Essay on Course Notes ch 1-6

Chapter 1

Goals of Organizational Behaviour

Predicting organizational behaviour and events.
Explaining organizational behaviour and events in organizations.
Managing organizational behaviour.

Management
The classical view advocates a high degree of specialization of labour and coordination and centralized decision making.
Scientific management is Frederick’s Taylor’s system for using research to determine the optimum degree of specialization and standardization of work tasks.
Bureaucracy is Max Weber’s ideal type of organization that includes:
Strict chain of command
Selection and promotion criteria based on technical competence
Detailed rules, regulations, and procedures
High specialization
Centralization of power at the top of the organization
The human relations movement began with the famous Hawthorne Studies of the 1920s and 1930s conducted at the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric.
The Hawthorne Studies
Concerned with the impact of fatigue, rest pauses, and lighting on employee productivity.
The studies illustrated how psychological and social processes affect productivity and work adjustment.
Suggested there could be dysfunctional aspects to how work was organized.
Critique of Bureaucracy
The human relations movement called attention to certain dysfunctional aspects of classical management and bureaucracy:
Employee alienation
Limits innovation and adaptation
Resistance to change
Minimum acceptable level of performance
Employees lose sight of the overall goals of the organization
The Human Relations Movement
Advocated more people-oriented and participative styles of management that catered more to the social and psychological needs of employees.
The movement called for: more flexible systems of management the design of more interesting jobs open communication employee participation in decision making less rigid, more decentralized forms of control
Contemporary Management – The Contingency Approach
The general answer to many of the problems in organizations is: “It depends.”
Dependencies are called contingencies.
The contingency approach to management recognizes that there is no one best way to manage.
An appropriate management styles depends on the demands of the situation.

Chapter 2

Person-situation debate
The dispositional approach
Focuses on individual dispositions and personality.
Individuals possess stable traits or characteristics that influence their attitudes and behaviours.
Individuals are predisposed to behave in certain ways.
The situational approach
Characteristics of the organizational setting such as rewards and punishment influence people’s feelings, attitudes and behaviour.
Many studies have shown that situational factors such as the characteristics of work tasks predict job satisfaction.
The interactionist approach
Organizational behaviour is a function of both dispositions and the situation.
To predict and understand organizational behaviour, we need to know something about an individual’s personality and the work setting.
This is the most widely accepted approach to organizational behaviour.

Personality and the Situation
In weak situations, roles are loosely defined, there are few rules and weak reinforcement and punishment contingencies.
Personality has the strongest effect in weak situations.
In strong situations, the roles, rules, and contingencies are more defined.
Personality has less of an impact in strong situations.

Each of the “Big Five” dimensions is related to job performance, motivation, job satisfaction and career outcomes.
Conscientiousness is the strongest predictor of overall job performance across all occupations.
The effects of personality on career success are relatively enduring.

Locus of Control

Self-Monitoring
The extent to which people observe and regulate how they appear and behave in social settings and relationships.
High self-monitors take great care to observe and control the images

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