Midterm (Ch 1-5) Flashcards
(113 cards)
Organizational effectiveness
An ideal state in which the organization:
Has a good fit with its external environment (open system)
Effectively transforms inputs to outputs (human capital)
Satisfies the needs of key stakeholders
Organizations as Open Systems
Open systems: The view that
organizations depend on
the external environment for
resources, affect that environment through their output, and
consist of internal subsystems
that transform inputs to outputs.
Inputs –> Feedback —> Outputs
Organizations have numerous subsystems (departments, teams, technological processes, etc.) that transform the incoming resources
into outputs that are returned to the external environment.
INPUTS
*Raw materials
* Human resources
* Information
* Financial resources
* Equipment
OUTPUTS
* Products/services
* Shareholder dividends
* Community support
* Waste/pollution
Human Capital as the Organization’s
Competitive Advantage
The most important ingredient in the organization’s process
of transforming inputs to outputs
Human capital is:
Essential for survival/success, difficult to find/copy/replace with technology
Human capital improves the organizational effectiveness:
- Directly improves individual behaviour and performance
- Performing diverse tasks in unfamiliar situations
- Company’s investment in employees motivates them
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
Activities intended to benefit society and the environment beyond the firm’s immediate financial interests or legal obligation
Triple-bottom-line philosophy:
- Economic (aim to survive and be profitable in the marketplace)
- Society (intend to maintain or
improve conditions for society) - Environment
The emerging evidence is that companies with a positive CSR reputation tend to have better financial performance, more loyal employees, and better relations with customers, job applicants, and other stakeholders
Organizational Behaviour Anchors (5)
Systematic research anchor:
A key feature of OB knowledge is that it should be based on systematic research:
forming research questions, systematically collecting data, and testing hypotheses against these data
Practical orientation anchor:
- Ensure that OB theories are useful in organizations.
- The true “impact” of an OB theory is how well it finds its way into organizational life and becomes a valuable asset for improving the organization’s effectiveness.
Multidisciplinary anchor:
the field should welcome theories and knowledge from disciplines other than its own
Contingency anchor:
- The effect of one variable on another variable often
depends on the characteristics of the situation or people involved
- A single outcome or solution rarely exists; a particular action may have different consequences under different conditions (e.g. the success of remote work depends on specific characteristics of
the employee, job, and organization)
Multiple levels of analysis anchor:
- Organizational behaviour recognizes that what goes on in organizations can be placed into three levels of analysis: individual, team (including interpersonal), and organization
Inclusive Workplace: Surface-level diversity
The observable demographic or
physiological differences in
people, such as their race,
ethnicity, gender, age, and
physical disabilities.
Inclusive Workplace: Deep-level diversity
Differences in the psychological characteristics of employees, including personalities,
beliefs, values, and attitudes.
Workplace Diversity Benefits and Challenges
Benefits of diversity:
- Better decisions, employee attitudes, team performance
- More team creativity, better decisions in complex situations
- Better representation of community needs
- Moral/legal imperative (A moral imperative is a strongly-felt principle that compels that person to act)
Challenges of Diversity:
- Team take longer to perform effectively together (communication problems)
- Higher dysfunctional conflict (behaviour such as aggression, hostility, or lack of respect toward others),
- Lower info sharing and morale
Work-Life Integration
- The degree to which individuals effectively participate in their diverse responsibilities, both at work and in their personal lives, while experiencing minimal conflict between these different life domains.
- This phrase has replaced
work–life balance, which
incorrectly implies that
work and non-work roles
are completely separate and opposing partitions - PROBLEM: work-life conflict - the heavy demands of one role deplete personal resources, which starve other roles.
Practicing work-life integration
- Literally integrate two
or more roles (e.g. conduct
meetings during an exercise or walk, On-site child care) - Flexible work scheduling
- Make sure your job, family life, sports activities, are roughly consistent with your personality and values
- Boundary management (disconnecting from work)
Remote Work Benefits and Risks
Benefits:
- Better work-life integration
- Valued job benefit, less turnover (leaving job)
- Higher productivity
- Better for environment
- Lower corporate costs
Disadvantages:
- More social isolation
- Less informal communication
- Lower team cohesion
- Weaker organizational culture
Employment Relationships (3) & their consequences
Direct employment:
- Employee working directly with employer
- This relationship
assumes continuous employment (lifetime employment, in
rare cases), usually with expectations of career advancement and the organization’s investment in the employee’s
skills
Adv: higher work quality, innovation, and agility
Disadv: lower job satisfaction, commitment when working with indirect workers
Indirect employment:
- Outsourced or agency work (sometimes cheap labour in 3rd world countries)
Disadv: Lower job satisfaction than other employment types
Contract employment:
- “Self-employed”, “Freelancer”
- A self-employed contractor an
independent organization that provides services to a client
organization.
indirect employment and self-employed contract work are the fastest growing work relationships.
Teams with direct and indirect workers:
- Weaker social networks, less information sharing
MARS Model: Employee Motivation (3 internal forces)
The 3 Internal forces that affect a person’s voluntary choice of behaviour:
1) Direction:
- The path along which people steer their effort.
- In other words, motivation is goal-directed, not random.
- People have choices about what they are trying to achieve and at what level of quality, quantity, and so forth.
E.g. They are motivated to arrive at work on time, finish a project
a few hours early, or aim for many other targets.
2) Intensity:
- The amount of effort allocated to the goal.
- How much people push themselves to complete a task.
e.g. Two employees might be motivated to finish their project within the next few hours (direction), but only one of them puts forth enough effort (intensity) to achieve this goal.
3) Persistence:
- The length of time that the individual continues to exert effort
toward an objective.
- Employees sustain their effort until they reach their goal or give up beforehand.
