What is organizational behavior?
FOPER II
Forest enterprise management
Faculty of forestry, Belgrade
Stojanovska Makedonka
Faculty of Forestry, Skopje
9.05-14.05.2011
ROADMAP
• Defining organizational behavior
• Today`s challenges in the workplace
• OB: Making sense of behavior in the
organizations
• Levels of organizational behavior
Questions for consideration
• What is organizational behavior?
• What challenges do managers and employees
face in the workplace of the 21st century?
• How will knowledge of organizational
behavior make a difference for you?
Defining OB
• OB – filed of study that investigates the
impact that individuals, groups and structure
have on behavior within organization
• Behavior refers on:
• -what people do in the organization
• -what are their attitudes
• -how they perform cast
OB is usually applied to
absenteeism
employment
turnover
productivity
working in groups
human
performance
job satisfaction
What is organization?
• Organization – process-related: an entity is being (re-)organized
(organization as task or action).
• Organization – functional: organization as a function of how entities
like businesses or state authorities are used (organization as a
permanent structure).
• Organization – institutional: an entity is an organization
(organization as an actual purposeful structure within a social
context)
• “Coordinated social unit composed of a group people that function
on a continuous basis to achieve a common goal or a set of goals”
• Examples: schools, police department, local/national government
agencies – are they organizations?
OB is for everyone
• It is natural to think that the study of OB is for
managers/leaders
• Why?
• They often set the agenda for everyone
• Informal leadership
• Does managers ask the employees to be
proactive
• Do they listen their ideas, even share decisionmaking processes
OB is for everyone
• Entrepreneurs/individuals may nor act as
managers but they interact with other
individuals or organizations
• OB in the street
• OB examines individuals, groups, entire
organization because each category
contributes to the challenges of the workplace
Workplace today
• Differences between today`s workplace and
two decades ago???
Challenges facing workplace
Organizational level
-productivity
-developing effective employees
-global competition
-managing in the global village
Group level
-working with others
-workforce diversity
Individual level
-job satisfaction
-empowerment
-behaving ethically
workplace
Individual level-job satisfaction
• -satisfied employee is more productive
• -managers should make employees happy and
satisfied
• -”managing people has changed even over
past 10 years. Expectations for job satisfaction
has grown. The main challenge is to ensure an
environment to help meet expectations”
Robert Gemmel
Individual level-empowerment
• Are the managers asked to share the
responsibilities also???
• Empowerment means managers are putting
employees in charge what they do
• Nowadays managers are referred to as coaches,
advisers, sponsors or facilitators rather then
bosses
• Managers-control level and employees –
responsibility for their work and make
appropriate decisions
• Decision-making – operational level
Individual level-behaving ethically
• Ethics is the study of moral values or
principles that guide our behavior and inform
us weather actions are wrong or right. Ethical
principles help us “to do the right thing”
• Starts at individual level and it concerns both:
individual and organizational dilemmas
Group level – working with others
• Success in job involves developing good
interpersonal or “people” skills
• Interpersonal skills are: communication, thinking,
learning and working with others, positive
attitudes and behaviors and ability to take
responsibility for one`s action
• Interpersonal skills do not come easy to all
people
• Failure of managers usually is connected to lack
of interpersonal skills
Group level – workforce diversity
• Workforce diversity addresses on differences
among people within the same country, while
globalization is focused on differences among
people from different countries
• Organizations are becoming more
heterogeneous; variety of different people
• Challenge for organization is to accommodate
diverse groups of people by addressing their
different lifestyles, family needs and work styles
Organizational level-productivity
• When organization/group is productive?
Employee labor
outputs
inputs
Matherials
• Effective + efficient = productive
finished goods or
services
Organizational level-developing
effective employees
• Absenteeism
• Turnover
• Organizational citizenship
Organizational level-competition from
the global environment
• New technologies requires new skills,
knowledge
Organizational level-managing and
working in a global village
• World is global village. Why?
• People need to learn working with people
from different cultures
• Managing people well and understanding the
interpersonal dynamics of the work place are
not the issues within one country
Thank you for your attention!