Mgt251 Midterm Paper

Submitted By KristaTietz1
Words: 2159
Pages: 9

1. Organizational behavior (OB) is the application of knowledge about how people, individuals, and groups act in organizations, in order to achieve the highest performance and dominant results; in a basic description the actions of other people. It may cover topics such as organization structure, conflict resolution, motivation, careers, leadership, group dynamics, organizational development and decision making. Organizational behavior is an academic discipline concerned with describing, understanding, predicting, and controlling human behavior in an organizational environment.

Now the importance of organizational behavior in the field of study is essential. Organizational behavior scientists study four areas of behavioral science. Those are individual behavior, group behavior, organizational structure, and organizational processes. They investigate many aspects of these areas like perception and personality, job satisfaction and attitudes, group dynamics, the role of leadership in the organization and politics, the impact of stress on work, decision-making processes, job design, the communications chain, and company cultures and climates.

The goal of nearly every organization is to motivate those involved towards a unified vision. All organizations experience the direct relationship between job satisfaction, and performance. In order to maximize the performance of those within a system it is important to develop an optimal interpersonal chemistry. By identifying the major individual variables that influence work behavior, an organization can offer an atmosphere that provides mandatory components for success.

2. As the new Marketing Department Supervisor, I would use the Nine Step Decision-Making System to fix the three problems in the Marketing Department that need to be fixed due to the department not having direct supervision for nearly three months. The Nine Step Decision-Making System is based on perception and reasoning to problem solving and decision making (pg. 40). Depending on how you perceive a situation will affect your solution to the problem. The Nine Step include: Problem Recognition, Problem Definition, Setting Objectives, Group Identification, Generation of Options, Option Evaluation, Option Selection, Option Implementation, and Decision Evaluation.
I would use problem recognition to recognize the problem that needs to be solved; then moving onto one of the critical steps, problem definition. What is the problem? In this case, there are three problems. The Marketing team is not meeting deadlines, coming to work late, and leaving early. The third step is setting objectives; this is where the entire direction of the decision can be altered. What needs to be done to improve the problem that the Marketing Department is having? How can we improve the team getting to work on time, not leaving early and start meeting deadlines? Then we move to step four which is group identification. In this case the group that is being affected is the Marketing Department. The group needs to know how their decisions with the problems in the Marketing Department are actually affecting the rest of the company. Next we use generation of options and we weight all the options that we have for the problem. Then we move to step six and evaluate out options. I need to compare all the options that I have to improve this situation and decide on which one would better; possibly offering rewards for motivation. After all the evaluating is done for the options that are at hand, it is time for selection. I need to pick the option that is best for accomplishing my objectives, and it should also be time to determine whether we need a short term fix, or a long term one. Considering that this has been an ongoing problem for nearly three months, a long term fix looks better than a short term one. Next is where I would put my decision into action. So in this case, it is where I tell the team that if they can