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Showing posts with the label ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Managing Organizational Change

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A rapidly changing environment places many demands on leaders and employees, including the need to plan for and manage organizational change effectively. Pressures for change stem from globalization, the increasing use of information technology as a communication channel, the rise in the number of powerful social networking groups, and the mixing of different generations of employees in many organizations. Each of these pressures for change requires leaders to adapt their behaviors in order to achieve their organization’s goals. The two major approaches to achieving planned organizational change are economic and interpersonal. The economic approach focuses on changing the organization’s design, reward system, and technology to achieve change and improve stockholder value. The organizational development approach focuses on the development of employees’ interpersonal competencies. This approach requires employees and leaders to become emotionally involved with the organiza...
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Cultivating Organizational Culture

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Organizational culture is the pattern of beliefs and expectations shared by members of an organization. It includes a common philosophy, norms, and values. In other words, it expresses the “rules of the game” for getting along and getting things done and ways of interacting with outsiders, such as suppliers and customers. Some aspects of organizational culture are cultural symbols, heroes, rites, and ceremonies. Organizational culture develops as a response to the challenges of external adaptation and survival and of internal integration. The formation of an organization’s culture also is influenced by the culture of the larger society within which the organization must function. The primary methods for both sustaining and changing organizational culture include (1) identifying what leaders and teams pay attention to, measure, and control; (2) recognizing the ways in which leaders and employees react to crises; (3) using managerial and team role modeling, teaching...
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Organization Design

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We reviewed how the four major environmental factors—suppliers, distributors, competitors, and customers—can affect the design of an organization. Although these four factors vary by industry, leaders need to assess them before choosing a business strategy. A business strategy indicates how the organization intends to compete in its industry. A cost leadership (low-cost) strategy focuses on achieving cost efficiencies that let the organization compete favorably against its rivals. An organization pursuing a differentiation strategy attempts to provide customers with a unique product and/ or service. Organizations pursing a focused strategy target a narrow market or niche for their product or service. There are two fundamentals of organizing: differentiation and integration. Differentiation is created through a division of labor and job specialization. As organizations grow, they create departments to handle certain activities, such as payroll, manufacturing, and human re...
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Managerial Decision Making

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Individuals make decisions that represent the probability of events occurring over which they have no control but that may affect the outcomes of those decisions. Such conditions may be viewed as a continuum from certainty to risk to uncertainty. Decision making becomes more challenging with increasing levels of risk and uncertainty. Important decisions by managers and leaders are often made under the conditions of risk (subjective probabilities) and uncertainty. Bounded rationality describes a pattern that tends to be more descriptive of how leaders and others make what they consider to be thoughtful decisions. It represents tendencies to satisfice, engage in a limited search for alternative solutions, work with inadequate information, and use various biases to obtain and process information. It recognizes the practical limitations of individuals when they attempt to make decisions. Over time, the level of satisficing can be raised through various actions, such as the v...
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Managing Conflict and Negotiating Effectively

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Conflict occurs at four different levels within organizations: intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup. Intrapersonal conflict occurs within the individual. Interpersonal conflict occurs when someone’s wishes or desires are perceived to be in opposition to another’s. Intragroup conflict occurs between or among group members. Intergroup conflict occurs between groups or teams. The five styles for handling interpersonal conflict are collaborating, compromising, forcing, accommodating, and avoiding. An individual may have a natural preference for one or two of these styles. Most individuals are likely to use all of them over time when dealing with various interpersonal conflict situations. As a reminder, an instrument for measuring your own conflict-handling style is presented in the Experiential Exercise at the end of this chapter. Negotiation is a component in conflict management. It is a process by which two or more interdependent individuals or groups ...
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Developing and Leading Teams

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We focused on developing the teams competency —the knowledge, skills, and abilities to develop, support, and lead groups to achieve goals. Groups and teams are classified in numerous ways. In organizations, a basic classification is by the group’s primary purpose, including informal groups and task groups (now commonly called teams). Informal groups develop out of the day-to-day activities, interactions, and sentiments of the members for the purpose of meeting their security or social needs. Informal groups may support, oppose, or be indifferent to formal organizational goals. Effective groups, formal or informal, have similar basic characteristics. We reviewed the core characteristics of effective teams. The degree to which a team lacks in one or more of these characteristics determines whether—and to what extent—it is ineffective. For a team to operate, it must have some degree of empowerment, which is reflected in terms of the teams’ degree of potency, meaningfulness, au...
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Leadership Effectiveness: New Perspectives

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Transactional leadership calls for managers to influence followers primarily through contingent reward-based exchanges. They attempt to identify clear goals for followers, the specific paths for achieving the goals, and the rewards that will be forthcoming for achieving them. A follower’s performance is monitored and corrective actions are taken if there are deviations from the expected path. The emphasis is on exchanging units of work for units of rewards (salary, bonuses, size of office, etc.). Leader–member exchange (LMX) suggests that leaders develop different relationships with each of their subordinates through a series of work-related exchanges. Over time, one group of subordinates is said to have a low-quality LMX with their leader and another group a high-quality LMX. The time dimension is said to be represented over three phases: stranger, acquaintance, and mature partnership. The latter phase develops for those who establish high-quality LMX. The degree of LMX ...
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Leadership Effectiveness: Foundations

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Leaders draw on five sources of power to influence the actions of followers: legitimate, reward, coercive, referent, and expert. All leaders engage in political behavior to influence others—sometimes ineffectively. Political behavior and organizational politics focus on efforts to protect or enhance self-interests, goals, and preferred outcomes. The drivers of political behavior were noted with special emphasis on how leaders can foster or minimize political behaviors of subordinates in relation to the performance appraisal process. Three of the legacy leadership models are the traits, Theory X/Theory Y, and behavioral models. The traits model emphasizes the personal qualities of leaders and attributes success to certain abilities, skills, and personality characteristics. This model fails to explain why certain managers succeed and others fail as leaders. The primary reason is that it ignores how traits interact with situational variables. The Theory X/Theory Y model is b...
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