part of socialization, one must adapt to the culture of the organization in order for him to socialize. Through that, it only proves that culture can influence the attitudes and behavior of employees.
Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions
Power Distance Index (PDI) that is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders. Power and inequality, of course, are extremely fundamental facts of any society and anybody with some international experience will be aware that 'all societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others'.
Individualism (IDV) on the one side versus its opposite, collectivism, that is the degree to which individuals are inte-grated into groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word 'collectivism' in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state. Again, the issue addressed by this dimension is an extremely fundamental one, regarding all societies in the world.
Masculinity (MAS) versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women's values differ less among societies than men's values; (b) men's values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women's values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women's values on the other. The assertive pole has been called 'masculine' and the modest, caring pole 'feminine'. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men's values and women's values.
Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) deals with a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity; it ultimately refers to man's search for Truth. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute Truth; 'there can only be one Truth and we have it'. People in uncertainty avoiding countries are also more emotional, and motivated by inner nervous energy. The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side. People within these cultures are more phlegmatic and contemplative, and not expected by their environment to express emotions.
