Foundations of Organizational Behavior

Develop essential managerial skills by balancing technical, human, and conceptual abilities while studying how individuals, groups, and structures affect organizational behavior and productivity.

Explore how organization behavior relies on systematic study rather than intuition, using hypotheses and variable relationships, and examine four research designs: case study, field survey, laboratory experiments, and field experiments.

Explore the Hawthorne studies, a laboratory experiment at Western Electric near Chicago. Findings show productivity rose due to social factors like attention and supervision, beyond physical conditions.

Explore how psychology, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and political science shape organizational behavior, while globalisation, workforce diversity, ethics, and change drive modern organizational behavior practice.

Explore the organizational behavior model, outlining how independent variables at the individual, group, and organizational levels influence dependent variables such as productivity, absenteeism, turnover, organizational citizenship behavior, and job satisfaction.

Explore how values, attitudes, and job satisfaction shape behavior, and examine terminal versus instrumental values, plus Hofstede's cultural dimensions and their impact on organizational dynamics.

Attitude comprises cognitive, affective, and behavioral components; in organization behavior, focus on job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment, and their links to performance, OCB, absenteeism, turnover, and productivity.

Examine how attitudes change with experience through cognitive dissonance theory and self-perception theory, and how attitude surveys guide managers in shaping policies and employee behavior.

Examine how job satisfaction stems from factors like pay, supervision, and environment, how surveys measure it, and how satisfaction links to productivity, absenteeism, turnover, organizational citizenship behavior, and customer satisfaction.

Explore how heredity, environment, and situation shape personality, and learn how traits are measured with mbti and the big five model, with managerial applications in selecting and developing employees.

Examine how internal versus external locus of control affects job satisfaction, absenteeism, and performance, alongside machiavellism, self-esteem, self-monitoring, risk taking, proactive personality, and type a versus type b dynamics.

John Holland's personality job fit theory links traits to work environments through six types: conventional, realistic, investigator, artistic, social, and enterprising. Managers align personality with job requirements to boost performance.

Explore how perception shapes judgment through the concepts of perception, attribution theory, and decision making. Learn how factors of the perceiver, situation, and target influence biases, shortcuts, and organizational applications.

Attribution theory explains how we distinguish internal versus external causes of others' behavior, using distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency to guide our perceptions.

Explore fundamental attribution error and self-serving bias, showing how we attribute others' behavior to internal factors and our own success to internal factors while blaming external factors for failures.

Explains how shortcuts like selective perception, halo effect, contrast effect, projection, and stereotyping shape judgments and evaluations, and offers strategies to reduce bias through training, diverse panels, and objective metrics.

Explore how employees make rational decisions via a six-step process—defining problems, criteria, weights, alternatives, evaluating, and selecting the best—while creativity, expertise, and task motivation shape outcomes.

Explore common decision making biases—overconfidence, anchoring, confirmation, availability, and hindsight—and how intuition and four styles—analytical, deductive, behavioral, and conceptual—shape choices.

Examine biographical characteristics such as age, gender, and tenure, and their effects on productivity, turnover, absenteeism, organizational citizenship behavior, and job satisfaction.

The lecture defines ability as an individual's capacity to perform tasks, outlines intellectual and physical abilities, and stresses right fit between ability and job requirements for performance and satisfaction.

Explore how learning changes behavior through direct or indirect experience, and examine classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning with practical examples.

Shape behavior by systematically reinforcing each step toward the desired action using positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, and extinction, with rewards, relocation choices, and terminations as examples.

Explore how reinforcement schedules guide managerial practice by differentiating continuous and intermittent reinforcement in employee motivation. Compare fixed and variable interval and ratio schedules and their effects on performance.

Explore behavior modification (ob mod) using reinforcement concepts in work settings; learn to identify critical behaviors, establish baselines, design reinforcement strategies, and evaluate performance improvements.