Session 1: What is Organizational Behavior?

1. Theories of Organizational Behavior Session 1: What is Organizational Behavior?

2. Today’s Agenda • Student Introductions • Course Introduction • What is Organizational Behavior?

3. Theories of OB: Logistics • 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: • Instructor: Professor Joerg Dietz; joerg.dietz@unil.ch • (Assistant: Celia Chui; celia.chui@unil.ch) • Office hours: by appointment (email first) 3 17. September 2014

4. Objectives • 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”)

5. Course Requirements • 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.

6. 1st Assignment: Metaphors of Organizations The book “Images of Organization” is available for scanning in my office. Several chapters may have been scanned before.

7. 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

8. What is an Organization? “collections of social entities (such as teams and work groups) that • share broad goals, boundaries, and activity systems and • 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)

9. Rafaeli (1997): Organization and Membership

10. 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

11. What are Levels of Analysis? What is the studied unit? E.g., People, groups, organizations • What are the antecedents of individual job performance? Why do some indivdiuals perform better than others? • What are the antecedents of a team’s performance? Why do some teams perform better than others? • What are the antecedents of an organization’s performance? Why do some organizations perform better than others? • What is the relationship between individiual, team, and organizational performance?

12. 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? What is Organizational Behavior? 12 17. September 2014

13. 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 interventions Source: Journal of Applied Psychology 13 23 fevrier 2010

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. Micro-OB Mainly (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

18. 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 Climate for Service Level of the service unit Level of the individual customer Employee- Customer Contact Customer Satisfaction

19. 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)

20. Molloy et al. (2011): Economics, Psychology, Sociology Economics Psychology Sociology 1 3 2 4 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)

21. Heath and Sitkin: Alternate Definitions Ob oB B Behavior Behavior in Organizing Context Not unique Fake uniqueness Unique (relabelling) Not important, but…

22. 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. Identity plausibility Ongoing updating Retrospect extracted cues Ecological Change Enactment Selection Retention Feedback of identity on selection and enactment • Examples: • Reactions to crises and accidents • Complex interactive processes • High performance organization

23. What is Organizational Behavior? My Description • 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. 23 17. September 2014

24. HR/industrial-org. Micro-OB Macro-OB Strategy psychology Trust, Identity, Conformity, Sense- making Resource-based view of the firm, Economic views (e.g., trans- action cost theory) Power dis- tributions, Coupling Selection etc., Performance management Org. design, Org. cahnge Work attitudes, Leadership, Teams Meso

25. What is Organizational Behavior? My Description • 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. 25 17. September 2014

26. 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

27. Klein and Kozlowski (2000): How to Do Meso Constructs • Global properties: • function, team size • Easy measurement • 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)

28. Klein and Kozlowski (2000): When is a Property Shared Theoretical Justification Statistical Justification

29. Klein and Kozlowski (2000): How to Do Meso Models • Single level: • all at the same level, e.g., self-efficacy causes job performance • Cross level: • Direct cross-level effects • Moderated cross-level effects 3. Homologous multi-level • Self-efficacy causes job performance • Team-efficacy causes team performance