Organizational Behavior

Course Description

Organizational Behavior examines theoretical and research contributions of behavioral sciences to management and administration within healthcare organizations. The curriculum addresses topics from both individual and organizational angles, including communication, motivation, conflict, decision-making, goal setting, leadership, organizational design, climate, development, and control.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, HSA is the Health Services Administration prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered fall, spring and summer.

Organisational behaviour in healthcare is not a soft subject sitting beside the clinical ones — it is where a great deal of preventable harm is actually determined. Investigations of serious clinical failures rarely find that nobody knew what to do. They find that information did not move, that someone did not feel able to speak, that a team had never worked together, or that a culture punished the reporting of problems. Those are organisational behaviour findings, and they are what this course is about.

Daytona State does not publish a contact-hour figure for this course. It is an unsuffixed upper-division lecture course, and the institution's lecture convention is 15 contact hours per credit — AMH2010, GEB1011 and MAN2021 are all live at 3 credits and 45 hours. This course is priced at that convention.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the behavioural sciences underlying organisational behaviour.
• Describe individual differences and their effect on work behaviour.
• Describe perception, attribution, and their errors.
• Describe attitudes, job satisfaction, and engagement.
• Describe motivation theories and evaluate their evidence.
• Apply motivational principles to a healthcare workforce.
• Describe goal setting and its effect on performance.
• Describe communication processes and their failures.
• Apply structured communication techniques used in clinical settings.
• Describe handover and information transfer as a safety-critical process.
• Describe group and team dynamics.
• Describe what makes clinical teams effective.
• Describe psychological safety and its consequences.
• Describe conflict, its sources, and its management.
• Apply negotiation and conflict resolution techniques.
• Describe decision-making processes and their biases.
• Describe groupthink and how to counter it.
• Describe power, influence, and organisational politics.
• Describe leadership theories and evaluate their evidence.
• Describe organisational design and its effect on behaviour.
• Describe organisational culture and climate.
• Describe safety culture and how it is measured.
• Describe organisational change and resistance to it.
• Describe organisational development and control mechanisms.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe stress, burnout, and their organisational causes.
• Describe diversity and inclusion in healthcare organisations.
• Describe interprofessional collaboration.
• Describe crew resource management and its healthcare adaptation.
• Describe organisational learning from failure.
• Describe remote and hybrid working in healthcare settings.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Behavioural science foundations
• Individual differences
• Perception and attribution
• Attitudes, satisfaction, and engagement
• Motivation theories
• Motivating a healthcare workforce
• Goal setting
• Communication processes and failures
• Structured clinical communication
• Handover as a safety-critical process
• Group and team dynamics
• Effective clinical teams
• Psychological safety
• Conflict and its management
• Negotiation
• Decision-making and bias
• Groupthink
• Power, influence, and politics
• Leadership theories
• Organisational design
• Culture and climate
• Safety culture
• Change and resistance
• Organisational development and control

Optional Topics

• Stress and burnout
• Diversity and inclusion
• Interprofessional collaboration
• Crew resource management
• Learning from failure
• Remote and hybrid work

Resources & Tools

• Your college library's health databases — free with enrolment; CINAHL, MEDLINE and PubMed access is the difference between a serious paper and a weak one.
• PubMed (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) — free; the primary index for health research literature.
• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (ahrq.gov) — free evidence reports, patient safety material, and practice tools.
• CDC and Florida Department of Health — free data, guidance, and state-specific health statistics.
• Your college writing centre — free, and upper-division health courses are writing-heavy.
• Professional association for your own discipline — practice standards and student membership; the standards are usually free to read.
• The Joint Commission's Sentinel Event Alerts — free; read several. They are case studies in exactly the organisational failures this course describes, and communication failure appears again and again.
• AHRQ TeamSTEPPS (ahrq.gov) — free and complete; the standard evidence-based teamwork and communication training used across American healthcare.
• AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture — free validated instruments with national benchmark data; genuinely usable in coursework.

Career Pathways

• Health services managers and administrators — SOC 11-9111; strong projected growth and a large Florida sector.
• Clinical department and practice management — the usual destination for an experienced clinician moving into leadership.
• Quality improvement, patient safety, and accreditation roles.
• Compliance, risk management, and privacy officer roles.
• Utilisation review, case management, and care coordination.
• Health informatics and analytics.
• Long-term care and senior services administration — a very large Florida sector; note that nursing home administrators are separately licensed.
• Public health and community health agencies.
• Insurance, managed care, and payer organisations.
• Clinical research coordination and regulatory affairs.
• Continue to a graduate degree — MHA, MPH, MBA or MSN; most senior healthcare leadership expects one.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Psychological safety determines whether anyone tells you what is going wrong

