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Organizational Behavior significantly changed my perception about how to
understand and manage individual and group behavior in an organization
environment. This report describes the lecture and the tutorial material. Then it
provides examples which demonstrate how taking this course improved my managing
knowledge and abilities, my communication skills in English and my critical reading
and thinking.
Firstly I would like to emphasize week 4 topic: Motivation and Emotion. During the
tutorial we made a selfassessment exercise in which we evaluated ours own
sensitivity to equity and fairness in which I’ve got a moderate level. That means that I
value fairly treatment, in contrast in I’m also able to understand why fairness is not
possible to be achieved in some situations and then I don’t feel motivated to change
things.
On my table, me and another student got moderate level and the other two got a high
sensitivity level. This exercised made me learn more about my own values and the
discussion with the group made me I understand how much people are different and
perceive situations in a contrasting way. However just with discussion I couldn’t
make a clear linkage between the equity sensitivity and motivation.
On week4 lecture we continued to talk about this topic, discussing the Partial Model
of Performance. In this model a high performance outcome is achieved by the
combination between ability and motivated behaviors. However, motivation is
determined by several factors that depend on one’s selfcontrol, emotional reward in
doing the task and goal acceptance. This last factor, in turn, is determined by the
employee’s values because based on ours personal values we have different reason to
achieve the goals.
With this model I understood that the equity sensitivity is a value and as result it
impacts one’s goal acceptance. For instance, someone who is highly sensitive to
fairness can feel significantly upset with a last month underpayment and for this
reason he or she doesn’t feel motivated to achieve next month goal settle by the
manager, because regardless of the effort he is always receive less that his peers.
Besides this linkage with the tutorial, I consider that this topic were substantially
important because of its practical implications. Firstly it helped me to motivate myself
in order to achieve my academic goals during the semester. For instance, I started to
chunk the task, dividing a big task in smaller ones in order to make visible progress.
Moreover I think that the Partial Model of Performance has practical implication for
managers, because they need to structure the activities in order to produce outcomes
in an efficient way, as consequence managers need to make sure that their employees
are motivated, therefore learning how to set goals and manage selfregulation are
valuable lessons.
Another important topic was discussed on week 10 Organizational Culture. From my
personal standpoint, the tutorial were considerably relevant because when we
interviewed other students we were able to understand how the organizational culture
is preserved and taught, then how this can impact on one’s perception about the job.
For example, talking with my peer I noticed that he holds a positive view about his
job, he describes his organization as a well structure and teambased retail company.
His managers use to give him feedback and small rewards based on productivity
improvements and the company has a strong sense of identity stressing the importance
of the uniform and organization’s colors.
Later, on the lecture I could fit those values on the three facets of organizational
culture: the physical artifacts, the intangible activities and the underlying values. The
fact that I already had some practical examples helped me to remember the concepts
and to understand the importance of the values for employees (help them to be align
with the company expectation even in a high turnover sector as retail sellers).
Moreover, the interview process itself is valuable for several reasons. Firstly, I needed
to come up with the proper set of questions, in order to do so I used my previous
knowledge to define organizational culture as well as to determine the scope in which
it can be perceived. Secondly this task forced me to use analytical skills to evaluate
the information that the interviewed provided and to aggregate it in order to formulate
a picture about his organization culture. Finally the presentation of my conclusions
for the group were and exercise that helped my to develop confidence in express
myself in front of others when I’m speaking my second language.
As usual, a lecture follows the tutorial. On week10, it’s worthy highlight the
Competing Value Framework (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1981) that is so unique because it
relates individual leadership behaviors with specific types of organizational culture
and competencies. On this model, there are two tensions, one between control and
flexibility and the other, which is internal versus external approach. Combining those
tensions there are fours types of culture and the empirical results showed that each
one of those cultures is better for a certain purpose.
This theory changed the way I see organizational culture because I thought that there
was a myriad of organizational culture styles without any guiding. However after the
class I learned that there are some directions and as result the manager can rely on
those parameters to build the culture and achieve the intended goals.
In conclusion, in the past 12 weeks I was able to increase my knowledge on
organizational behavior. In fact, during my undergrad program I took mostly
Economics and Accounting classes in my home university, only in the current
semester I took management disciplines as electives. Therefore I had only the
common knowledge about the topics discussed on class and for this reason in every
class I leaned crucial management skills such as decision making, critical thinking
and also psychological theories that are fundamental to understand employees’
behavior.
I’m still not sure about my future carrier, however in this course I leaned skills that
are useful in a wide branch of fields such as my communication abilities in English
through writing the assignments and participating on class. Moreover, during the
semester I read a few academic articles, and therefore I familiarized myself with this
type of writing and I developed critical thinking and analysis skills. For this reason
I’m glad that I choose this discipline as part of my Study Abroad program.