Fundamentals of Organizational Behavior - Understanding People
Main Challenges
1. People have different personalities, asymmetric interests & goals. Need to use strategies to understand and appreciate differences but also leverage commonalities.
2. Successful teams share information across group members, create fair decision-making processes, are aware of systemic effects of decisions over time, create a climate of trust and psychological safety.
3. Important to understand how to get the best performance out of each team member; learn from experience and be able to improve
Personality:
1. Different types of personalities: Conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, extraversion, emotional stability. To be kept in mind when dealing with individuals.
2. Empowered individuals don’t perspective-take and are more likely to take action.
3. Personality is dependent on both genes and environment. Stable and flexible.
4. People display different personality traits when dealing with other people and situations.
Groups and Teams:
1. Groups, if motivated and driven, outperform individuals. Leverage strengths of individuals and access to multiple ideas and perspectives.
2. Challenges faced by teams: conformity, social loafing (exerting less effort when in group than as individual), group-thinking, motivation/coordination loss, lack of psychological safety and fair process. Task vs relationship vs process conflict.
3. How to maximize performance? Set rules to encourage members to speak out, disagree. Encourage task conflict but minimize personal conflict. Build trust. Team contract. Update often.
4. Additional rules for virtual teams: Verify assumptions and deal with illusion of transparency. Set clear goals and interaction rules. Maximize face-time. Explicit communication. Aware of psychological distance effect (Things happening in past/future or to other people do not affect me here/now). Manage Technology & culture.
Influence:
1. Structural Tactics: Voting: Private/Public, decision rule (unanimous/consensus)
2.
1. People have different personalities, asymmetric interests & goals. Need to use strategies to understand and appreciate differences but also leverage commonalities.
2. Successful teams share information across group members, create fair decision-making processes, are aware of systemic effects of decisions over time, create a climate of trust and psychological safety.
3. Important to understand how to get the best performance out of each team member; learn from experience and be able to improve
Personality:
1. Different types of personalities: Conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, extraversion, emotional stability. To be kept in mind when dealing with individuals.
2. Empowered individuals don’t perspective-take and are more likely to take action.
3. Personality is dependent on both genes and environment. Stable and flexible.
4. People display different personality traits when dealing with other people and situations.
Groups and Teams:
1. Groups, if motivated and driven, outperform individuals. Leverage strengths of individuals and access to multiple ideas and perspectives.
2. Challenges faced by teams: conformity, social loafing (exerting less effort when in group than as individual), group-thinking, motivation/coordination loss, lack of psychological safety and fair process. Task vs relationship vs process conflict.
3. How to maximize performance? Set rules to encourage members to speak out, disagree. Encourage task conflict but minimize personal conflict. Build trust. Team contract. Update often.
4. Additional rules for virtual teams: Verify assumptions and deal with illusion of transparency. Set clear goals and interaction rules. Maximize face-time. Explicit communication. Aware of psychological distance effect (Things happening in past/future or to other people do not affect me here/now). Manage Technology & culture.
Influence:
1. Structural Tactics: Voting: Private/Public, decision rule (unanimous/consensus)
2.