What is Organizational Behavior, really? Organizational behavior is a field of study devoted to understanding and explaining the attitudes and behaviors of individuals and groups in organizations. The two primary outcomes of organizational behavior are job performance and organizational commitment.

Chapter 1 explores the factors that affect these outcomes, and shows how scientific studies provide evidence that good organizational behavior policies are linked to employee productivity, profitability, and even survival. This chapter also shows how we "know what we know" about organizational behavior by describing the scientific research process.

READ ACTIVELY!

Before you begin, review how to handle advanced college textbooks by engaging in active reading and interrogating your text.

Note: If these ideas are new to you, pick one to focus on that you think will be most effective for you and work on it with the first chapter, then try to use both on your next chapter, etc. (By the end of this course you'll find you're a much more effective reader with amazing textbook skills and habits you can use for the rest of your life.)

Another way to think about this -- read like someone watching a game and commenting on it to viewers. Be critical! Judge! Call things out - both good and bad!

As you are developing into a leadership scholar + strategic thinker, you're expected to be critical of all information you take in. In our current Information/Knowledge Economy that is one of the most useful things you can bring to the table -- an ability to sift through information and pick out the good stuff.

🔎 To help you see what I mean, I've provided some of this type of commentary on this lesson's readings below:

As you read the Chapter 1 of the textbook, you can skip section 3. (My commentary explains why.)

• Les Schwab Tires Case: Interesting, but it's so much about culture, which is something we won't cover for a while. It's an odd choice for the first thing in the book. I wish it had been more clearly about performance or commitment instead of obliquely about them.

• 2.3: They talk about how definitions matter in 2.2, but then they don't use terms like strategic or systems thinking here. That's a missed opportunity, as those are what employers are looking for and exactly what they described in many ways.

• OB Toolboxes in general: Great idea, but I don't like that they footnoted the citations vs. telling me HOW effective science has shown something to be. I'm the type that's going to go find out how helpful journaling might actually be before I bother to spend my time on it (same for every single item on the long list in the first toolbox). That's a huge hurdle that will prevent me from actually following a lot of these leads. I'm not sure why they handled this that way when they then state how important the science and study of OB is later in the chapter.

• 3 - Learning Styles: Seriously?!? When will this non-scientific hogwash die and stop being taught and appearing in books which are otherwise almost entirely scientifically based? Even popular culture knows it's junk (and their final point is right on target - employers want adaptability, thus students at the college level should be expected to adapt to whatever delivery method the material comes in, not to have it tailored for them). Styles are most likely just assessing our preferences and what we personally find easiest based on our intelligences, but they don't mean we learn less well other ways or anything else. Ugh.

• 4 - Methods: A little short, but covers the basics.

• 5 - Trends: Things like calling people 'Millenials' is why Industrial-Organizational Psychologists and those in the business world sometimes get really annoyed with each other. Those in corporations need shortcuts to classify and understand people (it makes them easier to manage, market/sell to, etc. etc.). However, because of this need, they often use anything that 'feels true' to make these classifications. If their grouping is based on wishes and dreams, and they then make decisions based on this arbitrary unscientific 'understanding' of people, they're wasting money and tons of employee resources on this ridiculousness with little chance of success! It makes my head hurt because it's easy to avoid these issues.

Instead, we could use a little science to understand customers/stakeholders/etc., and actually make informed choices likely to lead to success. It just makes no sense why anyone would choose the false promise of 'common sense' for such important decisions vs. looking for proven scientific outcomes or doing their own testing on people (employees or customers, etc). Studies consistently show that the so-called generations in the workplace are more similar than different and it's rarely that designation (i.e. Millenial, Boomer, etc.) that predicts anything (Mencl & Lester, 2014).

Considering how we need to be helping more diverse workforces to work better together and one way to do that would be to remove dividing lines between people/groups, you'd think you'd be taught what makes us similar as employees in the workplace vs. what makes us different! (But no one ever seems to be.)

On a final note, there are aspects of people that predict organizational outcomes, but few people are trained in those... so those useful aspects of employees often get ignored. We'll talk more about them soon!

Concept: Job Performance

Ok, so one of the main outcomes of OB is Job Performance, but what do we mean by that? Job performance is the set of employee behaviors that contribute to organizational goal accomplishment. It has three components:

1. Task performance, or the transformation of resources into goods and services;

2. Citizenship behaviors, or voluntary employee actions that contribute to the organization; and

3. Counterproductive behaviors, or employee actions that hinder organizational accomplishments.

Future chapters will cover trends that affect job performance in today's organizations, as well as practices that organizations can use to manage job performance.

Concept: Organizational Commitment

We're going to get into this concept in depth much later in the course, but since this is the second major outcome of OB, a short introduction is in order. Basically, Organizational Commitment is a psychological state that has 3 main components (much like feeling committed in a relationship is a state):

1. Affective Commitment - how much you like or have affection for your organization/job

2. Continuance Commitment - how much you fear losing your job

3. Normative Commitment - how obligated you feel to stay

Obviously, not all of these are positive things. Various types of commitment can have different effects on an employee. This is explained in more detail at this link if you're interested in learning more.

Reflect & Discuss

Take a Self Assessment

I want to make sure you get something out of this course that you can personally use to improve your work life, even if you aren't the boss. One of the ways to do this is to raise your awareness of aspects of yourself. For many lessons, there will be a self-assessment for you to complete, like the one below for this lesson.

• Affective Commitment Scale

Important: You should either save your results OR save the link to edit your response somewhere safe (like in a document) so you'll be able to access it later - you will need your scores and the details of the assessment for your future Action Plans and should bring your results to our live discussion.