Article archive / January 1, 2013
Originally published: . Volume 4, No. 5. Source pages: 14, 15.
Michael Hitt, Chet Miller, and Adrienne Colella Wiley, 2011
Peel back a few layers of the onion from Organizational Behavior and we have all sorts of wonderfully useful knowledge from the essential areas of applied organizational-industrial psychology.
In a comprehensive look at the psychology of people and their relationship to task performance, including how they make decisions separately and together, and how they behave in groups, the authors give us the important big picture.
What does psychology – personality, motivation, group dynamics, human communication, judgment errors, and a host of other areas rich in science, have to offer those who have a leadership role? This book gives salient answers to the question, and is well worth the entry fee.
Authors Michael Hitt (Texas A&M), Chet Miller (U. of Houston), and Tulane’s Adrienne Colella lay out the scientific and applied information for the study of people and human social systems in organizations. If anyone is looking for where personality, motivation, social psychology, and other needed topics were hiding out, here they are.
Dr. Adrienne Colella holds the McFarland Distinguished Chair at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. She is a Fellow in the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and the American Psychological Association. She recently completed her term as president of SIOP, the largest group of IO psychologists in the country.
Dr. Colella has left her mark on Organizational Behavior, key chapters and topics link with her expertise in diversity and her research on issues related to people with disabilities. She has received numerous grants for this line of work including support from the New Jersey Developmental Disabilities Council and Texas A & M University. Her work has been published in top journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology and the Academy of Management Journal.
The third edition of Organizational Behavior opens by placing the reader firmly into the framework of the strategic approach and idea that people are the foundation for the successes of any organization. OB provides the psychology behind this comprehensive business objective – what we know about people, how they relate to one another, what characteristics of social organization are conducive to their productivity. This and a host of other applied psychology knowledge sets, make up the text. The work aims to help business students, managers, top executives, middle and lower managers, but it is also the foundational knowledge for anyone in a leadership role.
A blend of psychology helps the reader understand the “social capital” of the organization and brings together individual, interpersonal, team, organizational, and inter-organizational characteristics. The authors use the “lens of an organization’s strategy” as a guiding principle, layering the applied issues on this heuristic so that readers remember why it matters.
One way they accomplish this is to give the reader a rich and varied fabric of information with fascinating case studies: Whole Foods, Apple, FedEx, Men’s Wearhouse, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, are included, just for starters. The authors link the real world to the topics and strategic importance, starting and ending each chapter with connections to the strategic value of the topic.
Authors also explain applications of the concepts in sections on “Experiencing Organizational Behavior” and “Managerial Advice,” regularly appearing at chapter ends, to help readers apply the new information. Also included are critical concerns of the times in the closing pages of each chapter with “Thinking about Ethics.”
“Human Resource Management Applications,” “Building Your Human Capital,” and “Team Exercise,” address business needs of readers directly, providing interesting and compelling examples in self- assessments and team exercises. Such topics include, “Experiencing Emotional Labor,” “An Assessment of Low Tolerance for Change,” “Are You A Transformational Leader?” and “Communication Barriers.”
Authors also include exercises for student involvement in class discussion, resources from Wiley for instructors such as the resources guide, test bank, PowerPoint presentations, and web quizzes. There is also a companion website.
The text covers Part I, The Strategic Lens, with chapters on the Strategic Approach to Organizational Behavior; Organizational Diversity; and Organizational Behavior in a Global Context.
Part II is Individual Processes. This part includes chapters on Learning and Perception; Personality, Intelligence, Attitudes, and Emotions; Work Motivation; and Stress and Well-Being.
Part III is Groups, Teams, and Social Processes. This section includes chapters on Leadership; Communication; Decision-Making by Individuals and Groups; Groups and Teams; Conflict, Negotiation, Power, and Politics.
The last section, Part IV, is The Organizational Context, and includes Organizational Structure and Culture, and also Organizational Change and Development.
With their “Strategic lens” approach, authors show how individual learning, personality, motivation, emotions, decision-making, and many other areas of psychological science, bear on the goals of business organizations. Through his strategic viewpoint they also examine the organizational context of organizational design, culture, and organizational change.
In chapters on leadership, teams, and communication, as with other areas of the book, the authors lay out a wealth of important IO psychology for the readers, information that relates the challenges anyone trying to lead in today’s society will find in their way.
Some examples of the information provided by Organizational Behavior include Chapter 8, “Leadership,” where authors define and describe theories of leadership, including transactional leadership that focuses on the social exchanges and how leaders respond to the needs and behaviors of those they want to lead.
Just one of the many interesting topics is the concept of transformational leadership. In this section authors point out for the reader ideas that integrate concepts from behavioral, contingency, and transformational leader research and theory.
They list the behaviors for transformational leaders, drawing from the research of Yukl and Van Fleet, “Theory & research on leadership in organizations,” in Dunnette & Hough’s Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
• Transformational leaders articulate a clear and appealing vision that is beneficial to followers • They delegate significant authority and responsibility • They eliminate unnecessary bureaucratic constraints • They promote cooperation and teamwork • They modify organizational structure and policies
The next chapters, “Communication,” “Decision Making by Individuals and Groups,” and “Groups and Teams,” spell out in detail the essential nature, goals, and challenges of group endeavors.
