MGMT 4400 Week 1 Levels of Analysis Discussion Post Example

Week 1 Discussion: Levels of Analysis in Organizational Behavior

Why Servers at the Newest Restaurant Stopped Picking Up Open Shifts: One Explanation at Each Level, Individual, Group and Organization, and the Fact That Decides Among Them

I am a shift lead at the newest of four restaurants run by Brennan Family Kitchens, a composite family-owned group in the Kansas City area; our location, a casual bistro, opened in March. Here are the facts. Open shifts are posted in the scheduling app every Sunday for the following week. At the group's flagship diner, open shifts are usually claimed within a day. At our bistro, since about May, roughly a third of open shifts have gone unclaimed until a manager phones someone, almost all of them weeknight dinner shifts. Our servers are not working fewer hours overall; the busy weekend shifts fill as fast as anywhere.

Organizational behavior asks where a behavior lives, and Robbins and Judge (2019) describe three levels at which to look: the individual, the group and the organization. Here is one explanation at each. At the individual level, several of our servers hold second jobs on weeknights and simply cannot take extra shifts. At the group level, the Friday crew, who trained together before opening, swap shifts privately by text, so they rarely look at the app at all, and newer servers have learned to do the same. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) note that groups formed early develop their own ways of working, and this crew is one. At the organizational level, the app lets managers see and assign open shifts a day before servers can, and managers fill the shifts they like best with their regulars, so by the time servers look, what is left are the weeknight shifts nobody chose.

I think the fact that decides it is which shifts go unclaimed. If second jobs were the cause, the unclaimed shifts would be spread across whatever nights servers work elsewhere, and the flagship, whose servers also hold second jobs, would have the same problem. If the private swap habit were the cause, unclaimed shifts would cluster among servers outside the Friday crew. But the unclaimed shifts are concentrated in exactly the slots left after managers' early picks, which points to the organizational explanation: the app's early viewing window. I could test this by checking whether the flagship's managers use the early window.

Which level do you think a manager usually reaches for first, and why?

Reply to Jasmine

Jasmine, your call center's rising absences on Mondays sound like a case where all three levels could fit too. Individual: agents with weekend jobs. Group: a team norm of covering for each other. Organization: Monday is when the worst call queue is scheduled. What fact would tell you which one is driving it, for example whether absences are concentrated in one team or spread across all of them?

Reply to Devon

Devon, you put your warehouse's safety lapses at the individual level, as carelessness. I would push back gently. Robbins and Judge (2019) warn that observers tend to blame individuals for behavior that is shaped by the situation, which Kelley (1973) described in research on how people attribute causes. If the lapses happen mostly on one shift, under one supervisor or at the end of long stretches of overtime, the cause may sit at the group or organizational level. Do you know whether the lapses cluster anywhere?

References

Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (1993). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization. Harvard Business School Press.

Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28(2), 107-128. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034225

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2019). Organizational behavior (18th ed.). Pearson.