Organization Behavior, Buchanan and Huczynski (Chapter 1)

1. Organizational Behavior: is concerned with the question of how human interactions and processes within organizations evolve, and why things occur as they do.  Also, how to get these interactions to serve a positive purpose?  Term first used by Fritz Jules Roethlisberger (1898-1974) He began using the term in the 1950's.  
2. basic conflict in organizations between individual and organizational aspirations
3. perspectives:  postivist vs. constructivist
1. constuctivist:  shared societal experiences lead to realized meaning, study processes that work
2. positivist: causal theories can be tested through regulated experiments, not always applicable to multivariate, ill-definable, interleaved, amorphous, imeasurable social phenomena.  Variance theories test effect when measurable variables are changed
4. theories: variance theory vs. process theory
5. evidence based management
6. "multiple stakeholders, inclusive adjenda":
7. organizational dilemma- meet objective and treat people well
8. organizations are necessarily stratified
9. Clarence H. Eckles, Dairy Cattle and Milk Production 1956 -> Gray and Starkt 1984
10. PESTLE analysis- Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Ecological context of an organization
11. two issues in particular are important:  Organization Outcomes, quality of Organizational Life
12. fundamental attribution error-blaming a member of the organization instead of the organization itself
13. Tools of the Social Scientist:  observation, questioning, documentation
14. Tools of Organizational Behavioral Action seeker:  
1. staff training
2. psychometric assessment
3. employee communication
4. job redesign
5. teambuilding
6. reorganization
7. organizational change and cultural change
8. human resource management
15. Principles of Management:
1. control the number of change variables, because managers can't typically focus on more than a few at any one time Rousseau, 2006
2. Factors which affect management decisions:
1. evidence
2. experience
3. Based on research conducted by J. P. MacDuffie of automotive plants, powerful management systems won out in terms of productiveness. (Pfeffer and Sutton 2006)
4. John Purcell defined three requirements for good performance:
1. ability
2. motivation
3. behavior
5.  BATH Model- good HR leads to stimulating workers