Organisational Behaviour For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome to Organisational Behaviour For Dummies! We already know that this book is of interest to you – not just because you’re reading this bit (although that does rather give it away), but because organisational behaviour is all about people at work. If you answer yes to the questions ‘Are you a person?’ and ‘Do you work or plan to work?’ then you can benefit from an understanding of organisational behaviour.

Organisational Behaviour For Dummies is meant to be fun to read, informative, and useful to you. We’ve bunched topics roughly into those that relate to employees, employers, and organisations, and you can dip into any topic you like without reading earlier chapters. Whether you’re studying organisation behaviour or just interested because of what you see happening in your workplace, we’re confident you’ll find information of interest in this book.

About This Book

We authors have many years’ experience (far too many to count and admit to) of teaching and training organisational behaviour topics. Our aim in this book is to introduce you to the key ideas and concepts that you’ll find both interesting and relevant to your studies.

We introduce you to the main organisational behaviour topics and explain why applying organisational behaviour principles at work can help make organisations more effective. We cover lots of relevant research and theories as we explain, but we also give lots of examples and descriptions so that the book is as much practical as theoretical.

We introduce you to the ideas and theories underpinning organisational behaviour and look at how to apply them in the workplace. You can therefore easily find out about the things you can do based on the theory we describe. We have as many years experience of applying psychology at work and working directly with organisations as we do of teaching the theory. This extensive experience is important because it means that we know the issues that are relevant to organisations, and we’ve worked with real people as opposed to just knowing the theory. We tell you theory throughout the book, but we also give practical advice about what this theory means to you as a manager.

For each topic, we cover the key points in the area, which can mean covering well-known theory and old research. You may have already heard of some of this information, but much of it is probably new to you. We include theory where we think doing so helps you understand the topic now. If ideas and practice have changed over time, we talk about those changes, too.

As well as covering essential background, we bring the topics right up to date and consider what they mean to the organisations of today, and what you can do with the information.

Conventions Used in This Book

To help you navigate through this book, we set up a few conventions:

Italics are used for emphasis and to highlight new words or defined terms.

Bold faced text indicates the key concept in a list.

Monofont is used for web and email addresses.

We try not to use jargon in this book, and when we do, we explain what we mean. We also restrict technical terms to those we think you need to know about. We’re more interested in why things happen than using fancy words to describe them.

We have a lot of experience working directly with organisations using organisational behaviour techniques. So, where relevant, we use stories from our own experience to illustrate points we’re making. Sometimes we adapt these examples to make sure that we don’t breach confidentiality, but we leave the relevant points in.

Foolish Assumptions

We assume that you’re reading this book because

You’re studying organisational behaviour and want an easy introduction to the topic.

You’re a manager who wants to better understand your own, and your employee’s, behaviour at work and how this impacts other people and the organisation as a whole.

You’re simply interested in the topic.

We don’t assume that you’ve work experience, and you don’t need experience of organisations in order to gain an understanding of organisational behaviour. Having said that, we do use a lot of examples set in the workplace when we explain topics, so you may find it easier to understand some of the things we cover if you do have work experience.

How This Book Is Organised

We include theory and real-life examples in this book and give lots of practical advice and suggestions about the topics we cover. We divided the book into five parts, and each part contains two or more chapters. The following sections outline each part in turn.

Part I: Getting to Grips with Organisational Behaviour

Before you look at the individual topics we discuss in later parts, check out Part I to get to grips with what organisational behaviour is and how an understanding of psychology and behaviour can help organisations.

This part gives you a good idea about the general topics that fall under the umbrella heading of ‘organisational behaviour’ and how people gather information on such topics (for example, through using workplace questionnaires or conducting face-to-face interviews with employees or managers). You find out here about changes that are happening in workplaces and how psychology can inform on these changes. You also start to discover how to best manage change (something we go into more detail about in Chapter 14).

Part II: All About the Employee

In Part II, we look at topics that relate to individuals and cover some of the ways in which people differ and how work can affect people.

Here, you find out about things like work attitudes, personality, and intelligence, and how they differ between people and what this means in the workplace. You explore the links between these things and behaviour at work and consider what this means for you as an employee or as a manager. You also find out how organisational behaviour can help you understand teams and groups, gain insight into why teams may fail and discover how to make your teams high performing.

Also within this part is a look at some of the negative things employees can experience at work, such as the costs and causes of stress, and how using your emotions in the workplace can negatively affect you. Throughout, we provide tips on how to manage stress.

Part III: All About the Employer

In Part III, we explore those organisational behaviour topics that we think are primarily under the control of employers.

Here, you find out about how different leadership styles influence people in the workplace and the different ways in which people can be motivated at work. You get to grips with some newer organisational behaviour topics such as the psychological contract, which is an unwritten agreement between employer and employee that can have negative consequences for both sides if broken or violated. This part also considers the importance of feeling fairly treated at work, and what can go wrong in a workplace if people feel they’ve been unfairly treated.

Part IV: All About the Organisation

In this part, we look at more general topics that affect organisations. You find out about the importance of job design, and how paying attention to job design issues can lead to more productive workplaces. You find out about organisational culture (the shared understanding in a workplace) and how important culture is, especially during times of change, and organisational change. You consider how people react to change and how to manage change.

Part IV also takes a look at the impact of an increasingly global workplace, and especially at how an understanding of different cultural values is becoming ever more important as organisations become more global. And in case that’s not enough, technology also gets a look in here – how it has changed, and is continuing to change, and what impact this change has on organisations and work.

Part V: All About Hiring and Developing People

How can organisations hire, and retain, the best people? Part V takes a look at an organisation’s key assets, people, from recruitment and assessment through to building the managers of tomorrow.

Part V delves into the variety of selection methods that are available to you and considers which of them work well and which work less well, providing advice on how you can put together a good selection process. In a similar manner, this part looks at assessment and appraisal issues and considers how you can successfully assess performance at work. Employee training and development, a consideration of the different types of training available to you and a look at how to best ensure that training transfers back to the workplace, wrap up this part.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

No For Dummies book is complete without the Part of Tens – a part full of handy chapters containing ten top topics or tips apiece. Here we offer a collection of interesting and helpful lists about hot organisational topics such as employee relations, stressed occupations, ways of managing your manager, up-and-coming organisational behaviour issues, and employee engagement.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book, we use helpful icons to draw your attention to different information:

When you see this icon, we’re highlighting a key point in...