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Chapter 1: What is organizational behavior?

Monday, 20 October 2025 1:10 PM

1. What are organisations?

An organisations is a group of people who work together in an organized way for a common purpose, goal, objective,
such as a company, a school, or a charity.

Social investions
• An essential characteristic of organizations is the coordinated presence of people, not things.
• The field of organizational behaviour is about understanding people and managing them to work effectively.
• All organisations need to perform to achieve the goals.
• Certain behaviours are necessary for survival and adaptation.
• Innovation and flexibility are especially important for organizations.
Eg:
For profit company: profit-making, sustainability (economics - social - environmental), survive and adapt to the
changing business environment.
○ In Covid-19, HRM had to lay off the employee due to the affect of the pandemic.
○ When the firm transforms into another type of business, all employees must be ready for the changes. It
requires all the effort off all people in the organisation. HRM has to prepare the mindset for the laid-off
employees and the retained employees.

All organisations if they want to grow, they have to innovate their products which add the customer value to the market
and the customers. A new product and service comes from ideas/invention, commercialization (turning that idea into a
market success), innovation. This process requires all effort of the human resource of the firm, but this effort just be
created when they have the good working environment, challenging mindset (tâm thế).
Hiện nay, quản trị không coi việc motivate nhân viên không phải là bóc lột mà là investment, how to motivate them, đổi
từ human resources thành human capital đầu tư cho people in the [Link]ững điều này đòi hỏi con người phải
luôn flexible, innovate, AGILE management

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Group Effort
• Organizations are based on group effort - the interaction and coordination among people to accomplish goals.
• Much of the intellectual and physical work done in organizations is performed by groups.
• The field of organizational behaviour is concerned with how to get people to practise effective teamwork.

2. Why do organisations exist?

Organizations exist to achieve shared goals that individuals cannot accomplish alone by pooling resources, knowledge,
and labor.

Organizations are mechanisms (cơ chế) through which many people combine their efforts and work together to
accomplish more than any one person could alone.

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Open systems: Có thêm sự tương tác bên ngoài, in order to transfer the input into output we need work activiy,
including: human resources and physical resources.
• People input: bao gồm kiến thức, kỹ năng, năng lực, kinh nghiệm chứ không phải chỉ số lượng.
• Muốn luôn được đón nhận, cạnh tranh, không mất lợi thế cạnh tranh (competitve advantage) thì phải luôn đổi mới
sáng tạo dựa trên customer feedback.

Performance equation
Job performance = attributes x work effort x organisational support

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Trao cho người ta cơ hội đi học nhưng phải áp dụng những kiến thức đó vào công việc.

3. What is organisational behaviour?

Organisational behavior (OB) is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have
on behavior within organizations for the purpose.
• Motivation
• Leader behavior and power
• Interpersonal communication
• Group structure and processes
• Attitude development and perception
• Change processes
• Conflict and negotiation
• Work design

Organisational level
• The attitudes and behaviours of individuals and groups in organizations.
• How organizations can be structured more effectively.
• How events in the external environment affect organizations.

Individual level
• Impact of personality on performance/commitment
• Employee motivation
• Emotions
• Perception and attitudes

Group level
• Effective team
• Leadership
• Power and politics

4. Why should we study organizational behaviour?

Issues for discussion:
• How do you know which job fits you most?
○ Personal fit, supervisor fit, group fit.
○ Talent management, in the field of HRM, how to recruit the graduates, differ from CEO recruitment. Find
the people that match the value
• If you are a group leader, how do you manage your group’s work effectively?
• You are manager of a marketing department and you havecloser relationship with some members but not all, what
could be the issues arising within your team?
• When you want to make a change or having better information from your organization, should you choose an
outsider or insider to be your manager?

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5. Importance of OB
• It helps individuals understand herself/himself (personality, emotions, person-job fit, person organization fit)
• It helps managers manage human resources effectively (Motivation, Leader-Member Exchange)
• It helps organizations understand, predict and influence events for achieving organizational objectives and in
response to changes.

6. Complementing intuition with systematic study

• Systematic study: Looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects, and drawing conclusions
based on scientific evidence.
• Evidence-based management (EBM):The basing of managerial decisions on the best available scientific evidence.
• Intuition: An instinctive feeling not necessarily supported by research.

7. How should we study organisational behaviour?

• Textbook readings: Theories, case studies
• Journal articles: google scholars
• Reflect theories in your own experience and observations
• Actively involve in class discussions
• Questions

8. Disciplines that contribute to OB field

a.

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• Social psychology tries to explain the behavior changes among a group of people (nations in terms of behavior)
• Sociology can help to explain the behavior of the intergroup of people, why the immigrants seem to be tried their
best in their workplace than the local people
• Anthropology: why there is difference between group of people with different origin?

Read article, critical thinking and find out in their research (what kind of theory that they use, under pov of OB)

I. Changing the nature of employer-employee relations

• Work-life balance
• Outsourcing
• Casualization of the workforce
• Telecommuting

• For Gen Z: open communication environment, rewards and recognition, contribute to the society, high salary,
clear personal development, proactive, good company culture,…
• For Parents: stable jobs, financial stability, prestige (uy tín), or comfort (thoải mái), long live labor contract,…
Two generations have different characteristics so that the way to manage is also different and aim not to lose the talents

Contemporary themes in OB
What are the key issues affecting organizations?
• Globalization
• Changing nature of work and workforce
• Changing nature of employment relationship
• Managing change (process re-engineering)
When the business environment changing quickly, the manager needs to consider to support the employees to adapt and
overcome anticipated events

Challenges and opportunities for OB

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Workforce demographics
Workforce diversity: The concept that organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, race,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics.
Social media
Employee well-being at work
Positive work environment: An area of OB research that concerns how organizations develop human strengths, foster
vitality and resilience, and unlock potential.
Ethical behavior

SMARTER - Specific - Measurable - Achievable - Relevant - Time-bound - Ethical - Responsible

Changing nature of work

• Technology has emerged as an ever-present, dominant force in our lives.
• Knowledge-based economy
○ Knowledge management
○ Brain-drain
The firm has to educate employees about the culture of respect the confidentuality.

Dimensions of national culture (Hofstede 1988)

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Coming attraction: Developing an OB Model

The only certain is the uncertainty

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