Characteristics of the Employee.html

Characteristics of the Employee

When we think about describing the characteristics of an individual, we tend to first consider variables such as the person's abilities and skills, attitudes, diversity, emotions, personality, perceptions, and attributes. However, there are other characteristics of the individual that play a critical role in determining employee behavior.

Some of the variables that affect how an employee performs on the job are:

• Job satisfaction, which refers to the positive or negative feelings that an employee has about his or her work.
• Job involvement, which is the extent to which an employee devotes himself or herself to the job, including investing time and energy, as well as seeing the job as an important definition of himself or herself.
• Organizational commitment, which is an employee's loyalty to an organization and his or her desire to continue to actively participate in the organization's activities.
• Organizational citizenship, which refers to an employee's voluntary actions on behalf of the organization (over and above what is expected at work) that contribute to the organization's success.

Every person is a unique blend of personal attributes, such as hereditary factors (e.g., gender and race), demographic factors (e.g., age and environmental background, such as urban or rural and poor, middle class, or wealthy), abilities (i.e., the talent to perform a mental or a physical task), skills (i.e., learned talents), temperament, and tendencies. These factors blend together to influence how a person interacts with the opportunities and responsibilities of his or her organizational environment. For example, why do different people respond differently to the same situation? Differences in behaviors and job performances among individuals can be attributed to differences in their characteristics.

The combination of job satisfaction, job involvement, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship contribute to our understanding of an individual's job performance. Each of these variables is impacted by the employee's individual characteristics, such as abilities and skills, attitudes, emotions, personality, perceptions, and attributions. However, even if a manager was to fully predict all of these listed variables, other factors will also impact performance.

Additional Materials

View the PDF transcript for Personal Attributes 

Simple-Open System Model.html

Simple-Open System Model

An open system is any biological or social unit that receives input, transforms it, and produces output. If your organization was a closed system, it would not receive any input from the external environment. It would be completely self-sustaining. However, every organization takes in some type of input (e.g., resources), transforms it (e.g., processes), and produces output (e.g., products or services). Take a moment and think about your organization. What are its inputs? How does it transform them? What are its outputs?

To explore organizational behavior in detail, the simple systems model can be expanded to recognize that organizations are composed of many different components. For example, look around any organization and you might see people, formal statements describing the goals and strategies of the company, different technologies, and various activities. In other words, the action of "transforming" input into output involves many different elements. In addition, organizations exist within a specific environment (a market, a community, etc.) and a general environment (e.g., broader national or global context). These environments exert their own influence on the organizational system.

A helpful exercise for any work-team, unit, or organization can be drawing “itself” on paper, a whiteboard, or a computer screen. What are the resources or inputs that come into the organization? What are our processes, policies, structures, technologies, and human elements that transform those inputs? What is our output?

Perhaps most importantly, does everyone on the team have the same ideas about our inputs and output? Do they have the same view about what we do to transform one to the other?

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Human Behavior in an Organization.html

Human Behavior in an Organization

At the heart of the transformation process occurring in organizations is the behavior of the humans who utilize the incoming resources and technology, operate within the culture and structure of the organization, and seek to follow the goals and strategies of the organization to produce the output. Although, as an academic field of study, organizational behavior is specifically interested in the human behavior occurring in organizations, the systems perspective of organizations suggests that each individual is part of the greater whole (the system) and that each individual's behavior has an effect on others' behaviors, individually and collectively. Accordingly, the study of organizational behavior includes a wide range of topics related to the active processes that occur at all levels in an organization (individual, group, and organizational) as they transform input into output. Components include culture, technology, structure, goals, strategies, processes, behaviors, and leadership.

Each component of the system is important for the performance of the organization. Each component directly or indirectly influences the behaviors of individuals in the system. Additionally, problems that can inhibit organizational productivity might occur within any component.

From a systems view, each person is a system. In an organizational context, one way to interpret the individual as a system is to consider the inputs, transformation process, and outputs by the individual. We can do the same for a team. What are its inputs, transformation processes, and outputs? We can do the same for any unit and for the organization as a whole. A key question is whether all of those systems (individuals, groups, and organizations) are working in harmony.

Additional Materials

View the PDF transcript for   Expanded Open-System Model

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