Theories of Organizational Behavior
Session 1: What is
Organizational Behavior?
8. April 2015
Today’s Agenda
• Student Introductions
• Course Introduction
• What is Organizational Behavior?
2
8. April 2015
Theories of OB: Logistics
• 4 hours of classroom sessions per week
• 7 weeks of classes from March 1 – April 19
• Schedule: Thursdays from 13:30 – 17:00
• Location: Extranef 118
• Website: https://www.hec.unil.ch/docs/jdietz/cours/275/
• Login and password: TOB2012
• Contact:
o Instructor: Professor Joerg Dietz; joerg.dietz@unil.ch
o (Assistant: Celia Chui; celia.chui@unil.ch)
o Office hours: by appointment (email first)
3
8. April 2015
Objectives
• Getting initial insights into fundamental theories of
organizational behaviour
•What falls under the domain of organizational behaviour?
•What are some academic views on the behaviour and
motivations of people in organizations?
•What is the purpose of organizations?
• Focuses on principles of behavior in organizations
•Can help students to develop their personal “management
philosophy,”
•Does NOT intend to offer “action plans” or “action scripts” on
solving specific organizational problems
• Make you reflect on your assumptions about organizations and
their members (“scientific mindfulness”)
4
8. April 2015
Course Requirements
You will be evaluated based on:
• Your class contribution (20% of final grade)
• Class Presentation (20% of final grade)
• Written Assignments (60% of final grade)
Assignments
Deadlines
Weekly reflection papers
A day before class
Interview and Paper
April 2 at noon
Thought paper or conceptual
research paper
April 27 at noon
• Detailed instructions for assignments on course syllabus
• Email all assignments to jorg.dietz@unil.ch before the
deadline. Late submissions will be assigned a grade of 1
• Students who fail the course must again hand in the written
assignments.
5
8. April 2015
1st Assignment: Metaphors of Organizations
Organizations as machines
Organizations as organisms
Sarah
Organizations as brains
Organizations as cultures
Nicolas
Organizations as political systems
Manuel
Organizations as psychic prisons
Doris
Organizations as flux and
transformation
Organizations as instruments of
domination
The book “Images of Organization” is available for scanning in my office.
Several chapters may have been scanned before.
Why Do We Need to Define OB (or any
professional field)?
• Definitions are a function of their purpose
• Definition are a point of orientation
– Definitions of fields provide direction
– Definitions provide identities (internal/external)
– Definitions legitimize
Who cares?
• Novices versus old-timers
• Internal versus external
What is an Organization?
“collections of social entities (such as teams
and work groups) that
(a)share broad goals, boundaries, and activity
systems and
(b)have sovereign powers granted by the state
(i.e., are treated as unitary actors that make
transactions, can sue, and can be sued)”
(Molloy et al., 2011)
Rafaeli (1997): Organization and
Membership
Perspective
Description
Who is in?
Who is out?
Physical or
temporal
relationships
“I am a member because I
am in the building”
Resident
employees, instore customers,
Home-office employees,
org. without buildings
Contractual
relationships
“I am a member because I
have a contract with the
organization”
Employees,
customers,
suppliers
Ex-members, prospective
members
Hierarchical
relationships
“I am a member because I
appear in the organization
chart”
Employees
Networks of organizations
(outsourcing),
professional loyalties
Production
relationship
“I am a member because I
participate in the org.’s
production process.”
Core employees,
co-producing
customers
Peripheral employees,
sub-contractors
Cultural
Relationship
“I am a member because I
feel part of the culture.”
?
?
Rafaeli (1997): Membership and Boundaries
• Multiple definitions of membership and boundaries
• Membership is a matter of degree (one can be more
or less of a member)
• People have multiple memberships: memberships
from one domain spill over into other domains
• Organizational boundaries are fluid and permeable
What are Levels of Analysis?
What is the studied unit? E.g., People,
groups, organizations
1.
What are the antecedents of individual
job performance? Why do some
indivdiuals perform better than others?
2.
What are the antecedents of a team’s
performance? Why do some teams
perform better than others?
3.
What are the antecedents of an
organization’s performance? Why do
some organizations perform better than
others?
4.
What is the relationship between
individiual, team, and organizational
performance?
What is Organizational Behavior?
Challenges
• Businesses do not have a
Department of Organizational
Behavior … but neither do they
have a Department of
Economics
• Organizations do not have
behave, people do
• OB covers a wide range of
topics: Is it fuzzy?
• OB skills are soft skills … but
how are soft skills different
from hard skills?
• What does OB uniquely
contribute (relative to other
disciplines)?
