Challenges and opportunities for Organizational Behaviour

How to use Organizational Behavior concepts effectively?

Understanding organizational behavior has never been more important for managers. A quick look at a few of the dramatic changes now taking place in organizations.

For instance, the typical employee is getting older; more and more women and people of color are in the workplace; corporate downsizing and the heavy use of temporary workers are severing the bonds of loyalty that historically toed many employees to their employers; and global competition is requiring employees to become more flexible and to learn to cope with rapid changes. The war on terror has brought to the forefront the challenges of working with and managing people during uncertain times.

In short, there are a lot of challenges and opportunities today for managers to use OB concepts. In this article, we review some of the more critical issues confronting managers for which OB offers solutions or at least some meaningful insights toward solutions.

Responding to Globalization: Organizations are no longer constrained by national borders. Burger King is owned by a British, and McDonald’s sells hamburgers in Moscow. Exxon Mobil, a so called American company receives almost 75 percent of its revenues from sales outside the United States. New employees at Finland based Nokia are increasingly being recruited from India, China, and other developing countries with non-Finns now out numbering Finns at Nokia’s renowned research center in Helsinki. And all major automobile manufacturers now build cars outside their borders; for instance, Honda builds cars in Ohio; Ford in Brazil; Volkswagen in Mexico; and both Mercedes and BMW in South Africa. These examples illustrate that the world has become a global village. In the process, the manager’s job is changing.

Increased Foreign Assignments: If you’re a manager, you are increasingly likely to find yourself in a foreign assignment transferred to your employer’s operating division or subsidiary in another country. Once there, you’ll have to manage a workforce that is likely to be very different in needs, aspiration, and attitudes from those you were used to back home.

Working with people from Different Cultures: Even in your own country, you’re going to find yourself working with bosses, peers, and other employees who were born and raised in different cultures. What motivates you, may not motivate them. Or your style of communication may be straightforward and open, but they may find this approach uncomfortable and threatening. To work effectively with people from different cultures, you need to understand how their culture geography, and religion have shaped them, and how to adapt your management style to their differences.

Coping with Anti-capitalism Backlash: Capitalism’s focus on efficiency, growth, and profits may be generally accepted in the United States, Australia and Hong Kong, but these capitalistic values aren’t nearly as popular in places like France, the Middle East, and the Scandinavian countries. For instance, because Finland’s egalitarian values have created a “soak the rich” mentality among politicians, traffic fines are based on the offender’s income rather than the severity of the offence. So, when one of Finland’s richest men (he is heir to a sausage fortune), who was making close to $9 million a year, was ticketed for doing 80 kilometers per hour through a 40-kilometer zone in central Helsinki, the Finnish court hit him with a fine of $217,000.

Managers at global companies like McDonald’s Disney, and Coca-Cola have come to realize that economic values are not universally transferable. Management practices need to be modified to reflect the values of the different countries in which an organization operates.

Organizational Behaviour Concept, read here

Your Brain Is Hooked on Being Right

Your Brain Is Hooked on Being Right

I'm sure it's happened to you: You're in a tense team meeting trying to defend your position on a big project and start to feel yourself losing ground. Your voice gets louder. You talk over one of your colleagues and correct his point of view. He pushes back, so you go into overdrive to convince everyone you're right. It feels like an out of body experience — and in many ways it is. In terms of its neurochemistry, your brain has been hijacked.

In situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. The body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself — in this case from the shame and loss of power associated with being wrong — and as a result is unable to regulate its emotions or handle the gaps between expectations and reality. So we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him).

All are harmful because they prevent the honest and productive sharing of information and opinion. But, as a consultant who has spent decades working with executives on their communication skills, I can tell you that the fight response is by far the most damaging to work relationships. It is also, unfortunately, the most common.

That's partly due to another neurochemical process. When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It's a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we're in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right.

I've coached dozens of incredibly successful leaders who suffer from this addiction. They are extremely good at fighting for their point of view (which is indeed often right) yet they are completely unaware of the dampening impact that behavior has on the people around them. If one person is getting high off his or her dominance, others are being drummed into submission, experiencing the fight, flight, freeze or appease response I described before, which diminishes their collaborative impulses.

Luckily, there's another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It's activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. Your goal as a leader should be to spur the production of oxytocin in yourself and others, while avoiding (at least in the context of communication) those spikes of cortisol and adrenaline.

