18. April 2023

Session 1: What is Organizational Behavior?

Theories of Organizational Behavior

Today’s Agenda

18. April 2023

• Student Introductions

• Course Introduction

• What is Organizational Behavior?

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Theories of OB: Logistics

18. April 2023

• 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.cho (Assistant: Celia Chui; celia.chui@unil.ch) o Office hours: by appointment (email first)

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Objectives

18. April 2023

• 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”)

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Course Requirements

18. April 2023

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)

• 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.

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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

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, in-store 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?

18. April 2023

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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)?

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?

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 interventionsSource: Journal of Applied Psychology

23 fevrier 201013

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-OBMainly (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

CustomerSatisfaction

Climate for Service

Employee-CustomerContact

Level of the individual customer

Level of the service unit

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

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)

Psychology Sociology

Economics

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Heath and Sitkin: Alternate Definitions

oB ObB

Behavior Behavior in OrganizingContext

Not unique 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.

Ecological Change

Enactment Selection Retention

Ongoing updating

Retrospect extracted cues

Identity plausibility

Feedback of identity on selection and enactment

Examples: -Reactions to crises and accidents-Complex interactive processes-High performance organization

What is Organizational Behavior? My Description

18. April 2023

• 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.

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HR/industrial-org. Micro-OB Macro-OB Strategy psychology

Selection etc.,Performancemanagement

Work a

ttitudes,Lea

dership, Team

s

Trust,Identity,Conformity,Sense-making

Meso

Psychology 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 Manage-ment Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science (qualititative), Journal of Organizational Behavior

Administrative Science Quarterly, AMJ, AMR, OS

Strategic Management Journal, AMJ, AMR, OS

Org

. design,O

rg. cahnge

Resource-basedview of the firm,Economic views (e.g., trans- action costtheory)

Power dis-tributions,Coupling

What is Organizational Behavior? My Description

18. April 2023

• 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.

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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