12
Opportunities
• Business do have leaders, team
leader, organizational changes
specialists, HR managers, and
management trainees
• People behave differently in
organizations than they do
outside or organizations
• “Good” OB research uses
rigorous methods (e.g.,
experiments, statistical
analyses
• Is the organizational context
unique?
8. April
2015
Examples of OB Topics
• individual differences in abilities, personality, and other characteristics;
• testing and personnel selection;
• performance measurement and management;
• training, learning, and skill acquisition;
• work motivation;
• job attitudes, affect, and emotions;
• leadership;
• team development, processes, and effectiveness;
• career development;
• work–family interface;
• work stress, health, and well-being;
• positive and negative work behaviors;
• diversity and cross-cultural differences in work behavior and attitudes;
• technology and work systems;
• expertise and knowledge management;
• creativity, innovation, and adaptation;
• and organizational design, change, and interventions
Source: Journal of Applied Psychology
13
23 fevrier 2010
What is OB? Porter’s Historical Perspective or
It Just Happened That Way
• Personnel administration as a precursor
• Whyte (1956): “Organization man”
• Chris Argyris (1957): first use of the term
“OB”
• Hal Leavitt (1963): “Social Science of
Organizations”
• More books in the 1960s
• Departments of Organizational Behavior in
the U.S in the late 1960s (faculty from
various disciplines)
• 1970s: Academy of Management
What is OB? Porter’s Take on Today
• Multidisciplinary, but not necessarily interdisciplinary
• HR/I-O Psychology – Micro OB – Macro OB Strategy
• Breadth and diversity of the field are exciting
Recommendations:
• Emphasize the big O (ORGANIZATION)
• Large-scale efforts
• Meso studies (integrate micro and macro OB)
• Integrate perspectives
Macro-OB Variables
• Primarily considered a property
of organizations
• structural - spans of control,
chains of command,
hierarchical differentiation,
formalization, standardization,
decentralization, organizational
subunits, looseness of
coupling, power distributions,
demographic distributions
• technologies, tasks, workflows
• attributes of external
environments
• functional organizational
practices and policies
Source: House, Rousseau, Thomas-Hunt, 1995
Micro-OB
Mainly (but not exclusively) studied at the individual level of analysis
• recruiting, selection, job design, organizational socialization,
performance appraisal, management development,
•
•
•
•
•
top management team behavior,
organizational citizenship,
superior-subordinate relationships, conformity to formal authority,
organizational boundary spanning, coordination, integration,
organizational learning and sensemaking processes, organizational
problem-solving, conflict and decision-making
• organizationally induced stress,
• relevant individual dispositions: achievement and power motivation,
authoritarianism, affective orientation, dominance, attraction and
power motivation, roles, machiavellianism, tolerance for bureaucratic
control and susceptibility to conformity pressures.
Source: House, Rousseau, Thomas-Hunt, 1995
Studies in the Meso Paradigm
• Macro typically does long term observations of firms
and studies characteristics and situations
• Micro looks at people and why they do what they do
• Meso looks at at least two levels and how they
interact
Level of the
service unit
Climate for Service
Level of the
individual customer
EmployeeCustomer
Contact
Customer
Satisfaction
Why Meso? Macro meets Micro
Clear recognition of levels in
organizations
Unique organizational issues that
span levels of analysis (e.g.,
conformity in hierarchies)
Model specification (complex
phenomena require complex
models) and integration
Homologous (e.g., escalation)
phenomena and non-homologous
phenomena (performance)
Molloy et al. (2011): Economics, Psychology, Sociology
Economics
1
3
2
Psychology 4 Sociology
1: Decision theories (e.g., Prospect theory: Kahneman & Tversky, 1979)
2: Evolution of entrepreneurial firms (e.g., Aldrich, 2006)
3: Evolutionary economics (e.g., Nelson & Winter, 1982)
4: Mentoring development networks (e.g., Higgins & Kram, 2000)
Heath and Sitkin: Alternate Definitions
o
B
Behavior
Not unique
B
Ob
Behavior in
Organizing
Context
Fake uniqueness Unique
(relabelling)
Not important, but…
What is Organizing?
• Weick, K. (1979). The social psychology of organizing
• Weick, K.E., Sutcliffe, K.M., & Obstfeld, D. 2005. Sensemaking and
organizing. Organization Science, 16(4), 409-421.
Ongoing
updating
Ecological
Change
Enactment
Retrospect
extracted cues
Selection
Identity
plausibility
Retention
Feedback of identity on
Examples:
selection and enactment
-Reactions to crises and accidents
-Complex interactive processes
-High performance organization
What is Organizational Behavior? My Description
• Organizational Behavior is a field of study that investigates the cognitions, emotions, and behaviors of
individuals in teams and organizations. It also investigates the impact of team variables and
organizational characteristics on cognitions, emotions and behaviors, as well as the processes in the
emergence, functioning, and demise of teams and organizations.