• Psychological safety is the shared belief that speaking up will not be punished or humiliated — and it is one of the most strongly evidenced predictors of team performance and of error detection.
• ⚠⚠ Teams with high psychological safety report more errors, not fewer. That counter-intuitive finding is the whole point: they are not making more mistakes, they are surfacing the ones being made — and an organisation that cannot see its errors cannot prevent them.
• Low reporting rates are a warning sign, not a success measure. A unit reporting almost nothing is usually a unit where people have learned not to.
• ⚠ It is set by the most senior person in the room, moment to moment. How a leader responds the first time someone raises a problem determines whether anyone does it again.
• Respond to bad news with curiosity rather than defence. "Tell me more" costs nothing and is the single most useful managerial habit available.
• Thank people for raising problems, including inconvenient ones and including when they turn out to be wrong.
• Ask directly and specifically. "Any concerns?" gets silence; "what nearly went wrong this week?" gets answers.
• ⚠ Hierarchy suppresses speaking up, and healthcare hierarchies are steep. Structured communication tools exist precisely to give junior staff a scripted, legitimate way to raise concerns.
• Measure it. Validated safety culture surveys exist, are free, and come with national benchmarks — and acting visibly on the results is what makes the next survey honest.

⚠⚠ Communication failure is the most common contributing factor in serious clinical harm

• Analyses of sentinel events find communication failure among the leading contributing factors, year after year — not knowledge gaps, not equipment.
• Handover is the highest-risk moment in a patient's stay. Information is lost, and each loss compounds over a hospital admission.
• ⚠ Use a structured format. SBAR — situation, background, assessment, recommendation — works because it forces the speaker to state a recommendation, which is the part junior staff omit and the part that gets acted on.
• Use closed-loop communication for anything critical. Direct it to a named person, have it repeated back, and confirm completion.
• Standardise handover, protect it from interruption, and make it two-way with an explicit opportunity to ask questions.
• ⚠ Interruptions cause errors, and clinical work is relentlessly interrupted — which is why protected time for medication administration and handover exists.
• Read back critical results and verbal orders, every time.
• Flatten the hierarchy deliberately for safety-critical moments — briefings, checklists, and timeouts exist to create a sanctioned moment where anyone may speak.
• ⚠ Watch for the softened concern. People raise worries indirectly under hierarchy — "are you sure about that?" is frequently the strongest form a junior colleague can manage, and a leader who does not hear it will miss the warning.

⚠ Burnout is an organisational condition, not an individual failing

• Clinician burnout is widespread, measurable, and associated with worse patient outcomes, more errors, and enormous turnover cost.
• ⚠ Its drivers are structural — workload, staffing, administrative burden, loss of control over work, and moral distress — which is why resilience training aimed at individuals has a poor record of fixing it.
• Moral distress is distinct: knowing what the right thing to do is and being prevented from doing it. It is corrosive and it is common in constrained systems.
• Administrative burden is a modifiable cause. Documentation and process requirements that add no clinical value are a legitimate management target.
• Control over schedule matters disproportionately to retention, frequently more than pay.
• ⚠ Support staff after adverse events. The clinician involved in serious harm is affected badly, and organisations that offer no support lose good people.
• Measure it and act visibly. Surveying without acting is worse than not surveying, because it teaches staff that reporting changes nothing.
• Retention is cheaper than recruitment, and this is where the financial case and the ethical case coincide.

⚠⚠ Speak up — failure to escalate is a recurring cause of patient harm

• Reviews of preventable patient deaths repeatedly find that someone noticed something was wrong and did not say so effectively, or said so and was not heard. "Failure to rescue" is a measured, named phenomenon.
• ⚠ Say it clearly, say who you are, and say what you want. "I'm concerned" softened into a question gets lost. Name the observation, the concern, and the action you are asking for.
• Escalate up the chain if you are not heard. Every institution has a route for this, and using it is correct rather than disloyal.
• You may question an order. Asking for clarification about a medication, a dose, or a plan is part of the role, not a challenge to it — and the person who administers is responsible for what they administer.
• Students and new staff notice things precisely because they are unfamiliar. That unfamiliarity is an asset, and it is exactly the group most reluctant to speak.
• ⚠ Never let hierarchy stop you. The cases where it did are in every patient safety textbook.
• Report errors and near misses. A near miss is free information about a hazard that has not hurt anyone yet.
• Support colleagues who raise concerns. Whether it is safe to speak up is determined mostly by peers, not by policy.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

HSA4353 is 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, offered fall, spring and summer at Daytona State.

See this repository's HSA4107 (Health Services Administration) guide for the companion course.