Mock Exam & MCQs | Free Organizational Behavior Exam Questions Question

The resource-based view suggests that a resource is more valuable when it is inimitable.

Inimitable: Incapable of being imitated or copied.

Trust, justice, and ethics reflect the degree to which employees feel that their company does business with fairness, honesty, and integrity.

Ethics: The degree to which the behaviors of an authority are in accordance with generally accepted moral norms.

The resource-based view suggests that a resource is more valuable when it is rare.

Resource-Based View: A model that argues that rare and inimitable resources help firms maintain competitive advantage.

Resources that are rare and inimitable are valuable to firms.

Inimitable: Incapable of being imitated or copied.

The two primary outcomes of interest to organizational behavior researchers (and employees and managers) are job performance and organizational commitment.

Job Performance: Employee behaviors that contribute either positively or negatively to the accomplishment of organizational goals.

The resource-based view suggests that the value of resources depends on several factors. It describes what exactly makes resources valuable and capable of creating long-term profits for the firm.

Resource-Based View: A model that argues that rare and inimitable resources help firms maintain competitive advantage.

Organizational culture captures shared knowledge about the rules, norms, and values that shape employee attitudes and behaviors.

Organizational Culture: The shared social knowledge within an organization regarding the rules, norms, and values that shape the attitudes and behaviors of its employees.

Organizational culture is the organizational mechanism in the integrative model that captures "the way things are" in an organization.

Culture: The shared values, beliefs, motives, identities, and interpretations that result from common experiences of members of a society and are transmitted across generations.

Organizational structure dictates how the units within the firm link to other units.

Organizational Structure: Formally dictates how jobs and tasks are divided and coordinated between individuals and groups within the company.

Leader styles and behaviors capture the specific actions that leaders take to influence others at work.

Influence: The use of behaviors to cause behavioral or attitudinal changes in others.

Leader power and negotiation summarize the process by which individuals attain authority over others.

Negotiation: A process in which two or more interdependent individuals discuss and attempt to reach agreement about their differences.

Team characteristics and diversity describe how teams are formed, staffed, and composed, and how team members come to rely on one another as they do their work.

Job Characteristics Theory: A theory that argues that five core characteristics (variety, identity, significance, autonomy, and feedback) combine to result in high levels of satisfaction with the work itself.

The integrative model examines ability, which describes the cognitive abilities (verbal, quantitative, etc.), emotional skills (other awareness, emotion regulation, etc.), and physical abilities (strength, endurance, etc.) that employees bring to a job.

Individualistic Roles: Behaviors that benefit the individual at the expense of the team.

Personality and cultural values reflect the various traits and tendencies that describe how people act, with commonly studied traits including extraversion, conscientiousness, and collectivism.

Cultural Values: Shared beliefs about desirable end states or modes of conduct in a given culture that influence the expression of traits.

Learning and decision making deals with how employees gain job knowledge and how they use that knowledge to make accurate judgments on the job.

Decision Making: The process of generating and choosing from a set of alternatives to solve a problem.

Motivation captures the energetic forces that drive employees' work effort.

Motivation: A set of energetic forces that determine the direction, intensity, and persistence of an employee’s work effort.

Resources that are rare and inimitable are valuable to organizations. People are inimitable because they create an organizational history made up of their shared knowledge, skills, and abilities; the many small decisions they make cannot be replicated by other organizations; and they create complex social resources based on shared culture, teamwork, trust, and reputation.

Resource-Based View: A model that argues that rare and inimitable resources help firms maintain competitive advantage.

The theories and concepts found in OB are actually drawn from a wide variety of disciplines such as industrial and organizational psychology, social psychology, and anthropology. Models from economics are used to understand motivation, learning, and decision making. This diversity brings a unique quality to the study of OB.

Strategic Management: Field of study devoted to exploring the product choices and industry characteristics that affect an organization’s profitability.

Effective management of OB requires a belief that several different practices are important, along with a long-term commitment to improving those practices. The Rule of One-Eighth suggests that one-half of organizations will not believe the connection between how they manage their people and the profits they earn. The CEO of Starbridge fits this category, which is the most common. One-half of those who do believe that connection will make a single change to solve their problems, not realizing that the effective management of people requires a more comprehensive and systematic approach. Of the firms that make comprehensive changes, probably about one-half will persist with their practices long enough actually derive economic benefits. One-half times one-half times one-half equals one-eighth, suggesting that, at best, 12 percent of organizations will actually do what is required to build profits by putting people first.

Values: Things that people consciously or unconsciously want to seek or attain.