In Communication we learn (or remind ourselves) that communication is of strategic importance and vital to organizational performance, regardless of what type of organization we are dealing with – two people or two million people. Communication aligns goals and behaviors and “few things are accomplished in organizations without it,” the authors write. Authors show different patterns or networks of common communication structures: centralized, decentralized, connected and hierarchical. They show how communication can be downward, upward, and horizontal, or formal and informal.
Barriers to communication include information overload, distortion, jargon, time, status differences, and poor listening skills. Overcoming these and other barriers requires some tap-dancing, they remind us.
They recommend “communication audits” to investigate if things are going well or poorly, and explain the need for an open climate, one in which the right methods include encouraging feedback loops.
They point to the common problems. One example they note as referred to by communication expert Virgil Scudder. He calls it the “me to me to me” communication, based in an ignorance of the audience’s differences and characteristics.
Chapter 10 is “Decision Making by Individuals and Groups.” Here authors provide a meaningful overview of the fundamentals of decision-making with the major decision-making styles, and sections on cognitive bias, moods, emotions, and pitfalls in decision-making and human judgment. The authors explain that the strategic importance of decision-making is critical for organizational success, because major decisions are not only at the top of the organization but also all throughout.
Steps in effective problem-solving techniques are laid out for the reader, and descriptions of individual decision-making styles. They explore Jung’s theory of type, and information on the Myers Briggs types called Sensing, Intuition, Thinking and Feeling, so popular today in business and industry. They describe the sensing decision style that is focused on gathering specific and detailed information and the intuitive style that works mostly on abstractions. They point out that both styles can be the most effective style when matched to the style demands of the task. One example is from Steven and Burley’s research, “Piloting the rocket of radical innovation.” In a Fortune 500 company where the sensing group identified ideas worth $15.2 million of profit and the intuitive group, displaying greater creativity, identified ideas worth $197.5 million of profit.
Next the authors review risk-taking and cognitive biases. They include descriptions of judgment errors common to humans including the “confirmation bias,” mental shortcuts, the tendency to seek information only supportive of one’s belief, the ease of recall bias, anchoring bias, and the sunk-cost bias or the “we’ve come this far already” error.
The authors outline problems with groupthink, when groups focus too much psychological energy on avoiding conflict or generating consensus, at the expense of self-critique.
The authors outline the characteristics of groupthink in a clear, succinct list, including:
• self-censorship – members who recognize errors remain silent • pressure – members apply social pressure to anyone with differences of opinions • rationalization – “members build complex rationales that effectively discount warnings or information that conflict with their thinking” • invulnerability – feeling that they are invulnerable • mindguards – some members work to “shield the group from any facts, criticism, or evaluation …”
Authors also point out that groupthink includes a feeling of superiority and of stereotyping outsiders, especially that block possibility of compromise with others who represent differences.
Next authors describe diversity-based infighting, and how when it becomes extreme, the group members have no mechanism for channeling conflict constructively. Group techniques are outlined, including brainstorming, the Delphi technique, “dialectical inquiry,” and “devil’s advocacy,” as group development methods.
The authors include a fascinating section on comparison of individual vs group decision-making, and when each might be the best direction for organizational development.
Throughout the text real world case examples are included and this chapter 11 opens with a review of from Starbucks, “Groups and Teams.” The chapter provides a description of “identity groups” and how social identity is part of the social fabric in organizations, with the natural formation of people into these types of subgroups.
A section on “Virtual Teams” brings in modern conditions where technology is used in work groups, the authors pointing out strengths and weaknesses of the virtual team, and research about ways to compensate for or manage problems.
In one example, authors note that virtual teams are more effective when they were empowered to make their own decisions, and when lead by transformational leaders. They report on research where successful virtual teams have increased productivity and saved companies millions of dollars.
Authors continue in describing self-managing teams, using McKinsey and Company consulting project teams as examples. They explain how team effectiveness is measured, as well as outcome criteria of shared knowledge and whether the team members are emotionally satisfied.
A section on team effectiveness examines “process loss.” Process loss is the situation where team performance drops because energy is used maintaining the team vs reaching team goals. Diversity, personality, team size, roles, structure, and other factors are described.
In the chapter on conflict, “Conflict, Negotiation, Power, and Politics,” authors explain functional and dysfunctional types of conflict and what are the common sources of conflict in the typical organization or group. They look at escalation of conflict and outcomes from the organizational framework perspective.
And the authors also describe three types of conflict: personal, procedural, and substantive, and show that for the first two task performance goes down as conflict increases. However, in case of substantive type conflict, the relationship between the degree of conflict to performance is an inverted U. So in this situation, when the degree of conflict rises to moderately high levels, performance goes up.
Causes and outcomes for conflict, including lose-lose, win-lose, compromise, and win-win, are discussed, and along with a section on the types of power.
Organizational Behavior last sections, including reviews on social structure, culture, and development are essential for those who want to understand the nature of human systems.
This exceptional text should be a foundation for psychologists, even those working in other areas, and especially for those who have lost track of social and personality as it impacts normal human behavior.
Early last year, Dr. Colella explained to the Times that she feels IO can offer a comprehensive set of services to benefit others. “We help individuals through coaching and welfare programs, and EAP programs,” she said. “I teach in a business school and I have all my career,” she said.
“One of my basic tenets is that nothing happens in an organization without people.” And, she said, “IO psychology is concerned with the welfare and functioning of those people. So I think it has a huge impact.”
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