Here are a few exercises for you to do at work to help your (and others') addiction to being right:

Set rules of engagement. If you're heading into a meeting that could get testy, start by outlining rules of engagement. Have everyone suggest ways to make it a productive, inclusive conversation and write the ideas down for everyone to see. For example, you might agree to give people extra time to explain their ideas and to listen without judgment. These practices will counteract the tendency to fall into harmful conversational patterns. Afterwards, consider see how you and the group did and seek to do even better next time.

Listen with empathy. In one-on-one conversations, make a conscious effort to speak less and listen more. The more you learn about other peoples' perspectives, the more likely you are to feel empathy for them. And when you do that for others, they'll want to do it for you, creating a virtuous circle.

Plan who speaks. In situations when you know one person is likely to dominate a group, create an opportunity for everyone to speak. Ask all parties to identify who in the room has important information, perspectives, or ideas to share. List them and the areas they should speak about on a flip chart and use that as your agenda, opening the floor to different speakers, asking open-ended questions and taking notes.

Connecting and bonding with others trumps conflict. I've found that even the best fighters — the proverbial smartest guys in the room — can break their addiction to being right by getting hooked on oxytocin-inducing behavior instead.

Post by Judith E. Glaser

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/break_your_addiction_to_being.html

Best Practices in Interviewing

How to Interview Legally and Effectively

We all know how litigious our society has become in the area of employment-related issues. Every recruiter, hiring manager, executive, and department manager must realize that asking the wrong interview questions or making improper inquiries can lead to discrimination or wrongful-discharge lawsuits, and these suits can be won or lost based on statements made during the interview process.

Thus, it is important to incorporate risk management into your interviewing process to help minimize your firm's exposure to employment practices liability.

You, or your company, could be accused of asking improper interview questions or making discriminatory statements or comments that reflect bias. It is also possible to make assurances or promises during an interview that can be interpreted as binding contracts. Recognizing these potential danger areas is the best way to avoid saying the wrong thing during an interview.

Most companies have at least two people responsible for interviewing and hiring applicants. It's critical to have procedures to ensure consistency. Develop interviewing forms containing objective criteria to serve as checklists.

They ensure consistency between interviewers, as well as create documentation to support the decision if a discrimination charge is later filed by an unsuccessful applicant.

Interview Problems to Avoid
To minimize the risk of discrimination lawsuits, it’s important for interviewers to be familiar with topics that aren’t permissible as interview questions. For example, you shouldn’t ask a female applicant detailed questions about her husband, children and family plans.

Such questions can be used as proof of sex discrimination if a male applicant is selected for the position, or if the female is hired and later terminated. Older applicants shouldn’t be asked about their ability to take instructions from younger supervisors.

It is also important to avoid making statements during the interview process that could be alleged to create a contract of employment. When describing the job avoid using terms like "permanent," "career job opportunity," or "long term."

Interviewers should also avoid making excessive assurances about job security. Avoid statements that employment will continue as long as the employee does a good job. For example, suppose that an applicant is told that "if you do a good job, there's no reason why you can’t work here for the rest of your career." The applicant accepts the job and six months later is laid off due to personnel cutbacks.

This could lead to a breach of contract claim where the employee asserts that he or she can't be terminated unless it's proven that he or she didn’t do a "good job." Courts have, on occasion, held that such promises made during interviews created contracts of employment.

Ref: Mike Poskey

Reengineering Management: The Grandest Challenges

Reengineering Management: The Grandest Challenges

When the National Academy of Engineering recently offered a list of “grand engineering challenges” — everything from developing methods for carbon sequestration to reverse engineering the brain — management consultant Gary Hamel thought, why not do the same for business management?

What should be the great, ambitious goals for advancing management into the 21st century?

Hamel offers a list of these potential challenges on a Harvard Business Publishing blog, 25 Stretch Goals for Management. The list came from a two-day convening of top business and social thinkers including Eric Schmidt, Peter Senge and James Surowiecki.

Here are five ideas that made the final cut. Check out Hamel’s post for the full list.

Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.

Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology and theology, and from such concepts as democracies and markets.

Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.

De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.

Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than in the past.

What would you add to the list?

By: Sean Silverthorne

About Author: Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001.

Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNet and Executive Editor of ZDNet News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily's first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

Ten Things Great Bosses Know...

