Organizational behaviour is the study of what people think, feel and do in and around organizations. It also encompasses how organizations interact with their environment. Organizations are groups of people who work interdependently toward some purpose. Organizations are collective entities. Organizational behaviour theories are important because they influence organizational events (1), they comprehend and predict work events (2) and they adopt more accurate personal theories (3).There are several major environmental developments facing organizations:Technological changeThis boosts productivity, but also have the possibility to displace employees and render entire occupational groups obsolete. It can also alter the relationships between co-workers, clients and suppliers.GlobalizationThis refers to economic, social and cultural connectivity with people in other parts of the world. There is an intense level of connectivity and interdependence around the globe in organizations. It brings more complexity and new ways of working to the workplace, but also requires additional knowledge and skills.Emerging employment relationshipsThe work-life balance is changing. This is the degree to which a person minimizes conflict between work and non-work demands. Increasing workforce diversitySurface-level diversity, the observable demographic or physiological differences in people, has increased over the past few decades. Deep-level diversity refers to differences in the psychological characteristics of employees.Telecommuting is working from home one or more workdays per month rather than commute to the office. Telecommuters usually experience better work-life balance, but these telecommuters need privacy at home for this. Telecommuting increases productivity and is better for the environment. Disadvantages of telecommuting include more social isolation, lower team cohesion and a weaker organizational culture. There is a difference in deep-level...

Self-concept is an individual’s self-belief and self-evaluations. Our self-concept is defined at an individual, relational and collective level. An individual’s self-concept can be described by three characteristics: complexity (number of distinct and important roles), consistency (amount of self-views that require similar personality traits) and clarity (clear, defined and stable). Clarity increases with age because personality and values become relatively stable by adulthood and people develop better self-awareness through life experiences. Clarity is higher when the consistency is high. The higher the complexity, consistency and clarity, the better well-being people tend to have. Too much variation causes internal tension and conflict, but consistency can help with this. Employees with complex self-concept tend to be better at adaptive performance. Self-concept clarity improves performance. There are four processes that shape self-concept and motivate a person’s decisions and behaviour:Self-enhancementThis is a person’s inherent motivation to have a positive self-concept. People tend to believe they’re above average at things they care about.Self-verificationThis is a person’s inherent motivation to confirm and maintain his or her existing self-concept. People are more likely to remember information that is consistent with their self-concept. Employees are motivated to interact with others who affirm their self-views. Self-evaluationThis is defined by three elements. Self-esteem is the extent to which people like, respect and are satisfied with themselves. Self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief that he has the ability, motivation, correct role perceptions and favourable situation to complete a task successfully. Locus of control is a person’s general belief about the amount of control he has over personal life events. Social-selfThe social identity theory states that people define themselves by the groups to which they belong to...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The meaning and effect of money differ between men and women. Men attach more value to money than women. Women see money in terms of things they can do with it and men see it as a symbol of power and autonomy. People in countries with high power distance have a high priority for money. There are four types of objectives of rewards:Membership- and seniority-based rewardsThese are monetary rewards for being a member somewhere and for working somewhere for a long time. These rewards can reduce turnover, but do not directly motivate job performance.Job status-based rewardsThese are rewards on the basis of the status or worth of the jobs they occupy. Job worth can be measured through job evaluation, which measures the required skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions. It can improve fairness, but also competitiveness within a company.Competency-based rewardsThese are rewards based on how well people perform on certain competencies (e.g: skill-based pay gives rewards based on the mastery of measurable skills).Performance-based rewardsThese are rewards based on an individual’s performance.There are several types of performance-based rewards:Individual rewardsThese rewards are given to an individual for individual accomplishments.Team rewardsThese rewards are given to a team for team accomplishments. The gainsharing plan is a team-based reward that calculates bonuses from the work unit’s cost savings and productivity improvement (e.g: reward employees for cost reduction).Organizational rewardsThese rewards are given to the entire organization for organizational accomplishments. Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) are a reward system that encourages employees to buy company stock (e.g: employee discount). Stock options are a reward system that gives employees the right to purchase company stock at...

Frequent, timely and accurate communication is the primary means through which employees and work units effectively synchronize their work. The functions of communication are coordination, organizational learning, decision making, changing behaviour and support employee well-being. The communication process model states that messages are formed and encoded and decoded and feedback is formed and encoded before being sent back and being decoded. According to this model, effective communication depends on the sender’s and receiver’s ability, motivation, role clarity and situational support to efficiently and accurately encode and decode information. There are four main factors that influence the effectiveness of this encoding-decoding process. A codebook makes effective communication easier (1), experience makes the process easier (2), the process is easier if the sender and receiver are skilled and motivated (3) and the process depends on the sender’s and receiver’s shared mental models of the communication context (4). The medium is the channel through which information is transmitted. There are verbal and nonverbal channels. The use of e-mail in an organization reduces social and organizational status differences between sender and receiver. Written digital communication (e.g: e-mail) can potentially reduce stereotyping and prejudice because age, race and other features are unknown or less noticeable. The lack of face-to-face contact may also increase reliance on stereotypes. There are several problems with email and other digital message channels. It is difficult to communicate emotions using digital message channels (1), there is less politeness and respectfulness (2), it is inefficient in ambiguous, complex and novel situations (3) and it contributes to information overload (4). Flaming describes digital messages that convey strong negative emotions.Nonverbal communication includes facial gestures, voice intonation, physical distance and...