Organizational Behaviour: Application of Concepts
Purpose
This assignment will allow you to apply concepts of organizational behavior, using an
organization you are familiar with as the context.
Using your experiences and knowledge of a workplace or organization where you have
worked, volunteered or are quite familiar, read through and answer the following
questions.
There are two parts to this assignment. Carefully read the instructions below.
Part 1
Watch Susan Cain’s TedTalk. Choose an organization that you are familiar with to help
you answer the following questions.
Questions:
1. Imagine that you are chairing a meeting and want to encourage participation
from everyone. Write a list of the ideas and techniques you would use before,
during and after the meeting to invite and gather everyone’s contributions.
2. Describe the strategies the organization has used to ensure that all members have
the opportunity to participate and to share their ideas in a conversation or in a
meeting. Evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies.
Part 2
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is one’s ability to recognize and label one’s feelings and those
of others. It also includes managing and adapting one’s emotions to the environments to
achieve goals. EQ has been shown to influence job performance above and beyond
general mental ability and personality factors, particularly in jobs requiring high emotional
labour.
As per the textbook, EQ includes four types of abilities:
a) Perceiving emotions: the ability to detect and figure out emotions in faces, pictures
and voices, including identifying one’s own emotions.
b) Using emotions: the ability to harness (and change) emotions to best fit the task at
hand.
c) Understanding emotions: ability to comprehend emotional language and
appreciate complicated relationships among emotions. E.g. the ability to be
sensitive to slight variations between emotions, recognize, and describe how
emotions evolve over time.
d) Managing emotions: the ability to regulate emotions in both ourselves and others,
even negative ones, and manage them to achieve intended goals.
Remember your Effective Communications courses; use the 7 C’s of communication.
Questions:
1. Among the four key components of EQ, which is your strongest component?
Which is your weakest? Explain.
2. Describe how you use/have used your strongest components of EQ in your
job. How does your weakest component cause barriers / issues in your job?
3. Create a plan to improve your weakest component of EQ. How will the plan
impact your behaviours / performance? How will you know if you have
improved this component?
