Unit 551 Behavior In Organization

CORG 551: BEHAVIOR IN ORGANIZATION
WINTER 2015

WAFAEI, SALMA
STUDENT ID: 260563244

Self And Team Reflection: Managing your Organisational behaviour
Stephen P. Robbins defined organizational behavior as a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structures have on behavior within organizations; regarding the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization's effectiveness. Theorists in this field focused on the importance of understanding three major factors, which can help managing our organizational behaviors:
· Personality and Individuality of people
· Power of people
· Dynamic Relationship among people
Nature and consequences of individual differences

has always been an important factor for people to identify managing organizational behavior in all possible workplaces. From my personal experience, I realized that some part of my personality is similar to my parents and some of it is formed by the experiences I had when I was young. When you understand the behavior of others, not only can work be circulated and get done professionally, there will also be less arguments and conflicts when dealing with people with different personalities.
Power is defined as the potential ability to influence behavior. The concept of power needs to be distinguished from authority and influence. Authority is the right to direct others and ask them to do things which they would not otherwise do so, but it is legitimate and is exercised in the working of organizations. Influence is conceived as broader and it is the ability to alter actions of other people in general ways by changing their satisfaction criteria and thus improve their performance. Authority is different from Power because of its legitimacy and acceptance in an organizational context and leadership is broader than power and indicates a willingness on the part of the follower to follow in the absence of authority.
They say “The strength of the team is in each individual member. The strength of each member is the team”. Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. Good teamwork plays a crucial role in fulfilling the common goal quicker and better in a team project. Every team member plays his or her role and takes on different responsibilities, which combined together can make the team function effectively.
In this essay, I will be reflecting on my personal experience in relation to those three points described above. The purpose of this paper is to rate myself on those three measures of organizational behavior, giving real life examples, and explain how some progress was made over the course of my life and expertise.

Activity 1
POWER
During my experiences, I have been learning and improving myself on how to understand the ways to influence and be influenced by the ability to affect the behavior of other people.
I always had a good circle of relationship with friends, family and professors. After I graduated in the middle of 2008, specializing in Banking and Insurance, I started searching for a job where those relationships would help me a lot. During those days, I got a lot of information from my network. At this point I understood that the informal network not only helped me achieve my goal, but also guided me in the right path. My friend had informed me about a job in an insurance firm, where I will find myself more suited, and which would start a considerably better career for me.
In 2009, I started my career as an intern at the Insurance firm. Where I had to feel most of the powers around me. Likewise, I discovered myself influenced by the referent powers of my manager. In the beginning, I had some difficulties understanding the ways of the firm and adapting myself towards the job. I was treated fairly, trusted and defended by my manager, which gave me much more confidence and engaged me in my tasks. After a month, I became an employee in the firm as a Customer Service Representative, where I enhanced my communication skills. Looking at the way I was progressing, I was given a chance to work as underwriter, after my first three months. This is where I proved my ability to handle that job in different case scenarios. Henceforth, they transferred me to different departments such as: Motor, Marine, Life, Medical, and Personal Accidents as an underwriter. This opportunity made me even more curious to learn more about these departments in detail. This helped me improve my flexibility, one of my personal characteristics.
Since I had to move to my hometown in 2011, my firm provided me a big offer by asking me to take over the whole underwriter department in the branch I was transferred. As a result of the authority of my position, I created an environment to fulfill all my responsibilities given by the organization. I was organized and strict towards my colleagues to achieve the branch goals, which produced good results. But I found myself uncomfortable in many situations. For instance, I was not able to talk to them or discuss about work friendly. I always had to maintain my authoritative power to keep them on track. After a while, I discovered I was using legitimate power which is not good enough. At one point, I looked back on my manager, who handled things pretty smoothly. So I started to change myself by using his ways of handling legitimate power by combining referent power. It took me a while to change myself, but over time I successfully created an environment where me and my subordinates existed in a perfect balance where I fulfilled my organization needs as well as my relationship with my colleagues.
After my entire encounter with these experiences, I came to a conclusion that I still had to improvise the way of using the powers I learned and earned. I was using legitimate power at first, and then I used referent power that I developed from my manager. After analyzing my skill sets, I still needed to improve my referent power (Regarding being a role model and trying to identify my colleagues’ skill sets to assign perfect jobs for them). I hope this perfection in which I needed to improvise, would lead safer, better quality and paths to achieve my future endeavors in the firm as well as my career.
Even though I have always tried to manage my power and ability to use it, I think there is still a room for improvement especially when I interact with people that are outside of my professional circle such as my friends and family. As for as my future plan, I have decided to practice more of my referent power in terms of my political skills. I hope to do it by getting myself engaged in more activities involving team work, where I can increase my flexibility and my ways to communicate my ideas to others. In this approach, I can handle the work in a more professional way.