Ten Things Great Bosses Know...

1. The Most Important Thing Bosses Do Is Help OTHERS Succeed:

This sounds simple, but bosses got promoted because of their personal achievements. Now, they have to shift the focus from themselves to the growth of those who report to them. In other words, it's not about YOU, boss. It's about the troops. If they do well, you should, too.

2. Managers Cannot Treat Everyone The Same:

Great bosses learn how to customize their approach to each person. Yes, they hold true to core values, but don't assume that they have to act in identical ways with each staffer. They manage people as the complex individuals they are. And that's a real skill.

3. IQ Gets Bosses Only So Far; EQ Takes Them to The Next Level:

I'm talking about emotional intelligence: the ability to be self-aware, self-managing, socially aware and adept at managing relationships. This means knowing how to read the emotions of others as well as our own, to know how to power up or power down in synch with a situation, to build trust through expertise, integrity and empathy.

4. People Fall In Love With Ideas & Solutions Of Their Own Creation:

It's faster and easier to tell people what to do; but when people come up with their own ideas, they are much more invested in them. Anyone who's ever assigned stories knows this one. Journalists love the project they come up with more than the one that's given them. When we put our personal stamp on something, we care more about it. This applies in work assignments, negotiation and conflict resolution.

5. Coaching Is A Critical Skill:

Bosses who "fix" the work of others don't help them grow. Fixing may be faster, but has short-term impact. Coaching takes more time but the results last. Fixing is about the product, coaching is about the person. With good coaching, the person and the product improve.

6. Staffers Must See You, Not Your Evil Twin:

What's the difference between visionary and delusional, a roll-up-my-sleeves helper and a micromanager, or between confidence and arrogance? It's often in the the way the leader communicates and the staff perceives her. Leaders can't assume their employees can read their minds. It's hard work to make your intentions clear.

7. Conflict Doesn't Get Better If It Is Ignored:

The best bosses build cultures where conflict may be inevitable among smart, creative people, but it is handled extremely well. Differences are aired, values are clear, people are held accountable, and bullies don't win.

8. Intrinsic Motivation Is The Most Powerful:

The best work gets done when people motivate themselves. That's intrinsic motivation: Internal engines like competence, choice, meaningfulness and progress. Or the joy of working with a team, or achieving something solo. Great bosses know what drives each person they lead.

9. Managing Change Is A Constant Responsibility:

Change can make people very uncomfortable, but leaders must move people in new directions, toward new opportunities. Today's newsrooms are undergoing massive changes of culture, workflow, skill sets, formats and technology. Great leaders build bridges to the future.

10. Leaders Inspire Others:

There's meaning, honor and dignity in every form of honest work. Don't fear that you will look corny by sharing a vision, a passion, or a dream. The best bosses make us feel better about ourselves, our work and our goals. Dare to inspire.

Employee Orientation

Employee Orientation - Keeping New Employees on Board

Orienting employees to their workplaces and their jobs is one of the most neglected functions in many organizations. An employee handbook and piles of paperwork is not sufficient anymore when it comes to welcoming a new employee to your organization. The most frequent complaints about new employee orientation are that it is overwhelming, boring, or that the new employee is left to sink or swim. The result is often a confused new employee who is not productive and is more likely to leave the organization within a year.

With an ongoing labor crunch, developing an effective employee orientation experience continues to be crucial. It is critical that new hire programs are carefully planned to educate the employee to the values, history and who is who in the organization. A well thought out orientation program, whether it lasts one day or six months, will help not only in retention of employees, but also in productivity. Organizations that have good orientation programs get their people up to speed faster, have better alignment between what the employees do and what the organization needs them to do, and have lower turnover rates.

Purposes of Orientation

Employers have to realize that orientation isn't just a nice gesture put on by the organization. It serves as an important element of the recruitment and retention process. Some key purposes are:

1. To Reduce Startup Costs
Proper orientation can help the employee get "up to speed" much more quickly, thereby reducing the costs associated with learning the job.

2. To Reduce Anxiety
Any employee, when put into a new, strange situation, will experience anxiety that can impede his or her ability to learn to do the job. Proper orientation helps to reduce anxiety that results from entering into an unknown situation, and helps provide guidelines for behavior and conduct, so the employee doesn't have to experience the stress of guessing.

