Matthews Case Study Sample

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• Subject Name : Organisational Behaviour

Organisational Behaviour

1. Psychologists state that five big personality traits can be found in a person. These traits cover the basic dimensions of personality. It is very important to note that all of these have two extremes that are high or low (Oshio, Taku, Hirano & Saeed, 2018). Research suggests that biological and environmental affect these personality traits.

The big five personality traits include the following: -

Openness

The characteristic of this trait includes imagination, creativity, and innovative insights. People possessing this trait are high in imagination skills. They use their creativity to develop innovative things. They enjoy experiences in life because they are adventurous. These people are traditional and may find difficulty in abstract thinking.

Conscientiousness

The people with this trait are found to be thoughtful, goal-oriented, and have a good impulse. They are well organized and can plan out things ahead about how will be their behaviour under circumstances. They are mindful of the details.

Extraversion

The standardized feature of this trait is characterized by excitability, assertiveness, sociability, excitability, and expressiveness. This kind of person likes to go to events and gain energy from them. Until and unless they are not surrounded by the people they do not feel energized. This kind of person loves social life.

Agreeableness

This personality people are found to be kind and ones who easily trust others. They are found to be corporative with others who do not possess these characteristics (Srinivasan& Ananthapadmanaban, 2020). They are known for affection, altruism, and prosocial behaviour.

Neuroticism

People possessing neuroticism are found to be sad, depressive, emotional, and unstable. These kinds of people have mood swings and may experience anxiety, irritability, or sadness. People who do not have this characteristic are found to be more stable.

2. The demand for occupation highly influences occupational stress. The main idea of the model reflects on demand of the work, control in the work process and social support of the organization and colleagues all of them contribute directly to increasing the straining process. This model has been criticized because of the predominance of the self-report and the demand and measurement of the objectives of the organization (Dawson, O'Brien & Beehr, 2016). This model is perfect to understand the rise in demand and how it is controlled by the support of the system. Multiple factors influence the job relationship and the work of the employees. The same has been depicted in Matthews case study.

Matthew is working in the Advert co. He is not a good performer and his team has not achieved the expectations of the company. Matthew receives a call from his mum to come and visit as his father is not well. Matthew is thinking to take a holiday when suddenly the company announced that it is changing its policy now the demand has increased and to gain reward Matthew and his team needs to work very hard. The team is asked to create a design for the advertisement by using new software. The company is not providing training for the members to learn the software and this is why Matthew is feeling stressed because he does not know how to operate and create an advertisement with the new software. He is thinking of taking the help of his teammates but he founds that his team members have no mastery in the software(Dawson, O'Brien & Beehr, 2016). He finds the work hard and a person in such a situation will also feel stressed out. The other factors of stress can be loneliness and lack of team support.

3. There are a lot of factors that influence a team's performance and this includes team norms and cohesion. They both play a vital role in running an organization. Both of these states that team members must have an interpersonal bond with one another and must try to create an environment of motivation to accomplish the team's goals. The team norms set clear and agreed-upon behaviour to work and get it done before the deadline of the project. It helps each other to know what is expected from them (Pizzi & Stanger, 2019). Without good team norms, the performance of the team would be very weak. To be a strong team both team norms and cohesion must be accepted by all the team members in the organization.

A team that does not stand united for a common goal has very low performance in the organization as was in the case of Matthews’s team. His team was not united all the members of the team used to work independently although they have an interpersonal bond with another they do not use to focus on the accomplishment of the goals rather most of them used to come late and spend a lot of time in taking breaks (van der Voet & Steijn, 2020). They all used to miss the deadlines of the project and were performing very low. It was required that the team fulfils the team norms along with maintaining cohesiveness. 

The five ways to encourage cohesiveness in Matthews’s team are: -

• Resolve conflicts in a right way
• Build trust in one another
• Encourage feedbacks in team
• Plan team-building events 
• Establish a meaningful purpose for the team.

4. A person who has power needs to exercise those according to the situations and carefully. It helps in controlling the environment of the organization. The five sources of power in an organization include:

• Legitimate Power

The power of an individual based on his or her position is known as legitimate power. It depends on the hierarchy of the organization. The person at the highest position will have more power than the one at the lowest.

• Reward Power

This is closely tied with legitimate power as a person with this power has the responsibility to raise the salary and give rewards to the employees (Tang, 2019).

• Coercive Power

People who possess the coercive power threaten the employees about the punishment on poor performance. These people can fire and demolish the employees form the organization. 

• Referent Power

It is the ability to influence others and change the decisions of the employees. A person who does not have any power uses this kind of power to change others' decisions.

• Expert Power

It is another power to earn respect based on knowledge, skill, and talent. A person having this power known about the job and does it properly.

I think Matthew can use referent power in the organization to influence the decisions and working conditions of the employees in the organization. Since Matthew is a common employee without any position in the top and middle level of the hierarchy thus he cannot use legitimate and reward power. He cannot even punish anyone as he does not have the coercive power. The only power he has is to influence others and improve his team performance (Tang, 2019). He can with his ability can change the behaviour of the people and make them understand the importance of working in a team and not to miss any deadline of the project since it has a negative effect on the overall performance of the individual and that of the team.

5. The equity theory is known as a justice theory in an organization. It aims to strike a balance between employees' input and the expectation of justified salary and benefits at the workplace. It is seen that an individual’s satisfaction is directly linked with the efforts of an employee place in the organization. A person if satisfied with the organization he or she will try to perform well and if not then they will take advantage of the resources. It is thus can be defined as a theory in which input of the employees is similar to the output generated (Ryan, 2016). It can be understood with Anisa and Henry’s case.

It was identified in the case study that Anisa was not satisfied with her job because she wanted an equal salary just like her other colleagues for the same work which she used to do. But she was paid low because she did not clear the English test. She scored very low marks. She was very disappointed with the organization for being bias and never used to see her fault and due to this, she started using the company's resources to send a parcel and even used to do the work according to her payment. She started taking long breaks to get away from work. 

On the other hand, Henry was a satisfied person, he knew the importance of equity and was perfectly satisfied with the salary which he was getting because he knew he lacked in English, and due to this reason, he is getting a low pay than her colleagues. Henry was trying to focus on how to improve English rather than thinking that the input he is providing is not receiving benefits from the company which he should get. Both of them displayed two different characters, Henry was satisfied with her input and output while Anisa was not.

References for Organizational Behaviour

Dawson, K. M., O'Brien, K. E., & Beehr, T. A. (2016). The role of hindrance stressors in the job demand-control–support model of occupational stress: A proposed theory revision. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37(3), 397-415.

Oshio, A., Taku, K., Hirano, M., & Saeed, G. (2018). Resilience and Big Five personality traits: A meta-analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 127, 54-60.

Pizzi, G., & Stanger, N. (2019). Consequences of teammate moral behaviour: Linking team moral norms with cohesion and collective efficacy. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 1-17.

Ryan, J. C. (2016). Old knowledge for new impacts: Equity theory and workforce nationalization. Journal of Business Research, 69(5), 1587-1592.

Srinivasan, S., & Ananthapadmanaban, K. R. (2020). Intelligent Agent-Based Organization for Studying the Big Five Personality Traits. In Intelligent Computing and Innovation on Data Science (pp. 81-89). Springer, Singapore.

Tang, K. N. (2019). Power and Politics of Business Organisation. In Leadership and Change Management (pp. 69-74). Springer, Singapore.

van der Voet, J., & Steijn, B. (2020). Team innovation through collaboration: how visionary leadership spurs innovation via team cohesion. Public Management Review, 1-20.

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