Excerpts

To The Instructor Welcome to the second edition of Human Relations: Personal and Professional Development. This book, like its predecessor, represents a different paradigm in conveying information to students about human relations in organizations. The fact is, the world continues to change. Work conditions, technology, and the people with whom individuals work have a dynamism about them that is unprecedented in our history. People are more likely today to work with more diversified peers than at any other time. Furthermore, their interactions at work are changing as well. No longer are employees primarily a cog in a bureaucratic organization. Instead, they are more likely to be part of a work team, and they are expected to work together to be successful in accomplishing tasks. Employees may not have the strong supervisory influence that directed our work behavior in the past. Rather, they'll have to take on more of this responsibility themselves. As such, work behavior will have to adapt. Employees will no longer be looking at what organizations are doing to them, but how they may affect attainment of organizational objectives. It's issues like these that have led to the focus of this text--paying attention to the critical human relations at work--from the employee's perspective. Writing this text was both exciting and frightening. The excitement came from being able to address topics that are important to our students as they apply to them at work. It gives each of us the opportunity to relate to students in a way that we think they can understand--and to prepare them for what lies ahead in their work interactions. The frightening part comes from doing something different. Books that are published often follow a similar structure. Sure, each of us puts our own spin on our material. We may give more weight to a topic that we have greater interest in or one that we feel is truly more critical to understand. Deviating from that norm is scary. But common sense dictates that when one attempts this, there has to be a well-grounded reason. For us, that reason came from the absolute belief that our students need to understand how to succeed at work today--no matter where or what type of work they do. Authors, however, don't simply go off on tangents without some basic premises. Human Relations: Personal and Professional Development, therefore, had to be rooted in an appropriate framework and assumptions. Let us explain what ours are. The Assumptions The first major assumption concerning this book and the revision is what students need to be exposed to--an order that makes sense. To address this issue, we've divided the book into five parts: Part I: Starting the Journey is written to provide students with sound foundational information about the field of human relations--past, present, and future challenges. Part II: Human Behavior begins the process of understanding why people do what they do. The chapters in this part focus on the fundamentals of individual behavior, how people develop interpersonal communications styles, and personal problems they may face. At the end of this part, students should have a better understanding of their own behavior. But recognizing that these behaviors are frequently exhibited at work, students need to understand the effect of their behaviors in a work setting. Part III: Organizational Behavior introduces students to the inner workings of organizations. Topics include why workers are grouped the way they are, how groups and teams affect individual behavior, the employment process, power, politics, status, and organizational communications. The nuances of each element and their behavioral implications are discussed. Part IV Human Behavior in Organizations recognizes that individuals interact with others while at work and frequently deal with change and conflict. How each of these aspects of work life affects employees is highlighted. Part V Making the Connections attempts to put all the pieces together. The focus is on one's career and what an individual can do to achieve personal goals. A book on a topic like human relations must support a strong skills focus. These skills include interpreting data, processing information, making decisions, thinking critically, and developing personal qualities. Each of these skills was a driving force for the first edition of this book and continues to be strengthened in this edition. Writing a book about human relations has an inherent benefit that other topic areas may not enjoy. That's because it's a book about people and how they behave. Although the material is often well rooted in organizational behavior and theoretical research, it does not have to be presented in a theoretical manner. Rather, we've taken a practical approach which we believe will assist in helping students understand the material in this book and meet their needs. To do this, we've written a text that is realistic to them, talks about issues they'll likely encounter at work, and discusses what they should do to be effective in their interactions with others in an organizational setting. We believe, too, that the book is written in an understandable manner with many examples drawn from students' everyday lives. We hope that writing style helps students learn about themselves and gives them an opportunity to explore their behavior and understand how to interact with others. Furthermore, a book for students should be interesting and user-friendly. The book should be performance-based, providing students an opportunity to develop a variety of competencies. We believe such characteristics make a text more interactive, and it's this performance-based approach that assists students in positioning themselves for success in tomorrow's jobs. The Features In deciding which features to include in this edition, several things came to mind. First, we wanted students to relate to this book. We wanted them to see themselves through the eyes of others who encounter situations that they may face in the future. Accordingly, we've used a rich base of relevant examples. Several features have been included in the book that can best be described as in-text learning aids: Learning Outcomes summaries linked to the learning outcomes review and discussion questions key terms and margin notes cases But in order to make this text more interactive, we've taken another step. In each chapter, there are several learning stimuli designed to help students better understand themselves and the material and to build skills: Unlocking Your Potential vignettes ask students to respond to questions about themselves or how they perceive a particular event. Many of the Keys to Unlocking Your Potential also present the opportunity to go further--under a section called "extra effort." These extras may also be used as a graded writing assignment, thereby reinforcing another critical skill, effective communications. Reviewing Your Understanding features are designed to explain the important feature of some text-related material as it applies directly to the student. Students begin to formulate their personal profiles by completing the Unlocking Your Potential features and working through the Reviewing Your Understanding questions. Value Judgment: Today's students, as well as tomorrow's workers, are bound to face dilemmas not encountered by their parents. How students deal with the unexpected will often be a function of their value system. In response to this fact, each chapter contains a vignette called Value Judgment that links a situation to a particular facet in the chapter and asks the student his or her opinion on how they would deal with or resolve the dilemma. Supplements Companion Website on CD-ROM. Packaged free with every copy of the book, the Companion Website on CD-ROM offers practice questions with immediate feedback and evaluation. Companion Website provides free access to the same questions as students will find on the CD-ROM, but set up for distance learning environments. Prentice Hall's Companion Websites offer automatic feedback, Internet communication support, and grading and gradebook features. Student Study Guide provides an additional set of questions and practice scenarios for students requiring more hands-on applications. Self-Assessment Library on CD-ROM, an option to the package provided with the text, provides students with greater insight into their own capabilities. Instructor's Manual with CD-ROM and PowerPoint Files provides a complete set of instructional tools, lecture guidance, classroom handouts, and test questions. WIN PH Test Manager is a computerized bank of test questions easily or randomly selected and printed with automatically generated answer keys. JWA Video Offer: Choose from a catalog of videos related to the topics in the book: one video for every adoption of 25 copies or two videos for every adoption of 50 copies or more. Excerpted from Human Relations: Personal and Professional Development by David A. Decenzo, Beth Silhanek All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.