Mgt 311 Learning Team Reflection Week 4

Organizational Development Team D Learning Team Reflection December 3, 2012 This week we learned about the influence of how organizational structure is on behavior. Also we learned how to analyze and influence an organizational culture on behavior. Then there is how power and politics influence people’s behavior. We talked about mechanistic structure and organic structure. When talking about mechanistic structure, the employees know how to present themselves, why there is no room for them to mess up. (Robbins & Judge, 2011).
When people are at work they have to act one way compared to the way they act at home. If the business does not put into place a strong organizational culture, then there could be a lot of unethical behavior in the place of business. This would show the people that work at the place of business and the customers that there is a low organizational structure. All work places of some kind of influence of power and politics. Without the right kind of power and politics in the place of business this could cause discord for people that work in the business.
If this kind of behavior is not watched it could cause other people in the business to feel left out or not appreciated in the right way. In week four we took a look at power and leadership, here we contrasted the two. Power is the influence someone has over another person and leadership uses power to attain goals. It is important that one does not have to be a leader to have power. Many people have the power to coerce others without having the leadership role. We could relate to formal power and compare it to the workplace. We use the different formal powers; coercive, reward, and legitimate powers every day.

When our employees fail to comply with company goals they can get written up which could result in termination. We also use rewards for employees who exceed goals. Exhibit 13-2 in chapter 13 was very humorous; it gave political labels and compared it to effective management. For example, the political label ‘passing the buck’ is known as ‘delegating authority’ for effective management. The things we learned that made us think more was about virtual organizations. Some of us did not know what the full term meant and now we can say that the company one of us works for is one of the utsourcing companies from a virtual organization. Some of the leading companies have the profit that they do because of the flexibility and low overhead. Organizational behavior is here for the people to have a better understanding of the people they work with. The more that we know our surroundings and the people that work in the place we are able to know how to influence the individual or group. This will help each person to feel a part of the team and in return the business will run better because the people working there will not mind doing the work.