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management? How did this management style affect your attitudes and behaviors? 6. Think of your co-workers or fellow members. How did their attitudes and behavior affect yours, particularly your level of performance? 7. Given your answers to these questions, how would you improve this organization’s approach to managing its members? ■ RESEARCH ON THE INTERNET: A MANAGER’S TOOL Specific Task General Task Enter Wal-Mart’s Web site, click on “About Wal- Mart” and then click on “Culture Stories”(www. walmart.com). 1. What do the stories about Wal-Mart’s culture suggest about the company’s approach to management and organizational behavior? 2. What do the stories say about Wal-Mart’s approach to managing its human resources to gain a competitive advantage? Search for the Web site of a company that describes its managers’ approach to utilizing human resources or the way they address one of the four management challenges identified in the chapter. What is their approach, or what is the main challenge they are facing? ■ TOPICS FOR DEBATE Now that you understand the nature of organizational behavior and management and the kinds of issues they address, debate the following topics: Debate One Team A. Organizations should do all they can to promote the well-being of people and groups inside and outside the organization. Team B. The best way to increase organizational performance is to give workers the flexibility to define and negotiate their own positions. Debate Two Team A. The best way to increase organizational performance is to clearly specify each worker’s position and the relationships among positions. Team B. Organizations exist to make a profit. As they earn money for their shareholders, all they should do to promote social well-being is to follow government laws and regulations. ■ EXPERIENTIAL EXERCISE A Question of Ethics Objective Your objective is to uncover and understand the factors that allow you to determine whether behavior in organizations is ethical. Procedure 1. The class divides into groups of three to five people, and each group appoints one member as spokesperson to present the group’s findings to the whole class. 2. Each member of the group is to think of some unethical behaviors or incidents that he or she has observed in organizations. The incidents could be something you experienced as an employee, a customer, or a client, or something you observed informally. 3. The group identifies three important criteria to use to determine whether a particular action or behavior is ethical. These criteria need to differentiate between ethical and unethical organizational behavior. The spokesperson writes them down. 33
4. When asked by the instructor, the spokespersons for each group should be ready to describe the incidents of unethical behavior witnessed by group members and the criteria developed in step 3. ■ MAKING THE CONNECTION At the end of most chapters is a “Making the Connection” exercise that requires you to search newspapers or magazines in the library for an example of a real company that is dealing with some of the issues, concepts, challenges, questions, and problems dealt with in the chapter. The purpose of the exercise for this chapter is to familiarize you with the way in which managers make use of organizational behavior to increase organizational effectiveness. Find an example of an organization in which managers made use of organizational behavior concepts or theories to deal with one of the four challenges discussed in Chapter 1: gaining a competitive advantage, organizational ethics, diversity in the workforce, or globalization. Closing Case How Jeff Bezos Manages at Amazon.com In 1994, Jeffrey Bezos, a computer science and electrical engineering graduate from Princeton University, was growing weary of working for a Wall Street investment bank. With his computer science background prompting him, he saw an entrepreneurial opportunity in the fact that Internet usage was growing at over 2,300 percent a year. Searching for an opportunity to take advantage of his technical skills in the new electronic, virtual marketplace he decided that the book-selling market offered an opportunity. Deciding to make a break, he packed up his belongings and drove to the West Coast, deciding en route that Seattle, Washington—a new mecca for hightech software developers and the hometown of Starbucks coffee shops—would be an ideal place to begin his venture. Bezos’s plan was to develop an online bookstore that would be customerfriendly and easy to navigate, and would offer the broadest possible selection of books. He had decided to create an e-commerce business that, operating through the Internet, never saw its customers but whose mission was to provide customers great selection and great service at low prices. 60 Bezos realized that compared to a real “bricks and mortar” bookstore, an online bookstore would be able to offer a much larger and diverse selection of books. His goal was that online customers would find it easy to search for any book in print on a computerized, online catalog, browse different subject areas, read reviews of books, and even ask other shoppers for online recommendations—something most people would hesitate to do in a regular bookstore. With a handful of employees and operating from his garage in Seattle, Bezos launched his venture online in July 1995 with $7 million in borrowed captial. Within 34
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