Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior - Softcover

Jennifer M. George; Gareth R. Jones

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0536862613 ISBN 13: 9780536862617

Publisher: Pearson, 2006

Synopsis

Information Technology ...Globalization of Business ...New Challenges in Organizational Behavior Call for a New Approach! In the third edition of Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior, authors Jennifer George and Gareth Jones merge comprehensive coverage with outstanding applications to show you how to best manage the growing challenges associated with working in today's modem organizations.

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer M. George is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology in the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University. She received her B.A. in Psychology/Sociology from Wesleyan University, her M.B.A. in Finance from New York University, and her Ph.D. in Management and Organizational Behavior from New York University. Prior to joining the faculty at Rice University, she was a Professor in the Department of Management at Texas A&M University.

Professor George specializes in Organizational Behavior and is well known for her research on mood and emotion in the workplace, their determinants, and their effects on various individual and group level work outcomes. She is the author of many articles in leading peer-reviewed journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and Psychological Bulletin. One of her papers won the Academy of Management's Organizational Behavior Division Outstanding Competitive Paper Award and another paper won the Human Relations Best Paper Award. She is, or has been, on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, and Journal of Managerial Issues, was a consulting editor for the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and is a member of the Organizational Frontiers Series editorial board. She is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and a member of the Society for Organizational Behavior. Professor George also has co-authored a leading textbook on management.

Gareth Jones received both his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Lancaster, U.K. He previously held teaching and research appointments at the University of Warwick, Michigan State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Jones specializes in both organizational behavior and organizational theory and is well known for his research on socialization, culture, and applying transaction cost analysis to explain many forms of intraorganizational and interorganizational behavior. He also has published many articles in leading journals of the field and is one of the most prolific authors in the Academy of Management Review. One of his articles won the Academy of Management Journal Best Paper Award. He is, or has been, on the editorial review boards of the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Management, and Management Inquiry.

Professor Jones is a professor of Management at the Lowry Mays College and Graduate School of Business at Texas A&M University, where he is involved actively in teaching and research in Organizational Behavior and related fields.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The challenges of understanding and managing organizational behavior have become greater as the result of the information technology revolution and the globalization of business. The challenges have also become greater because organizational behavior scholars and researchers are developing new and improved theories and models that explain why and how people and groups behave as they do. Concepts like personality, trust, creativity, affect, moods, emotions, virtual teams, telecommuting, and knowledge management are now found in all the central research areas of organizational behavior such as learning, motivation, leadership, group behavior and communication. Our challenge in revising Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior has been to put both these sides of the coin together. First, to summarize the most important elements of this new knowledge and provide a thorough and contemporary account of organizational behavior (OB). Second, to convey this information to students in a readable and applied form so they can understand and enjoy it. Nowhere is this clearer than in our increased attention to the effects of information technology in the third edition.

Recognizing the sweeping changes that new information technology (IT) is currently having on people and tasks inside organizations, we make IT a major contemporary theme in the new edition. Through new text material and rich examples in opening cases and chapter insights we show dramatically how most aspects of OB are being impacted by computer-based linking and coordinating systems both inside (by the intranet) and outside (by the Internet) organizations. The use of IT at all levels and in all parts of the organization has changed the nature of the jobs and work employees perform, and allowed people to work more efficiently and effectively. IT encompass a broad array of communication media including voice mail, e-mail, voice conferencing, video-conferencing, the Internet, groupware and corporate intranets, cell phones, fax machines, personal digital assistants, intelligent agents, and so on. Chapter by chapter we examine many of the specific ways in which IT impacts people, their roles and jobs, and the organization as a whole. We discuss the many profound ways IT is impacting organizational behavior including:

• Using IT to enhance creativity and learning.
• Effects of IT on job satisfaction, why dot-com companies are attractive to employees and problems traditional companies have had in recruiting and retaining employees.
• Using automated (i.e., computerized) hiring programs to mitigate the effects of stereotyping and discrimination against employees and to crack down on e-mail harassment.
• Using IT and the Internet to recruit and train employees.
• Organizational learning and knowledge management through IT.
• Using IT to develop new ways to attract, motivate, and retain talented employees.
• Work-life linkages through such mechanisms as telecommuting.