3. To Reduce Employee Turnover
Employee turnover increases as employees feel they are not valued, or are put in positions where they can't possibly do their jobs. Orientation shows that the organization values the employee, and helps provide the tools necessary for succeeding in the job.

4. To Save Time For Supervisor & CoWorkers
Simply put, the better the initial orientation, the less likely supervisors and co‑workers will have to spend time teaching the employee.

5. To Develop Realistic Job Expectations, Positive Attitudes and Job Satisfaction
It is important that employees learn as soon as possible what is expected of them, and what to expect from others, in addition to learning about the values and attitudes of the organization. While people can learn from experience, they will make many mistakes that are unnecessary and potentially damaging.

Examining Worker Productivity (Part 1)

Kathryn Shaw's detailed research inside steel mills set a higher standard for how to evaluate the impact of management practices on worker productivity.

If you're a manager, you've heard it all before: Build teams, develop trust, empower your workforce, be proactive, etc., etc., etc. There's no shortage of management gurus and consultants to sell you expensive advice about how to make your workforce more productive. And no wonder. With the rise of globalization and an ultra-competitive economy, managers who don't understand the imperatives of increasing efficiency and productivity and, ultimately, shareholder value are quickly "pursuing other interests."

But how do managers know which of the many human resource practices currently being heralded as innovative really work? Human resource departments often propose that managers adopt new practices such as offering employees more flexible hours, job sharing, employment guarantees, and ongoing training. One study in 2000, for instance, found that 85 percent of 700 companies surveyed had implemented at least one of these relatively new HR practices.

Meanwhile, productivity has been on the rise since the mid-nineties. Is there a link between the two trends? Hard evidence that innovative HR practices boost employee productivity—much less the bottom line—is hard to find. And that's a problem for thoughtful managers. After all, you'd never spend money on a machine tool or computer unless you had good reason to think you could demonstrate a reasonable return on your investment.

In a series of groundbreaking studies, economist Kathryn Shaw, the Ernest C. Arbuckle Professor of Economics at the Business School, identified quantifiable links between imaginative HR practices and increased productivity. Characterized by deep analysis of individual plants and data collection across an entire industry, her work sets a new and higher standard for research in the developing subspecialty of personnel economics.

Shaw, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, began her study of productivity while a member of the faculty at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Fittingly enough, her work focused on the steel industry, the historic heart of western Pennsylvania's economy.

Although she grew up in California's San Fernando Valley, Shaw was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and many of her relatives had a connection to the mills, as engineers or accountants or plumbers, or simply residents who knew the local economy depended upon Big Steel. When money became available to do research in the mills, she saw it as "a great opportunity to get inside firms and see how they improve performance."

"There is no business that is more interesting to visit—you can really 'see' what matters and what doesn't,” she says. "The mills are also a work of art—of color and drama and people—and, in fact, I have a collection of oils and original photographs of them." Shaw now works on productivity in high-tech companies where she sees people sitting at computer terminals—low key in comparison.

After months of observation of 36 integrated steel finishing lines, Shaw found that plants that used the most innovative human resource management system were rewarded with a gross annual payout of $2.24 million more annually per line than those with traditional systems.

More recently, Shaw examined the effect of new information technology and new human resource practices on another classic old-economy industry: valve production. "When people think of IT, they usually think of computers on desks," she says, "but in this case the technology was embedded into the machine tools."

Plants that combined the most advanced machinery with better training and development of better employee communication and teamwork skills were able to produce customized products, a significant competitive advantage over shops that could produce only standard valves, she says. Workers in the advanced plants need more than excellent mechanical skills. They must be trained to be flexible and to work on varied products at the same time, and to take more responsibility for solving problems as they arise.

Azim Premji - "My Lessons in Life"

Azim Premji - "My Lessons in Life"

An Article Address by Azim Premji in the "Shaping Young Minds Program" (SYMP) organized by AIMA in collaboration with the Bombay Management Association (BMA) in Mumbai on "My Lessons in Life".

I am very happy to be here with you. It is always wonderful to be with young people. As my hair turned from black, to salt and pepper and finally salt without the pepper, I have begun to realize the importance of youth. At the same time, I have begun to truly appreciate some of the lessons I have learnt along the way. I hope you will find them useful when you plan your own career and life.