Activity 2
Cognitive type
Life is a great stage in where we learn all kinds of possibilities, which make us who we are and what we end up being. Everyone has individual personality born from their culture, family and friends. Experience is a tool that makes us learn and improvise the difference and adapt ourselves with the new place and culture. Of course no one knew more about me and myself but to understand more about myself, I took the test MBTI to get a better view about myself.
I am from a culture where people are mostly reserved, traditional and give a great importance to family. My way of establishing relations in life was more introverted, where I would enjoy giving myself time alone. Even though I am reserved, I did like to spend time with my friends and family. However, when it comes to the outside world like work, marriages or meetings, I care about what I say. For example, how would other people think about me if I say this? I am a person who loves to be in her world of thoughts. Working as an underwriter was one of the things I liked because I don’t have to meet people regularly and I don’t have any unanticipated interruptions at work.
While I was in my country, each and every situation I face I deal it by sensing and a bit of intuition. When I generate information I would like to work by a system and method. Whatever I do, I pay attention to details and respect each and every fact in the problem I face. I cannot take decisions without real perspective, and I always view the details as like a real problem. And I also faced a lot of problems, since sometimes at work I have to take intuitive decisions in which I found myself being nervous to see the outline and the connections among the problems. Then I decided to learn and develop these skill sets to improve myself.
The most important personality trait that I love about myself is my decision making skill. I am more towards thinking than feeling. When it comes to decision making, I take my time to devise a method to analyze, argue and negotiate on the problem. This leads me to take a better decision almost every time.
I always judge problems I prefer structural and organised method for solving problems, hence I find myself more organised, time oriented and conclusive. All throughout my life, I was my father’s daughter. I considered him my role model and hero. I inherited most of his characteristics and personality. He prefers to lead, plan, and organize life, like making decisions. And I noticed that I was applying that in my workplace
In 2013, I had an opportunity to expand my education background so I came to Canada.

Since most of my studies are in multicultural environments like McGill, I learned more about people and their culture, which had an impact on me and my cognitive types. Such as, going out to meet people, having a better conversation with people I never met before, and speaking about what I intend to propose. I gained confidences with myself, which made me more of an extrovert. I increased my intuitive skills sets as I absorbed more from the people around me. Whenever I get a chance to do a team project or team work, I see what others do. How intuitive are they? How do they solve problems? How far do they think about the patterns and connections to the problem? I started seeing myself as a different person. I was able to understand people, analyze their needs and situations. I realized that I was gaining feelings for the people around me at work. These changes improved my decision making skills. The MBTI exam results showed my improvement in decision making skills, where I obtained equal percentage for both thinking and feeling. These changes I went through after coming to Canada made me ESTJ and ESFJ. In general I am proud of myself in terms of my improvement over my cognitive

types.
As I have improved my cognitive types, I always find a way to brush up on my skills. My choice is always to get myself involved in all kinds of extracurricular activities. I prefer a place where I can interact, express myself, and take part in decision making and understand the different nature and behavior of people. In this way, I can also improve my skill and also get to know more about people.

Activity 3
Teamwork
Teams have an important place in our professional and personal lives. Working in teams is probably an inevitable life experience, even for people who prefer to work alone. There are always student teams, play teams and teams in a workplace.
I had a team project that consisted of six members in a course at McGill University. We were divided into groups by our teacher. In other words, we did not have the ability to choose out the members of the team. The most interesting thing was, each student had a different background, life experience, culture and age. It was a good experience working with my group members even though we had some ups and down throughout our group project.
At the beginning of the first meeting in the class, everyone was cautious and shy.

However, my friend and I were playing roles to break the ice between the team. After our first meeting outside of the classroom, I found out that my group was friendlier as we started getting more comfortable with our team members. The first issue we encountered was how we should communicate to do the work. I was the person who created a group on WhatsApp and Skype in order to make the group communication more effective. The second issue we faced as a group was that we seemed to be stuck in the brainstorming stage. I could say that we spent more than two weeks in that stage just because there were lot of disagreements between team members on how we should be conducting our project. Each one had different idea and point of view. But after numerous meetings, we were finally able to come up with a detailed plan on how we were going to conduct our project, and we specifically defined each other specific

