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Mr. Zebra, I'm tired of getting paid
the minimum wage for trimming trees here at the National Park.
But Mr. giraffe, this is the only job you are qualified to do.
You are very tall and are able to eat the leaves from the trees.
That is true. But I was thinking about moving to America to work.
What job would you do in America?
Well, basketball players in America are very tall.
And I am very tall.
So maybe I could play basketball too and get rich.
Very rich.
Well, Mr. Giraffe, You just keep dreaming for this is what you are good at.
In the meantime, please get back to work.
Hi, professor Navarro here once again.
And in this lesson,
we're going to take a spin around the markets for both land and labor.
Two key factors in the production process.
From a personal perspective,
this lesson should be really interesting as it will shed light on questions like,
will I ever be able to buy my home given that housing prices often seem really high?
What are my job prospects look like?
And why are the wages for young college graduates so low
while superstar athletes earn millions of dollars just to play games?
To lay the foundation for our analysis of the labor market,
I want to start with an overview of some of the big questions and key concepts.
One of the most important fields of management science, organizational behavior.
It's useful to briefly examine this field because it provides some perspective on
quite literally the human dimensions of
the workplaces you will be working in over the course of your lifetime.
Once we finish with our overview of organizational behavior,
we'll move on first to the labor market and how wages are set, and then,
to the market for land and its development,
with everything from homes and shopping malls to ranches, farms and factories.
To get an idea
of the importance of organizational behavior,
let's start off with a quotation from one of
the most famous industrialists in American history, Andrew Carnegie.
He once said, "Take away my people but leave my factories,
and soon grass will grow on factory floors.
Take away my factories but leave my people,
and soon we will have a new and better factory."
Carnegie's point of course,
is that, it is the people of a business,
the human capital, that ultimately determine
its success or failure and not machinery and equipment.
At its essence,
organizational behavior focuses on the people's side of the business equation.
And in this figure, we summarize just a few of
the key questions and concepts of this sprawling field.
Take a minute now to look this table over
and then we will talk about just a few of its highlights.
As you do so, note that the figure is broken into three main points of focus,
individuals, teams and the organization itself.
At the individual level,
perhaps the biggest question is,
how do you motivate people?
And in order to answer that question,
organizational behaviorists often look at questions like,
what are the sources of individual behavior?
And how do the values and personality affect behavior and performance?
As to why you might care about any of this,
by understanding what businesses might be looking for in an employee,
you may do a bit better in your job search and interviews by undertaking
a bit of self evaluation to see how you match up in today's labor market.
Consider for example, just one of the many models
used in organizational behavior to examine individual characteristics.
The so called CANOE model,
where the letters in CANOE stand for, Conscientiousness,
Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness to experience and Extroversion.
So where do you think you stand on each of those personality traits?
Let's pause now as you think about that and rate yourself on a scale of one to 10.
Well, there is no right answer here.
But as you might expect,
organizational behavior scholars have found that
personality does indeed affect performance.
Conscientious employees set higher personal goals and are more motivated.
People with high agreeableness,
can handle customer relations and conflict based situations better.
And people that are less neurotic,
that is emotionally stable,
work better with others in high stress situations.
That's why businesses look for employees that rate high on personality tests.
Let's turn now to our next set of big questions that revolve around the team process.
Teams are critical in many organizations because teams and
groups tend to be better at making decisions than single individuals.
Teams are also more likely to discover problems or opportunities,
and they create synergies by pooling their knowledge to form new alternatives.
As a student, you may often find it useful
to work with a group routine on a course project,
or just a course itself.
As to whether your team works effectively,
here are some insights from organizational behavior scholars.
Teams work best when they are assigned structured tasks.
And when team members are required to work together
rather than alone much of the time.
Teams also work best if they're not burdened with too many members.
And sometimes it is a lot better to have people with
diverse backgrounds so they do not all think alike.
In fact, one of the big reasons a team can fail,
is by succumbing to what's called groupthink.
In this key definition,
groupthink is the tendency of
highly cohesive groups to value consensus at the price of decision quality.
Every business
has an organizational culture
whether they know it or not.
And the two key questions here are,
how does organizational culture affect corporate performance?
And, how can a business strengthen its organizational culture?
Just what is organizational culture?
A dry definition is simply this,
organizational culture is the basic pattern of shared assumptions,
values and beliefs that are considered to be the correct way of thinking
about and acting on problems and opportunities facing the organization.
Yep, I said it was dry.
But to give this context,
consider a company like Wal-Mart.
Its organizational culture is that of frugality and efficiency.
It has Spartan waiting rooms for suppliers,
visitors buy their own coffee and soft drinks and employees sit at inexpensive desks.
Not exactly the most fun filled workplace on the planet,
but they do push product out the door with very low prices.
In contrast, Google's organizational culture is casual and democratic.
Afternoon volleyball breaks are common and there is no top down hierarchy.
The broader goal is to stimulate innovation and free flowing thoughts.
No drones or robots need apply.
The point here of course is that,
organizational culture has a critical effect on business performance.
And as you search for a job,
you may well want to tune into
the organizational cultures of the companies you interview at.
Understanding that organizational culture,
may help you land the job.
And it also may guide you away from companies with
cultures that are incompatible with your own goals and vision.
With that, let's move on to the next module and
start our journey into the nuts and bolts of the labor market itself.
Dr. Peter NavarroProfessor
