McGraw-Hill/Irwin

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Copyright © 2013 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Organizational Behavior and Your Personal
Effectiveness
Knowing Objectives Doing Objectives
Recognize the importance of people skills Make a compelling case that OB and
and cultures management skills can improve
performance
Understand how OB evidence is the Use proven methods of self-management
source of effectiveness to make personal improvements

Appreciate the cost of bad managers and Seek feedback and focus on your strengths
toxic organizations
Understand the importance of self- Act professionally
awareness and personal effectiveness
Know the fundamentals of professional Build a personal network to enhance your
behavior success

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 Managing people is a distinct and critically
important skill set
• How is learning to manage people different than learning other skills
sets like accounting or a foreign language?
 Evidence for the importance of management is
abundant and clear
• How might we go about finding this kind of evidence?
 Most textbooks do not focus on developing the
most critical management skills – this text focuses
on application
• How can we try to apply and develop our skills rather than just
memorizing theories?

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 Good management is based on solid evidence,
NOT just “common sense”
 Research studies show that good management
practices are associated with…
• Reducing employment-related costs like turnover
• Improving employee and team performance
• Company financial performance

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1. Management is the process of getting things done
through others
2. Managers get rewarded for what their employees do
3. People join organizations but they leave managers
4. People generally manage the way they have been
managed
5. People problems are far more complex than any
other organizational problem

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 Three broad categories:
• Conceptual
 Collecting and analyzing data to diagnose problems and
make decisions
• Technical/Administrative
 Specific content knowledge and skills (e.g., accounting,
marketing)
• Interpersonal
 The ability to relate effectively with others (e.g.,
communicating, motivating, negotiating conflict)

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 “People skills” are critical for success in
management jobs
 Recruiters rate interpersonal skills, leadership,
communication and adaptability as the most
desirable yet scarcest skills among graduates
 Managerial skills cannot necessarily be learned
“on the spot” later (see figure on next slide)

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 EBM = translating principles based on good
scientific evidence into organizational
practices
 Many popular bestsellers on management are
not based on EBM but on sensationalism,
common sense, and “half truths”

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1. Learning cause and effect relationships
• How do various factors relate to each other?

Factor A Factor B

• Example: How do monetary rewards impact employee

performance?
• Example: How does diversity impact team creativity?

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2. Isolating variations that affect desired
outcomes
• Does the relationship between two factors differ depending on the
context?

Factor A Factor B

Context

• Example: Is the relationship between job satisfaction and

turnover lower in economically depressed times?
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3. Reducing the overuse, under use, and
misuse of specific practices

-Example: Graphology (handwriting analysis) is NOT

a valid predictor or managerial performance so should
not be utilized.

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4. Building decision supports to promote
practices that evidence validates

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5. Create a culture of evidence-based decision
making and research participation

Organizational Behavior (OB) = a social

science that attempts to describe, explain and
predict human behavior in an organizational
context

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 Our beliefs aren’t always supported by
research…thus research is important to help us
debunk myths and flawed beliefs!
 Example: Despite beliefs that ibuprofen reduces pain,
studies show there is little effect for most people.

? Pain
reduction

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 Big E Evidence = generalizable knowledge
regarding cause and effect connections derived
from systematic scientific methods.
 Little e evidence = local or organizational
specific data collected to inform a specific
decision.
 Good managers know how to find, evaluate,
and apply good evidence!

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 Personal Effectiveness: The foundation of
great management
 Becoming a good manager requires practice
and personal improvement
 One fundamental aspect of personal
competence is self-awareness
• Have a clear understanding of how you learn new skills
and motivate yourself to improve your capability

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 Learning comes with age and experience
 We know ourselves
 Growth opportunities lie solely in our
weaknesses
 It’s not me, it’s them
 The best managers are hyper-organized and
workaholics

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 Bandura’s Social Learning
Theory – learning of any new
behavior is the result of three
main factors – the person, the
environment, and the
behavior
 Reciprocal Determinism = the
mutual influence of the
person, environment, and
behavior
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 Previous theories of learning suggested that
people had to learn through their own
experiences
 However…
 According to Bandura, most learning is done
through observation and modeling of the
behaviors of others

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 Attention
 Retention
 Reproduction
 Motivation