roles.
There were different roles given to each team member. We had a team leader, a project manager, a researcher, a supporter, a collaborator, a strategist, and a communicator. My roles were supporter and collaborator because of my facilitation skills.
What I did personally to help the team function was that I never missed a team meeting. Either if it was online, after class period or at the library. Furthermore, I always made sure not to miss the deadlines assigned by the group to each team member’s deliverables. In addition, when we were having disagreements on some issues I was trying to come up with a deal as a facilitator. Even though we had arguments and conflicts during our team meetings, each of us tried to respect each other’s points of view. Henceforth we developed our group to a new level where each member was devoted to help the team function better and achieve our goals, and we did that by constantly keeping in touch by emails or WhatsApp. What I liked the most in that team project was that after we divided the roles, each team member did his part effectively. By performing this way, we made sure that we helped each other improve the team function as well as its effectiveness in achieving better goals.
In general, we organized ourselves to obtain better effective teamwork. To reach this harmony between our team members, we used the Team Effectiveness Model by clearly identifying Goals, Roles, Procedures, Relationships and Leadership among ourselves. The personal experience that I learned out of team work is that, when compared to individual work, I have less pressure, and effective job results. I have even gained good friends out of my team.
In terms of member satisfaction, even though we were from different cultural backgrounds and had different experiences, we pushed ourselves in achieving a better outcome for our project. We all felt that we did a great job in finishing the project on time and we commended ourselves on having created a positive experience through commitment and friendship.
My team members and I were able to obtain such good results because of several factors, such as Sense of trust, where everyone is certain that all other members will do their job efficiently, Harmony and good dynamic connection between the members. We were all classmates and we became a small family. Diversity, every single person in the team came from a different background, and has a unique experience. Where each one reflected his or her mentality and different level of enthusiasm. This diversity enriched the team. Communication, where we were using multiple ways to report information to each other.
If we were to continue as a team in future, even though we are really satisfied, I can think of some disadvantages that we could have been able to avoid. For instance, the fact that we spent so much time in the brainstorming phase of our team development. We will work on making extra group meetings in order to fathom more about the project personally, so we could have in-depth knowledge about it. Then we would do a small presentation to each other about the project to know how others have different perspective about the project. So this would avoid internal conflicts. In this way, we will make improvements to our teamwork.

Activity 4
Plan To Manage Organizational Behavior

ACTION PLAN 2008 2009 2010 2011 T0 2012 2013 T0 2015
Milestones Graduated Started
Career Got Promoted as Underwriter Underwriter head Pursuing
Higher Education
Power Learned Informal Network Referent Power Flexibility and Confidence Legitimate Power Multiple Culture and More exposure
Applied -Expanded my social Network and efficient use of network
-Inspired by my manager
-Made plans develop it - Always eager to know more about work
- Got transfers to many section because of my flexibility - Lead a department with control
- Learned my mistake
-Applied referent with legitimate - Learned more about power
- By pursuing Diploma in Business Administration
- Active participation in team work
- Increasing Skill sets
Cognitive Type ISTJ ISTJ IST&FJ IST&FJ ESTJ & ESFJ
Applied - love to be alone
- Less Circle of friends and family - Less interaction at work
- Mostly waited to develop new skills - Started developing feeling for colleagues
- Got to make decisions at work
- Obtained important post
- Chance to explore my leadership skills
- More of decision making, Priorities - Culture and Places started to change my cognitive type
- Started exploring a different world
- Became more involved with others and their culture
Team Work
Exited and Involved Curious to learn more about team work Communication,
And Started to work on stress Trust , dynamic
And respect Diversity and harmony
Applied -Organise most college events -New to job, found myself hard but always try to involve myself - Find different to commutation cohesively
- Less stress because the work gets divided - Learned better team work creates better relationship between team which leads to trust -Multiple culture, background, age, languages and experience provided a better platform
I - Introvert E- Extrovert S - Sensing T- Thinking N-Intuitive F- Feeling J - Judging P- Perceptive

When it comes to make a plan and follow it, I will be the person who could sabotage my plan. Because I was restricting myself in the past, I was living by a set of rules and did not go over it. As I mentioned before I would like to develop on referent power and to be more of an extrovert person.
In order to prevent the failure of my plan, I have to work more about my self-confidence and be more open minded, by doing so I will go out of my comfort zone and learn more from people around me. Learning, adopting and developing are never ending process, the more I dedicate myself the more I will be perfect and prevent my failure.
To ensure success, I should be able to apply what I learned in a real word. In other words I should apply whatever I learn in my own unique way to see the consequences and to feel the difference. For instance, by developing some of my political skills such as referent power, I could treat my subordinates fairly in any organization where I will be working. Also by being more of an extravert I believe can achieve most of my life goals.
As a conclusion, managing your organisation behaviour cannot be obtained just by looking at definition in the dictionary; we have to feel what we learned from an experience and apply it by your own skills towards all kinds of problems we face. From my personal experience all my political skills and cognitive types are developing day by day from experience to experience.