Organizational Behavior

The new edition of Organizational Behavior includes a rich array of exercises, cases, and applied materials such as the Kouzes and Posner Leadership Practices Inventory and Pfeiffer Annual Edition exercises available in the OB Skills Workbook.  It also focuses more on the hot topic of ethics throughout the entire book to ensure it is contemporary and engaging.  The text also introduces two brand new key features ‘Finding the Leader in You" and "Taking it Online".  "Finding the Leader in You", discusses leading in the workplace in a personal and applied way.  The goal is to make the material more relevant and applicable to today's readers.  The "Taking it Online" feature will take the reader from the book to an online case, activity, self-assessment, or video clip of the leader they are reading about.

 

 

Test Your Knowledge in Organizational Behavior:

1. When a person’s human skills are so good that they always have relationships with other people who they can confidently ask for help and assistance at work, these skills increase the ________ of an individual.
1. Analytical capacity
2. Ethics mindfulness
3. Social capital
4. Multiculturalism
2. When a team leader evaluates the performance of all team members as “average”, the possibility for ___________ error in the performance appraisal is quite high.
1. Personal bias
2. Recency
3. Halo
4. Central tendency
3. What is a possible disadvantage of choosing to make a decision by the team rather than by the individual method?
1. People are better informed about the reason for the decision
2. It takes too long to reach a decision
3. More information is used to make the decision
4. It won’t ever result in a high-quality decision
4. If someone is interested in proxemics as a means of improving communication with others, that person would likely pay attention to his or her ____________.
1. Office layout
2. Status
3. Active listening skills
4. 360-degree feedback
5. The three basic power relationships are _________________.
1. Upward, downward, and lateral
2. Upward, downward, and oblique
3. Downward, lateral, and oblique
4. Downward, lateral, and external
6. Copying of the successful patterns of others is called _____________.
1. Mimicry
2. Scanning
3. Graphting
4. Strategy

Answers:

1. c
2. d
3. b
4. a
5. a
6. a

What makes a leader successful?

• Energy and adjustment or stress tolerance
• Prosocial power motivation
• Achievement orientation
• Emotional maturity
• Self-confidence
• Integrity
• Perseverance or tenacity
• Cognitive ability, intelligence, social intelligence
• Task-related knowledge
• Flexibility

“If you have difficulty with change you will have a harder time being successful as a leader” –Avon CEO Andrea Jung

Fun Facts:

The most powerful voice reporting from within Iran about the recent presidential election didn’t belong to a single person. Rather, it was a chorus of many voices. On July 16, 2009, a peak of 221,744 tweets mentioning Iran were sent out in one hour, and more than 23,750 tweets were tagged with #iranelection.

Amazon.com’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos coined a simple rule when it comes to sizing the firm’s product development teams: If two pizzas aren’t big enough to feed a team, it’s too big.

A Microsoft survey of 38,000 workers worldwide raised concerns about teamwork and productivity. Results showed that the average worker believes 69% of all meetings attended were ineffective.

A “jelly” is a co-worker community – people who meet together to do individual work in public places like libraries or coffee shops rather than at home.

At Root Learning, a small management consulting firm in Sylvania, Ohio, and also ranked by the Wall Street Journal as one of America’s Top Small Workplaces, the individual counts. Caricature drawings of each employee are hung in the loby with the goal of highlighting their interests and talents.

In the 20th century, left brain (analytical) thinking ruled. In today’s workplace, right brain (creative) and “whole brain” thinking provide the keys to success.