Organizational Behavior: Chapter 3 - Values, Attitudes, and Job Satisfaction

"Regardless of which studies you choose to look at, when American workers are asked if they are satisfied with their jobs, the results tend to be very similar: Between 70 and 80 percent report they're satisfied with their jobs" (p. 61).

"How does one explain these findings? …Because people are likely to seek jobs that provide a good person-job fit, reports of high satisfaction shouldn't be totally surprising. Second, based on our knowledge of cognitive dissonance theory (discussed in this chapter), we might expect employees to resolve inconsistencies between dissatisfaction with their jobs and their staying with those jobs by not reporting the dissatisfaction. So these positive findings might be tainted by efforts to reduce dissonance" (p. 61).

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Red     = Indowebster

Green  = Ziddu

Yellow = Ubuntu One

Organizational Behavior: Chapter 2 - Foundations of Individual Behavior

"Intelligence is but one characteristic that people bring with them when they join an organization. In this chapter, we look at how biographical characteristics (such as gender and age) and ability (which includes intelligence) affect employee performance and satisfaction. Then we show how people learn behaviors and what management can do to shape those behaviors" (p. 33).

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Red     = Indowebster

Green  = Ziddu

Yellow = Ubuntu One

Organizational Behavior: Chapter One - What is Organizational Behavior?

"We have come to understand that technical skills are necessary but insufficient for succeeding in management. In today's increasingly competitive and demanding workplace, managers can't succeed on their technical skills alone. They also have to have good people skills. This book has been written to help both managers and potential managers develop those people skills" (p. 2).

WHAT MANAGERS DO
"Managers get things done through other people. They make decisions, allocate resources, and direct the activities of others to attain goals. Managers do their work in an organization. This is a consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two or more people, that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals" (p. 2).

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Red     = Indowebster

Green  = Ziddu

Yellow = Ubuntu One

Leadership Chapter 15 - Culture and Leadership

As the title suggests, this chapter is about culture and leadership. Like the previous chapter, this one is multifaceted and focuses on a collection of related ideas rather than on a single unified theory. Our discussion in this chapter will center on research that describes culture, its dimensions, and the effects of culture on the leadership process.
 

Since World War II, globalization has been advancing throughout the world. Globalization is the increased interdependence (economic, social, technical, and political) between nations. People are becoming more inter-connected. There is more international trade, cultural exchange, and use of  worldwide telecommunication systems. In the past 10 years, our schools, organizations, and communities have become far more global than in the past. Increased globalization has created many challenges, including the need to design effective multinational organizations, to identify and select appropriate leaders for these entities, and to manage organizations with culturally diverse employees (House & Javidan, 2004). Globalization has created a need to understand how cultural differences affect leadership performance.
 

Globalization has also created the need for leaders to become competent in cross-cultural awareness and practice. Adler and Bartholomew (1992) contended that global leaders need to develop five cross-cultural competencies: First, leaders need to understand business, political, and cultural environments worldwide. Second, they need to learn the perspectives, tastes, trends, and technologies of many other cultures. Third, they need to be able to work simultaneously with people from many cultures.
 

Fourth, leaders must be able to adapt to living and communicating in other cultures. Fifth, they need to learn to relate to people from other cultures from a position of equality rather than cultural superiority (Adler & Bartholomew, 1992, p. 53). Additionally, Ting-Toomey (1999) said that global leaders need to be skilled in creating transcultural visions. They need to develop communication competencies that will enable them to articulate and implement their vision in a diverse workplace. In sum, today’s leaders need to acquire a challenging set of competencies if they intend to be effective in present-day global societies.

Leadership Chapter 14 - Women and Leadership

When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is “male or female?” and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty.
—Sigmund Freud

Writers in the popular press have shown an enduring interest in the topic of gender and leadership, reporting stark and meaningful differences between women and men (Book, 2000; Bowman, Worthy, & Greyser, 1965). These differences turned from a view of women as inferior to men (e.g., some posited that women lacked skills and traits necessary for managerial success; Hennig & Jardin, 1977) to the more modern popular view that extols the superiority of women in leadership positions (Book, 2000; Helgesen, 1990). However, for a variety of reasons, including methodological hindrances, a predominance of male researchers largely uninterested in the topic, and an academic assumption of gender equality in leadership, academic researchers ignored issues related to gender and leadership until the 1970s (Chemers, 1997). The increasing numbers of women in leadership positions and women in academia, brought about by dramatic changes in American society, have fueled the now robust schol-arly interest in the study of female leaders.
 

Scholars started out asking, “Can women lead?” but that is now a moot point. In addition to the increasing presence of women in corporate and political leadership roles, we can point to highly effective female leaders including former prime ministers such as Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan), Margaret Thatcher (UK), Gro Marlem Brundtland (Norway), and Indira Gandhi (India), and current world leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil. Beyond politics we can point to a number of highly effective female leaders including PepsiCo’s CEO Indra Nooyi, Avon’s CEO Andrea Jung, Four-Star General Ann E. Dunwoody, and the founder of Teach for America, Wendy Kopp. The primary research question now is “Are there leadership style and effectiveness differences between women and men?” which is often subsumed under a larger question: “Why women are underrepresented in elite leadership roles?” This chapter explores empirical evidence related to these issues of gender and leadership by first examining style and effectiveness differences between men and women, then discussing the gender gap in leadership and prominent explanations for it, and, finally, addressing approaches to promoting women in leadership.