Comm 292 Final Notes Essay

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Comm 292 Chapter Notes
Chapter 1: Introduction to OB?

What is OB? Field of study that investigates the impact of individual, group, and structural behavior within an organization. Applying such knowledge helps improve organization effectiveness.
Challenges for OB in 21st Century:
Individual Level: Managers and employees need to learn to work together, despite different personalities, perceptions, values, and attitudes. Greatest issue is the not knowing how to behave ethically in the face of competing demands from different stakeholders.
Group Level: As organizations are made up by a variety of people, workforce diversity is a key factor: One of the biggest challenges within workforce diversity is the mix of generations with different values: and ethnic diversity.
Organization Level: Companies need to decide when to use temporary workers and how to handle their place in the business. Many of these can lose touch with the company and therefore underperform.
Managers want business to be profitable, effective, and efficient.
Effectiveness is achievement of goals.
Efficiency is ratio of work inputs to output.
Organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB): Employees go beyond their work description to improve performance of the organization.
How Does OB Make Sense of Behaviour? Split into four main groups: Psych, socio, anthro, and socio psycho:
Psychology: Science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change individual behaviour.
Sociology: Studies people in relation to their social environment. Areas include: group dynamics, design of work teams, organizational culture, communication, power, and conflict.
Social Psychology: communication patterns, group decision making, measuring and understanding attitudes, and the ways in which groups can satisfy individual needs.
Anthropology: the study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities, cultures
Political Science: structuring of conflict, allocation of power, and how people manipulate power for individual self-interest.
Contingency approach: Concept in management stating there is no one universally applicable set of management rules to manage organizations. All have different situations and require different ways of management.
Competing Value Framework: Models that can help us identify some of the most useful skills. Note that the range of issues faced by organizations can be divided along two dimensions:
1. Internal-External Focus: Degree to which organization focuses inwards or outwards. Inwards is within organizations, outwards is customer focused.
2. Flexibility-Control Focus: Determines who makes decisions. Control is with management, flexibility is with employees.

Chapter 2: Perception, Personality, and Emotions

Perception: Process by which individuals organize their impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.
What factors affect our perception? Situation, Perceiver, Target:
Situation: Time, work setting, and social setting.
Perceiver: attitudes, motives, interests, experience, and expectations.
Target: novelty, motion, sounds, size, background, and proximity.
Perceptual Errors:
Fundamental Attribution Error: People often underestimate influence of external factors and overestimate internal factors when judging others
Halo Effect: If a person has one attribute, we judge from that (i.e. Good teacher because she is sexy).
Contrast Effect: Our reaction towards one person is often influenced by the beliefs of other people we recently encountered.
Stereotypes: An oversimplified conception.
Projection: Attributing one’s own characteristics onto others.
Heuristics: Judgment shortcuts in decision-making.
Personality: Stable patterns of behaviour and consistent internal states that determine how an individual reacts to and interacts with others.
Personality Determinants:
Heredity: What you are born with
Current Situation you happen to be in
Personality Traits: Enduring characteristics that…