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 First challenge of learning is to focus
 Isolate the specific behaviors that are to be
learned – try not to take on too many aspects at
once

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 Must be able to understand and remember
what you have observed
• Rote memorization is not as effective as retention
through relating observations to theories, frameworks,
and other experiences

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 Importance of practice or actual demonstration
of a skill
 Management must be learned through doing,
not just classroom or textbook learning
 Receiving feedback on behavior is critical for
further development

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 The motivation to persist towards the learning
goal is critical
 Motivation may be enhanced through
reinforcement
• Positive reinforcement (e.g., getting praise)
• Vicarious reinforcement (e.g., watching others receive
promotions or salary increases)
• Punishment (e.g., getting reprimanded)
 Note: punishment is typically NOT as effective as
reinforcement

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 Self-Management = a process of
modifying one’s own behavior
by systematically altering how
we arrange different cues in our
world, how we think about
change, and how we attach
behavior consequences to our
actions

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 Self-Observation/Exploration
 Self-Set Goals
 Management of Cues
 Positive Self-Talk and Rehearsal
 Self-Reward and Punishment

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1. In committing to a goal, a person devotes
attention toward goal-relevant activities
2. Goals energize people
3. Goals affect persistence
4. Goals motivate people to use their
knowledge to help them attain the goal

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SMART goals have been shown to be most effective!
 Specific Think of the last time you
 Measurable had a goal that failed…
was it a SMART goal?
 Attainable
 Relevant Can you create a SMART
 Time-bound goal for yourself?

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1. Know where you are currently
2. Set SMART goals for your change
3. Arrange your world so it focuses your
attention and reminds you of your
improvement plan and goals
4. Stay positive and rehearse the desired
behaviors at every opportunity
5. Create your own rewards for accomplishing
your targets
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 Ability – what a person is capable of doing
• Examples: cognitive ability, physical ability, emotional
ability
 Personality – the pattern of relatively enduring
ways in which a person thinks, acts, and
behaves
• Example: Extroversion-Introversion

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 Assessments are ways to gain knowledge about your
own individual differences
 Assessment results are simply feedback… they are not
your destiny
 Thousands of self-assessments exist but many have
questionable legitimacy
 Look for patterns and consistency across your
assessments
 Get multisource feedback (from many other people) to
enhance self-knowledge

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 How do I think critically and analytically?
 Cognitive ability = the capacity to learn and
process cognitive information such as reading,
comprehension, mathematical patterns and
spatial patterns

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 How Well Do I Understand and Use Emotion?
 Emotional intelligence = the ability to
accurately identify emotions (in self and
others) as well as understand and manage those
emotions separately

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 Cultural intelligence = a person’s capability to
function effectively in situations characterized
by cultural diversity

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What is my personality?
Big Five Dimensions of Personality
1. Extraversion
2. Emotional stability
3. Agreeableness
4. Conscientiousness
5. Openness to experience

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 What Are My Personality Preferences?
 Preferences for direction of energy, decision-
making, information acquisition, and
orientation to the outer world.
 Large percentages of people in certain
occupations tend to share similar preferences
 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a measure of
personality preferences

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 What Are My Core Values?
• Preferences for desirable ends or goals and the
processes for attaining them
• Enduring beliefs about what is most important in the
world

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 What is my preferred career orientation?
 Career orientation – preference for a specific
type of occupation and work context

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 PCQ is a self-management tool in which
desirable standard of behavior and
performance are identified and then measured.
 Steps in PCQ

1. Draw up a checklist of standards

2. Tally your daily defects
3. Review your tally and action
plans

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 Focus on Strengths, Not Just
Weaknesses
• Most productive to place focus on strengths
and the things you can realistically change
 Become a positive force
 Identify and craft your own personal
brand

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 Ability  Motivation
 Attention  Multi-source feedback
 Big E Evidence  Organizational behavior
 little e evidence  Personality
 Cognitive ability  Positive self-talk
 Conceptual competencies  Reciprocal determinism
 Emotional intelligence  Reproduction
 Evidence-based management  Reward and punishment
 Extraversion  Self-management
 Intrapersonal competencies  Self-observation
 Introversion  SMART goals
 Modeling  Social learning theory
 Technical/administrative
competencies
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