Advanced Organisational Behaviour Lecture Notes

Advanced Organisational Behaviour

Week 1

Employer Perspective:

 Person-job fit:
o Psychometric rigour (reliability and validity of assessment)
 Strategic fit:
o Best practice/best fit

Applicant Perspective:

 Two-way relationship
 Social/interactive process:
o Growing emphasis on employer branding in recruitment
o Candidate experience important for attraction

Societal Perspective:

 R&S practices viewed as mechanisms of control rather than neutral, rational, meritocratic
processes
 Recognise multiple stakeholders and power dynamics
 Socially constructed ‘ideal’ types of candidates:
o Unpaid internships favour those in high classes and who possess wealth
o SP suggests person-job fit is not a clean measurement

Tattoos in Hiring Situations:

 Other societal differences; gender, accent, class etc.
 Society cultivating views on particular personal and societal attributes
 Industry context/societal context effects

 Hiring Manager:
o Stigma of tattoos and appearance in regard to white collar sector i.e. lawyers,
doctors
o Clients have significant bargaining power in relation to impacting how much
business one firm can receive, so managerial personnel may base decisions on these
factors
o Finding ‘one size fits all,’ referring to recruitment and selection process
o May brand their organisational culture in a particular way in order to attract a more
diverse range of applicants
o Best practice from an employer to explicitly base hiring decisions on person-job fit
 However, unconscious bias more than usually contributes significantly to
hiring decisions i.e. subtle discrimination
 Applicant:
o Appearance shouldn’t lessen qualifications and suitability for a job role
o May be more likely to apply on the basis of personal culture fit i.e. more tolerable
organisational cultures
 Society:
o Growing awareness of personal complexities

, o Link between ethnic cultures and body art; could then be linked to possible
discrimination i.e. headscarves
o Wider society of possible social exclusion and job insecurity
o Society’s reliance on first impressions of applicants; making judgements on the
connotations of tattoos
o Movie culture has created a culture of tattoos attributing to crime etc.

Employer Perspective:

 Minimum Qualifications:
o Training/education i.e. qualifications, ratings
 RBS removing degree cut-off; assessing people in a way that attributes
actual personal attributes pertaining to future job outcomes
o Biographical data
o Weighted application blanks
 Ability/Aptitude Testing:
o Cognitive ability/aptitude e.g. numeracy
o Job knowledge testing i.e. technical areas
 Personality/Interest Inventories
o Personality traits, preferred styles or interests
o Emotional intelligence
 Interviews:
o One-to-one, panel, competency-based i.e. situational/behavioural
o Virtual i.e. skype, digital
o Video interviews
 Performance-Based:
o Work samples, simulations, situational judgement tests/competency-based methods
o Mini training/evaluation
o Assessment centres
 Highest fidelity to the job refers to highest match to the job role and
requirements
 Social Media:
o Potential employers screening applicants for regular social behaviours
o Does social media conform to any of the screening methods?

Person-Job Fit: Psychometric Rigour:

 Reliability:
o Consistency of assessment measure
 As used by different assessors; mapped to job performance; free from bias
 Validity:
o Predicting job performance levels and ability to achieve set organisational objectives
 Utility:
o Hiring methods and decisions must have high utility i.e. low turnover, high
contribution, positive future employment
o i.e. assessment centres have low utility for small orgainsations
 Fairness:
o Not basing hiring decision on degree, but basing it on ability to meet client and job
role needs

,  Organisational Results:
o Tenures of hires; productivity; career progress; success rates



Behavioural Science of R&S:

 Behavioural science explanations of unconscious bias:
o Sense-making;
 In unstructured interviews, which is still the most common interview
technique, interviewers’ tendency to identify patterns or detect trends when
they don’t even exist
o Cognitive load involved;
 Real decision made inn first 4 mines
 Interviewers prone to confirmation bias; selective attention to earlier beliefs
 Biases in final decisions i.e. status quo bias; groupthink effect
 Unstructured Interviews:
o Low predictive validity, no clear link between technique and future job performance
outcomes
 Structured Interviews:
o High predictive validity, good indicator of potential future job performance
behaviours
 Competency-Based:
o Highest fidelity to job role
 Virtual:
o Arguably time saving, may lose common social cues which contribute to
‘naturalness’ of interview
 Evidence of increasing structure in interviewing methods (CIPD, 2017)
o Study of 691 employers; 78% use competency-based interviews

R&S as a core HRM function: A more strategic employer model:

 One of 7 practices identified as ‘best practice’ HRM;
o Employment security/internal labour markets
o Selective hiring/sophisticated selection
o Extensive training and development
o El; information sharing; worker voice
o High compensation contingent on performance
o Reduction of status differentials

A More Strategic Employer Model:

 Focuses on organisational processes;
o Impact of organisational performance
o Legality
o Managing risk
o Speed; cost efficiency
o Alignment with other strategies
 The labour market;
o Labour market supply and demand