• Practitioners can consult research in organizational behaviour to find answers to questions about, for
example, job performance, leadership, team management, decision making, fair treatment in the
workplace, the effectiveness of HR policies, as well as organizational cultures, climates, designs and
the process of organizational change.
• Within the domain of organizational behaviour, micro-OB, meso-OB, and macro-OB can be
distinguished.
• Micro-OB research focuses on understanding individuals (e.g., why and how they perform their
jobs and under what conditions employees and leaders trust each other)
• Macro-OB focuses on organizational-level characteristics, such as the emergence of power
distributions.
• Meso-OB considers phenomena at more than two levels (e.g., the individual and organizational
levels), such as the influence of organizational-level culture on individual performance.
• Researchers of organizational behaviour employ both quantitative (statistical) and qualitative methods
(e.g., case studies, interviews), whereby quantitative articles outnumber qualitative articles across
journals.
23
8. April 2015
HR/industrial-org.
psychology
Power distributions,
Coupling
Strategy
Org. design,
Org. cahnge
Trust,
Identity,
Conformity,
Sensemaking
Macro-OB
Meso
Psychology
Work attitudes,
Leadership, Teams
Selection etc.,
Performance
management
Micro-OB
Resource-based
view of the firm,
Economic views
(e.g., transaction cost
theory)
Psychology (I/O and
social), anthropology
Sociology
Sociology, Economics
Methodological focus,
outcome focus,
individual,
experimental,
quantitative
Theoretical focus,
process/outcome focus,
individual, experiment
to case study,
quantitative/
qualitative,
Theoretical focus,
process focus, business
unit, survey to case
study, qualitative/
quantitative,
Theoretical focus,
business unit, industry,
survey to case study to
modeling,
quantiative/qualitative
Department of
Psychology (I/O group)
Department of
Pychology, Business
School (OB Dep.)
Business School (OB,
OT), Department of
Sociology
Business School
(Strategy, General
Management)
Journal of Applied
Psychology, Personnel
Psychology,
Organizational Behavior
and Human Decision
Processes
Academy of Management Journal, Academy
of Management Review,
Organization Science
(qualititative), Journal
of Organizational
Behavior
Administrative Science
Quarterly, AMJ, AMR,
OS
Strategic Management
Journal, AMJ, AMR, OS
What is Organizational Behavior? My Description
• Organizational Behavior is a multi-disciplinary field of study
that draws theories and findings from psychology (in
particular, industrial-organizational psychology and social
psychology), sociology including organizational sociology,
anthropology, and economics. A sister-discipline of micro-OB
is industrial-organizational psychology, while macro-OB
intersects with strategy research. Departments of
Organizational Behavior are almost exclusively sub-units of
business schools or faculties of business and economics.
• Academic outlets for organizational behaviour are, in
particular for micro-OB, the Journal of Applied Psychology,
Personnel Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and
Human Decision Processes. Journals that publish work in
micro-OB, meso-OB, and macro-OB include the Academy of
Management Journal, Academy of Management Review,
Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science.
Qualitative articles are more likely to be found in Organization
Science and Administrative Science Quarterly. The preferred
journals of organizational behaviour researchers vary greatly
by their specific topics and often cross-over into more
psychological, sociological, or economic journals.
• Practitioner outlets for organizational behaviour include the
Harvard Business Review, Academy of Management
Perspectives, and MIT Sloan Management Review.
25
8. April 2015
Next class…
• What explains human behaviour: Economic,
sociological, and psychological approaches?
• In-class debate: Prostitution
– Prepare by reading the articles assigned for the debate
before the class. You will be assigned to either a)
psychological/sociological or b) economic perspective
Klein and Kozlowski (2000): How to Do Meso
Constructs
1. Global properties:
•
function, team size
•
Easy measurement
2.
Shared properties:
•
•
Held in common by team members (attitudes, beliefs,
cognitions, affect
Need to justify theoretically and statistically aggregation
to the unit (team, organization, etc.) level
3. Configural properties
•
Patterns of variability (or homogeneity)
Klein and Kozlowski (2000): When is a
Property Shared
Theoretical Justification
Statistical Justification
Klein and Kozlowski (2000): How to Do Meso
Models
1. Single level:
•
all at the same level, e.g., self-efficacy causes job
performance
2. Cross level:
•
Direct cross-level effects
•
Moderated cross-level effects
3. Homologous multi-level
•
Self-efficacy causes job performance
•
Team-efficacy causes team performance