Understanding Organizational Behaviour: Key Concepts

Posted on Feb 13, 2025 in Psychology and Sociology

Organizational Behaviour

Organizational Behaviour is a multidisciplinary field that seeks knowledge of behavior in organizational settings by systematically studying individuals, groups, and organizational processes.

Hawthorne Study: The Bank Wiring Experiment (Group of 14 Men)

Hawthorne Studies: Key Findings

• Organizations are Social Systems
• Social factors have more impact on job performance than physical factors.
• Informal organization vs. formal organization
• Understanding behaviors on the job: human needs, attitudes, motives, relationships in the workplace.

Formal vs. Informal Organization

Formal Organization: An organizational structure type in which the job of each member is clearly defined, and whose authority, responsibility, and accountability are fixed.

• Goals & objectives
• Policies & procedures: Official norms of behavior, guidelines, and SOPs
• Job descriptions: tasks, duties, responsibilities
• Financial resources: Cash flow, credits, equity
• Authority structure: Hierarchy
• Communication channels: email, internet
• Products and services: Anything that the company offers in exchange for money

Informal Organization: An organization formed within the formal organization as a network of interpersonal relationships where people interact with each other.

• Beliefs & assumptions: Guesses about personality, characteristics of people
• Perceptions & attitudes: How individuals interpret stimuli from the environment depending on beliefs, previous experiences, etc.
• Values: Principles of a person that affect how someone thinks and acts
• Feelings: Emotional states caused by stimuli that motivate or encourage a response
• Group norms: A group of individuals has its own explicit and implicit rules about how and how not to behave
• Informal leaders: Don’t have a position of power but have skills to influence others

Age Diversity

Age Diversity: bodies, maturity, experiences

• Silent generation
• Baby boomers (1946-1964)
• GenX (1965-1980)
• Gen Y, Millennials (1981-1994)
• Gen Z, Igen (1995-2009)
• Next Gen Alpha (2010-)

Benefits and Problems of Diversity

Benefits: Attracts and retains the best talent, Improves marketing efforts, Promotes creativity and innovation, Results in better problem solving. People of different cultures have experienced different situations and have different ways of approaching problems and solutions, organizational flexibility.

Problems: Resistant to change (people may not be willing to work with people who think differently), Lack of cohesiveness, Communication problems, interpersonal conflicts, Slower decision making.

Attribution Theory

Attribution Theory: Explains how individuals pinpoint the causes of their own and others’ behavior (external and internal).

• Fundamental attribution error → attributions to internal causes when focusing on someone else’s behavior
• Self-serving bias → successes to internal causes and failures to external causes

Escalation of Commitment

Escalation of commitment: cognitive dissonance, Overly optimistic, illusion of control, Sunk cost fallacy.

Sensing vs. Intuition

Sensing Vs. Intuition – what kind of information do you prefer to use?

Judging vs. Perceiving

Judging Vs. Perceiving – How do you deal with the world around you?

Thinking vs. Feeling

Thinking Vs. Feeling – how make decisions?

Political Skill

Political skill: ability to get things done through positive interpersonal relationships outside the formal organization, ability to accurately understand others and use this knowledge to influence others in order to meet personal or organizational goals.

Barriers to Social Perception

5 barriers to Social Perception: Selective perception, Stereotype, First-impression error, Projection, Self-fulfilling prophecy.