We have also continued to strive to ensure that our book (1) is comprehensive, integrated, and makes important theories accessible and interesting to students; (2) is current, up-to-date, and contains expanded coverage of issues of contemporary significance such as ethics, diversity, and global management; and (3) uses rich, real-life examples of people and organizations to bring key concepts to life and provide clear managerial implications; (4) is experiential and applied. Our end-of-chapter experiential exercises contained in the Organizational Behavior in Action section give students the opportunity to catch the excitement of organizational behavior as a fluid, many-faceted discipline with multiple levels of analysis.

COMPREHENSIVE AND INTEGRATED COVERAGE

Most of the chapters of our book have been significantly revised to incorporate the most recent theoretical advances in organizational behavior into our book. Also, we have changed almost all of our opening and closing cases and insight boxes to build upon the contemporary themes that characterize coverage in our book. However, we have been careful to organize the material in an integrated way so that each part of the book builds on the previous parts, and inside each part, each chapter builds on the material in earlier chapters in a clear and logical fashion. In this way, students develop an integrated and cohesive understanding of organizational behavior. The comprehensive and integrated coverage in Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior includes the following highlights:

• The book opens with an account of organizational behavior in Chapter 1 that demonstrates its real-world relevance and that outlines the key challenges managers face in today's global environment—managing information technology, diversity, ethics, competitive advantage, and global issues. New issues include using information technologies to increase employee creativity and organizational learning.
• An up-to-date treatment of personality and ability and their implications for modern organizations is provided in Chapter 2, with detailed coverage of the Big Five Model of Personality. Expanded coverage is presented of emotional intelligence, creativity, openness to experience, and sources of entrepreneurship, the link between emotional intelligence and leadership; and training requirements posed by IT.
• In Chapter 3, we present a model that explains clearly to students the relationship between work values, attitudes, and moods and their implications for such organizational behaviors as citizenship behavior. Two types of organizational commitment—affective commitment and continuance commitment—are identified and we examine the determinants and potential consequence of affective commitment. New to this edition is an updated and expanded discussion of work moods and a discussion of trust.
• In Chapter 4, we use a unique approach in examining diversity from the perspective of perception and attribution-fundamental individual processes that operate in every organization. New to this edition is expanded coverage of sexual harassment and ways to combat it, and discussion of physically challenged workers.
• Chapter 5 has extensive coverage of recent approaches to learning such as vicarious learning, self-control, and self-efficacy. New to this edition is expanded discussion of organizational learning, the learning organization, and the effects of knowledge management on organizational learning.
• Three chapters on motivation (Chapters 6, 7, and 8). We offer an integrated approach to understanding work motivation, one of the most important challenges in organizational behavior. First, we present the overall model of motivation and then explain how the different theories of motivation are related and complementary and offer an in-depth treatment of procedural justice theory. Then, building on basic theories of motivation, we discuss job design, goal setting, performance appraisal, pay, and careers as motivation tools. The inclusion of social information processing theory and a discussion of the limits to goal setting are developed here as is our analysis of ethical career management, career management that supports diversity, and career management in an era of dual-career couples, contingent workers and 360-degree performance appraisals. Also discussed is how high-tech companies are using innovative outcomes to attract, motivate, and retain talented employees. New to this edition is discussion of scientific management in "new" kinds of organizations like Internet companies and how the use of stock-options at high-tech companies have prompted other more traditional organizations to increase their use of merit pay.
• Chapter 9 on stress and work-life linkages contains new discussion of effects of information technology on workplace stress; also how working in cross-cultural teams can be stressful, but why it is important to work through misunderstandings and potential conflicts because of the advantages these teams bring. Also, there is a major new section on telecommuting including recent research findings.
• Two chapters (Chapters 10 and 11) set forth an integrated coverage of groups as the basic building blocks of organizations. After describing the nature of work groups and the ways in which groups control their members, we focus on what makes for effective work groups in organizations. The discussion of process losses and gains, social loafing, and important types of groups such as the top management team, self-managed work teams, and R&D teams are innovations. New to this edition is material on how office design can be used to capture advantages of social facilitation and allow for teamwork while also giving workers private work space. Also we include a new discussion of conformity and national culture with examples of high conformity in Japan. Finally, a new section on virtual teams reflects the information technology theme.
• Chapter 12 contains a new discussion of research on and new material on leadership and emotional intelligence and recent research on gender and punishment.
• Chapter 13 contains a new discussion of information available over the Internet, such as domestic and global email, ethics of surfing the Web at work, a discussion of electronic trails, information technology, and information overload. It also includes a discussion of the paperless office and the effects of increased use of electronic communication.
• At the intergroup and organizational level of analysis we ,provide a two-chapter (Chapters 15 and 16) integrated treatment of organizational design, organizational structure, and organizational culture. After discussing the basic building blocks of organizational structure and culture, we provide an up-to-date account of the three most important factors affecting the design of structure and culture: the organization's environment, strategy, and technology. This discussion includes coverage of cross-functional team structures and ethical cultures. Innovative use of a Web-based intranet to speed product development and improve coordination between subunits and new information about the way IT affects organizational structure is integrated throughout the chapter such as decentralization and integration and the idea of the boundaryless and virtual organization.
• In addition to the extensive global material integrated throughout the whole text a whole chapter (Chapter 17) examines all aspects of managing global organizations. We want students to see how differences in attitudes, values, ethics, and ways of doing business in different countries present many challenges for managers. Coverage of cross-cultural differences in communication and understanding of linguistic styles is presented in Chapter 13. New to this edition is coverage of global video-teleconferencing, using IT to facilitate global communication, and effects of cross-cultural differences on the transfer of information.
• The last chapter of the book (Chapter 19) continues to provide what we believe to be the most current treatment of organizational change in any organizational behavior textbook on the market. This chapter we offer an in-depth treatment of restructuring, reengineering, total quality management, and other approaches to increasing organizational effectiveness in today's increasingly competitive global environment. New to this edition is a discussion of e-engineering and of the effects of information systems on organizational roles and tasks.

