Organizational Behaviour Report: A Study of Valve's Approach

This report analyzes the organizational behaviour of Valve, focusing on the appropriateness of its unique approach. It examines individual factors such as personal and environmental influences, highlighting how Valve's environment encourages creativity and skill development. The report delves into group dynamics, emphasizing the absence of formal leadership and the collaborative exchange of ideas within the company. Furthermore, it explores structural factors, particularly Valve's flat management system, and its impact on employee empowerment and decision-making. The report concludes by assessing how Valve's organizational behaviour, which includes its management process factors, fosters employee engagement and contributes to organizational performance. The study uses the case study of Valve's organizational behaviour to evaluate the approach taken by the company.

ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
TASK ..............................................................................................................................................1
2.2 Appropriateness of Valve's approach ...................................................................................1
CONCLUSION ...............................................................................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................4

INTRODUCTION
Organisational Behaviour (OB) is the study of human behaviour in an organizational setting,
interface between human behaviour and organization (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2010). The
present report is based on the case study of Valve's organizational behaviour.
TASK
2.2 Appropriateness of Valve approach
Individual Factors-Factors affecting individual behaviour are as follows:
Personal Factors- It can be classified into two categories Biographic and Learned
characteristics. Biographic Characteristics are the inbuilt or genetic kind of characteristics in
human beings (Gyekye and Haybatollahi, 2015). According to Valve organizational behaviour, it
gives great opportunity to show their inherited abilities, experience, intelligence, skills, ideas to
individuals encouraging them for the formation of new ideas. It works as a motivation for any
employee at Valve's to show their creativity and talent, resulting in greater employee
involvement in each stage of production process. Thus, engaging employee in achieving
organizational goals by enhancing organizational performance.
On the other hand, characteristics that are learned by employees are relatively a
permanent change in the behaviour of employees resulting from interactions with organizational
environment. In case of Valve's, there are very high chances of such changes in employees’
performance. As work environment is dynamic, it develops great scope for employee to learn
and enhance their skills on duty (French, 2011). Thus, it attracts employees towards it that result
in high interaction of employees with this organization. Enhanced skills of employees help in
increasing performance of any organisation.
Environmental factors-This factor affects individuals to a large extent by the economic
environment. This factor is further classified as economic factors, political factors, legal
environment and socio-cultural factors. As Valve's is not bounded by many rules or regulations
and includes flat management techniques, which encourages employees to work efficiently
according to his choices unaffected by the environmental factors. Employees are not affected by
the involvement of environmental factors because they can work freely in an organization
according to their wishes and choices (Huczynski, Buchanan and Huczynski, 2013).

Group factors- Group can be defined as two or more individuals interacting with each
other. In Valve, there is no term involved like leadership so there is a type of social group in an
organization where employees interact with each other and share their ideas and views of their
choice and mutually start working on the same. Group factors that affect other organizations are
formal leadership, roles, norms, group status, group size, composition of group, group
cohesiveness, etc.
Terms like formal leadership, norms, etc. do not exist as there is no formal leader of
this organization, hence all are free to work according to their choices and ideas. Roles are not
assigned to any employee in Valve without norms; this motivates them to engage profoundly into
company's activities and to achieve their goals. Valve is like a big social hub where exchange of
ideas and thoughts take place and process of realizing those ideas is done (Lawrence and Lee,
2013). This type of work strategy enhances skills of individuals and helps in achieving
organizational goals, which in turn boosts the overall performance. Valve has an ever evolving
culture as hiring is done by recruiting smarter people than they already have within business.
Structural factors: - Valve has a very simple business structure, not complicated by any
type of hierarchy in management; flatland type of management is used within the business.
Structural factors include components like size of an organization, business development stage,
and type of business strategy.
Small and big size organizations put significant impact on type of structure; for small
business, a simple structure is needed whereas for big organizations, up to down method of
management should be used. However, in Valve, there is a special kind of management structure
i.e. Flatland, in which there is no boss, no head and everyone is at the same level of management
working for an organization (Luthans, 2011).
Valve has a very simple business strategy of realizing innovative ideas and thoughts of
any employees into reality as a video game. Employees are empowered to take quick decisions
without any supervisory approval. This empowerment of employees leads to a successful
business enterprise with flatland management system, as they are engaged into day to day
functioning of an organization. According to Valve, if a company hires smart, the best and
brightest people then they would be assigned personal desks and to supervisor tasks, that’s why
there are no job titles (Wilson, 2017).

Management process factors- Managing is a regular process of knowing things,
understanding and improving them by making necessary changes that are needed. Factors of this
process includes improved process cost, decrease in cost of quality, improved PTT, training time,
reduction in customer complains, and surety about tomorrow. Management process is all about
improving the existing process.
As Valve is using flatland management system; the quality and process costs can easily
be improved as there will be no supervisory permits needed to carry out any actions related to it.
Quality of product can easily be determined in case of Valve especially video games with
poor quality will definitely fail in the markets. And to combat their failure, there is a common
mind set of employees working with Valve i.e. “we all are stewards of our long term relations
with customers".
As hiring is done for the smartest candidate, Valve’s trust their employees to produce
materials with customer's interests at heart. There are no internal complaints by employees as
they all worked as a team. The judgements found after conducting a study on management
process factors are that there is a good collaboration between Valve’s employees and also there
is no impact on any factors. This encourage employees to work with Valve and get engaged in
organizational performance and activities (Organizational Behaviour: Definition, Characteristics
and Nature, 2018).
There are no such factors in organisational behaviour of Valve that discourage employees
efforts in organisational activities. As a result of flatland management system, engagement
activities in Valve maximises encouraging organizational performance.
CONCLUSION
The concluded report emphasised on the study of organizational behaviour of Valve.
Further, classification is done on factors of Valve that affect the human behaviour.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Buchanan, D. A. and Huczynski, A. A., 2010. Organizational behaviour. (p. 794). Pearson
education.
French, R., 2011. Organizational behaviour. John Wiley & Sons.
Gyekye, S. A. and Haybatollahi, M., 2015. Organizational citizenship behaviour: An empirical
investigation of the impact of age and job satisfaction on Ghanaian industrial workers.
International Journal of Organizational Analysis. 23(2). pp.285-301.
Huczynski, A., Buchanan, D. A. and Huczynski, A. A., 2013. Organizational behaviour. (p. 82).
London: Pearson.
Lawrence, P. and Lee, R., 2013. Organizational Behaviour (RLE: Organizations): Politics at
Work. Routledge.
Luthans, F., 2011. Organizational behaviour: An evidence-based approach. McGraw-Hill.
Wilson, F. M., 2017. Organizational behaviour and gender. Routledge.
Online
Organizational Behaviour: Definition, Characteristics and Nature 2018. [online]. Available
through<http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/organization/organizational-behaviour/
organizational-behaviour-definition-characteristics-and-nature/63741>