First

The first thing I have learnt is that we must always begin with our strengths. There is an imaginary story of a rabbit. The rabbit was enrolled in a rabbit school. Like all rabbits, it could hop very well but could not swim. At the end of the year, the rabbit got high marks in hopping but failed in swimming. The parents were concerned. They said, "Forget about hopping. You are anyway good at it. Concentrate on swimming." They sent the rabbit for tuitions in swimming. And guess what happened? The rabbit forgot how to hop! As for swimming, have you ever seen a rabbit swim? While it is important for us to know what we are not good at, we must also cherish what is good in us. That is because it is only our strengths that can give us the energy to correct our weaknesses.

Second

The second lesson I have learnt is that a rupee earned is of far more value than five found. My friend was sharing me the story of his eight year-old niece. She would always complain about the breakfast. The cook tried everything possible, but the child remained unhappy. Finally, my friend took the child to a supermarket and brought one of those ready-to-cook packets. The child had to cut the packet and pour water in the dish. The child found the food to be absolutely delicious? The difference was that she has cooked it! In my own life, I have found that nothing gives as much satisfaction as earning our rewards. In fact, what is gifted or inherited follows the old rule of come easy, go easy. I guess we only know the value of what we have if we have struggled to earn it.


Third

The third lesson I have learnt is no one bats a hundred every time. Life has many challenges. You win some and lose some. You must enjoy winning. But do not let it go to the head. The moment it does, you are already on your way to failure. And if you do encounter failure along the way, treat it as an equally natural phenomenon. Don't beat yourself for it or any one else for that matter! Accept it, look at your own share in the problem, learn from it and move on. The important thing is, when you lose, do not lose the lesson.


Fourth

The fourth lesson I have learnt is the importance of humility. Sometimes, when you get so much in life, you really start wondering whether you deserve all of it. We have so much to be grateful for. Our parents, our teachers and our seniors have done so much for us that we can never repay them. Many people focus on the shortcomings, because obviously no one can be perfect. But it is important to first acknowledge what we have received. Nothing in life is permanent but when a relationship ends, rather than becoming bitter, we must learn to savor the memory of the good things while they lasted.


Fifth

The fifth lesson I learnt is that we must always strive for excellence. One way of achieving excellence is by looking at those better than ourselves. Keep learning what they do differently. But excellence cannot be imposed from the outside. We must also feel the need from within. It must involve not only our mind but also our heart and soul. Excellence is not an act but a habit. I remember the inspiring lines of a poem, which says that your reach must always exceed your grasp. That is heaven on earth. Ultimately, your only competition is yourself.


Sixth

The sixth lesson I have learnt is never give up in the face of adversity. It comes on you suddenly without warning. Always keep in mind that it is only the test of fire that makes fine steel. A friend of mine shared this incident with me. His eight-year old daughter was struggling away at a jigsaw puzzle. She kept at it for hours but could not succeed. Finally, it went beyond her bedtime. My friend told her, "Look, why don't you just give up? I don't think you will complete it tonight. Look at it another day." The daughter looked with a strange look in her eyes, "But, dad, why should I give up? All the pieces are there! I have just got to put them together!" If we persevere long enough, we can put any problem into its perspective.


Seventh

The seventh lesson I have learnt is that while you must be open to change, do not compromise on your values. Mahatma Gandhiji often said that you must open the windows of your mind, but you must not be swept off your feet by the breeze. Values like honesty, integrity, consideration and humility have survived for generations. At the end of the day, it is values that define a person more than the achievements. Do not be tempted by short cuts. The short cut can make you lose your way and end up becoming the longest way to the destination.


Final

And the final lesson I learnt is that we must have faith in our own ideas even if everyone tells us that we are wrong. There was once a newspaper vendor who had a rude customer. Every morning, the Customer would walk by, refuse to return the greeting, grab the paper off the shelf and throw the money at the vendor. The vendor would pick up the money, smile politely and say, "Thank you, Sir." One day, the vendor's assistant asked him, "Why are you always so polite with him when he is so rude to you? Why don't you throw the newspaper at him when he comes back tomorrow?" The vendor smiled and replied, "He can't help being rude and I can't help being polite. Why should I let his rude behavior dictate my politeness?

I hope you achieve success in whatever way you define it and what gives you the maximum happiness in life. "Remember, those who win are those who believe they can."