EXTENSIVE LEARNING PACKAGE

We believe that no other organizational behavior textbook has the sheer range of learning features for students that our book has. These features—some integrated into the text and some at the end of each chapter or part—ease the student's way through the study of organizational behavior. All in all, these features were crafted so that instructors could actively involve their students in the chapter material. They provide an interactive approach to teaching organizational behavior that helps students understand and appreciate the complexity of the challenges facing managers and workers in today's business environment.

Opening Curse
The student enters the chapter via an in-depth, real-world example of people and organizations that focuses attention on the upcoming chapter issues.

Running Glossary
To address the abundance of terminology that an introductory student needs to assimilate, we have included a running glossary that provides a definition for every key term in the book.

Advice to Managers
In each chapter, we have included two or more managerial summaries called "Advice to Managers," where the practical implications of key organizational behavior theories and concepts are clearly outlined. These take-home lessons extend the chapter material into the realm of application in ways that students can actually use when they enter the workplace.

Insight Boxes
Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior reflects all the current and pressing concerns facing organizations and their managers and workers today. We have created interesting real-world examples geared to the subject matter of the chapter to engage the student and to bring these concerns to life. These "Insights" are not mere summaries of academic studies or contrived situations, but are stories from the frontline of today's businesses. They are different from similar features in most other textbooks in that they are directly integrated into the text material to highlight and illustrate the most significant points. We have deliberately set up these features this way because our experience has shown that students are more likely to read material that is seamlessly woven into the fabric of the chapter rather than set apart.

Organizational Behavior in Action
The sections entitled "Organizational Behavior in Action" are found at the end of each chapter and include a wide range of activities to help students build the skills they will need as future managers and workers. We have carefully developed the features within these modules with both large and small classes in mind, as well as individual and group assignments. Our overriding goal is to help students appreciate that there are no absolute answers to organizational behavior issues and that they must instead learn how to analyze particular situations, compare alternative courses of action, and generate options for solution.

Building Diagnostic Skills
This experiential feature engages students by challenging them to explore, analyze, and diagnose actual organizational behavior, based on what they have just learned in the chapter. This exercise draws on students' own experience base to apply theories diagnostically to real situations from their own lives and to organizations and companies that they select.

Research on the Internet: A Manager's Tool
Each chapte...

Edition details

• Publisher: Pearson
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0536862613
• ISBN 13: 9780536862617
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English