To help remember these three elements of motivation,
consider the metaphor of driving a car in which the thrust of
the engine is your effort. Direction refers to where you steer
the car, intensity is how much you put your foot down on the
gas pedal, and persistence is for how long you drive toward
your destination.
MARS Model: Employee Ability
Natural aptitudes (the natural talents that help employees
learn specific tasks more quickly and perform them better) and learned capabilities (the skills and knowledge that people acquire, such as through training, practice, and other forms of learning) required to successfully complete a task
MARS Model: Employee Ability (Person-job matching: 3 strategies)
Person-job matching:
- The challenge to match a person’s abilities with the job’s requirements because a good match tends to increase employee performance and well-being.
3 Strategies:
1) Selecting
- Select applicants who already demonstrate the required abilities
- Companies ask applicants to perform work samples, provide references for checking their past performance, and complete various selection tests
2) Developing
- Train employees who lack specific knowledge or skills needed for the job
3) Redesigning
- Re-design the job so that employees are given tasks only within their current abilities.
- E.g. a complex task might
be simplified—some aspects of the work are transferred to others—so a new employee is only assigned tasks that they are currently able to perform.
- As the employee becomes more competent at these tasks, other tasks are added back into the job.
MARS Model: Employee Role Perceptions Definition
- The degree to which a person
understands the job duties
assigned to or expected
of them
MARS Model: Employee Role Perceptions (Definition and 3 forms of role clarity)
Role perceptions: the degree to which a person understands the job duties assigned to or expected
of them
Forms of Role Clarity:
1) Clear duties:
- Employees understanding the specific duties or consequences for which they are accountable
- Employees are occasionally evaluated on job duties they were never told was within their zone of
responsibility
2) Clear task priority
- Employees understanding the priority of their various tasks and performance expectations (quantity vs quality)
- Role clarity in the form of task priorities also exists in the dilemma of allocating personal time and resources (e.g. how much time managers should devote to coaching employees versus meeting with clients)
3) Preferred procedures
- Understanding the preferred behaviours or procedures for accomplishing tasks.
- Role ambiguity exists
when an employee knows two or three ways to perform a task, but misunderstands which of these the company prefers
MARS Model: Employee Role Perceptions (Consequences of clear vs ambiguous role perceptions)
Clear role perceptions:
- Employees perform work more accurately and efficiently
- Motivates employees because they
have a higher belief that their effort will produce the expected
outcomes.
- Essential for coordination with co-workers and other stakeholders
Ambiguous role perceptions:
- Employees waste considerable
time and energy by performing the wrong tasks or the right
tasks in the wrong way
MARS Model: Situational Factors (Constraints/facilitators & Cues)
Situational Factors:
- Conditions beyond people’s short-term control that constrain or facilitate behaviour
Constraints/facilitators:
- Employees who are motivated, skilled, and know their role
obligations will nevertheless perform poorly if they lack time,
budget, physical work facilities, and other resources.
Cues:
The work environment provides cues to guide and motivate people. E.g. companies install
barriers and warning signs in dangerous areas (cue employees to
avoid the nearby hazards)
Types of Individual Behaviours (2)
1) Task Performance:
- Voluntary goal-directed behaviours
- 3 types: Proficient, adaptive, proactive
2) Organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs):
- Various forms of cooperation and
helpfulness to others that sup-
port the organization’s social
and psychological context.
- Some OCBs are directed toward
individuals (e.g. assisting co-workers with their work problems)
- Other OCBs represent cooperation and helpfulness toward
the organization (e.g. the company’s public image)
- Some organizational citizenship behaviours are discretionary (employees don’t have to perform them), other OCBs are job requirements even if they aren’t explicitly stated in job descriptions.
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES of performing OCBs:
- They take time and energy away from performing tasks, so employees who give more attention to OCBs risk lower career success in companies that reward task performance.
- Employees who frequently perform OCBs tend to have higher work–family conflict because of the
amount of time required for these activities
Presenteeism
- Showing up for work when unwell, injured, preoccupied by personal problems, or faced with dangerous conditions getting to
work - Employees who show up for work when they should be absent tend to be less productive and may reduce the productivity of co-workers.
- They may also worsen their own health and spread disease to co-workers.
- More common among employees with low
job security (such as new and temporary staff), employees who
lack sick leave pay or similar financial buffers, and those whose
absence would immediately affect many people.
Five-Factor (CANOE) Personality and Individual Behaviour (Type of performance –> Relevant Personality Dimension)
Proficient task performance –> Conscientiousness, extraversion
Adaptive task performance –> emotional stability, extraversion (assertiveness), openness to experience
Proactive task performance –>
extraversion (assertiveness), openness to experience
Organizational citizenship (cooperative,
sensitive, flexible, and supportive) –> Conscientiousness, Agreeableness
Counterproductive work behaviours –> Lower Conscientiousness, agreeableness = more CWB,
CANOE and Work Performance Predictors
- Effective leaders, salespeople are somewhat more extraverted
- Openness to experience may predict a creative work performance
- Conscientiousness is a weak predictor of adaptive, proactive performance
- Agreeableness:
-Predicts team member, customer service performance- Weak predictor of proficient, proactive performance
Five Factor Model Issues (4)
1) Higher big five scores aren’t always better
E.g. Employees with moderate extraversion perform
better in sales jobs than those with high or low extraversion.
2) Specific traits may predict better than their overall Big Five factor:
E.g. The specific extra-
version traits of assertiveness and positive emotionality predict proficient task performance better than the overall extraversion factor.
3) Personality isn’t static
- Personality can shift when the individual’s environment changes
significantly over a long time, such as when moving to a different culture or working in a job for many years.
4) The five-factor model doesn’t cover all personality concepts
E.g. needs and motives