What Is Organizational Behaviour

Deepa Kumari
deepakumari@hotmail.com

Learning Outcomes

Demonstrate the importance of interpersonal

skills in the workplace.
Describes the managers functions, roles and
skills.
Define OB
Show the value of OB to systematic study
Identify the disciplines that contribute to OB
Demonstrate few absolutes that apply to OB
Identify the challenges and opportunities for
managers to apply concepts of OB

1. What Managers Do?

Managers

Managers get things done through

other people.

They make decisions, allocate

resources, and direct activities to attain
goals.

Managers do their work in an

organization.

Organization

Managers do their work in an

organization, that is consciously
coordinated social unit, composed of
two or more people, that functions on a
relatively continuous basis to achieve a
common goal or set of goals.

3. Management Functions
Four functions performed by a manager:
1. Planning-defining an organizations goals and overall
strategy, comprehensive plan to integrate and
coordinate the same.
2. Organizing- It includes determining what tasks are to
be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be
grouped, who reports to whom, and where decisions
are to be made.
3. Leading- When managers motivate employees, direct
their
activities,
select
the
most
effective
communication channels, or resolve conflicts among
members, they are engaging in leading.
4. Controlling-Comparison of progress with set goals and
correcting deviations.

4. Management Roles
Henry Mintzberg, an MIT fellow, studied five
executives trying to understand what
managers did on their jobs. Those ten roles
can be summarized are as follows:
1. Interpersonal
2. Informational
3. Decisional

5. Management Skills

Technical Skills
Human Skills
Conceptual skills

Of all the skills found to be important, the

human skill was considered to be the most
important to be an effective manager
therefore

6. Enter Organizational Behavior

It is often abbreviated as OB is a field of study

that investigates the impact that individuals,
groups and structures have on behavior within
organizations, for the purpose of applying
such

knowledge

towards

organizational effectiveness.

improving

7. Disciplines that Contribute to the OB

Field

Psychology
Social Psychology
Sociology
Anthropology

8. Why there are few absolutes in OB

Causal relationships exist but under certain

situations only. Like x leads to y but only in
presence of z or the contingency variables.
Contingency variables are situational factors:
variables
that moderate the relationship
between two or more variables.

10. Challenges and Opportunities for OB

Responding to Economic Pressures

Responding to Globalization
Managing Workforce diversity
Improving Customer Service
Improving People Skills
Stimulating Innovation and change

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11. Developing an OB Model

A model is an abstraction of reality, a

simplified representation of some real world
phenomenon. It proposes three levels of
variables(inputs, processes and outcomes) at
three levels of analysis(individual. Group and
organizational)

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11.1. Inputs, Processes and Variables

Inputs are the variables like personality,

group structure and organizational culture
that leads to processes. These variables set a
stage for what will occur in an organization at
a later stage.
Processes are actions that individual, groups
and organizations engage in as a result of
inputs that lead to certain outcomes.
Outcomes are the key variables that you
want to explain or predict, and that are
affected by some other variables

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12. Conclusion

Managers need to develop their interpersonal

skills to be effective in their jobs.
The study of OB becomes all the more
important
in
the
light
of
improving
productivity, reduce absenteeism, turnover
and
deviant
workplace;
and
increase
organizational citizenship behavior and job
satisfaction.

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Suggested Reading and Hyperlinks

Organizational Behavior, 16th edition by

Robbins; Judge and Vohra, Pg No 4-33
You may also read another article that
comments on changing work stations at
organizations.
http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/xtJ9kcKF2zOx
vU0JFyVj3H/The-evangelical-explorer.html

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