Organizational Behavior - Introduction

Organizational behavior is the study of both group and individual performance and activity within an organization. Internal and external perspectives are two theories of how organizational behavior can be viewed by companies.


Organizational Behavior

Why do people behave a certain way in an organizational environment? What factors affect job performance, employee interaction, job commitment, leadership and managerial styles? Individuals have studied this very topic for decades in order to find ways of increasing organizational performance. Organizational behavior is the study of both group and individual performance and activity within an organization.

This area of study examines human behavior in a work environment and determines its impact on job structure, performance, communication, motivation, leadership, etc. Internal and external perspectives are two theories of how organizational behavior can be viewed by companies. Let's take a look at how the perspectives are different through examining Ninja Corporation.

Internal Perspective

The Ninja Corporation has two human resource managers at their headquarters. Julia and Nick have different opinions regarding how to use organizational behavioral factors to improve work conditions. Julia embraces the internal perspective and believes that employees' behavior is in large part based on their own personal feelings, interactions, thoughts and experiences.

This theory revolves around the idea that, in order to understand individuals in an organizational environment, an individual must understand the person's thoughts, feelings and personal values. Recently, a manager mentioned to Julia that she was having difficulty with motivating one of her subordinates in the sales division. Julia met with the manager and employee to see what advice she could offer in this situation.

Julia spoke with the subordinate, who revealed that he wanted to achieve his sales goals and felt that his co-workers were getting the best territories and extra feedback. Once Julia was able to uncover the subordinate's internal employment issues, she then could explain what motivational techniques would improve his performance to the manager. Her human resource coworker, Nick, had the opposite view of organizational behavior.

External Perspective

Nick was also a human resource manager at Ninja Corporation. He took an external perspective of organizational behavior. He believed that external events and environmental factors affected an individual's job performance and behavior. A recent example of this theory would be when Nick told numerous managers  to increase their subordinate's salaries by $5,000 in order to further motivate the sales team. Organizational behavior's history is really a combination of numerous elds of study.

History

While Organizational Behavior as a field of academic study wasn’t fully recognized by the American Psychological Association until the 1970’s, it’s roots go back to the late 1920’s when the Hawthorne Electric Company set up a series of experiments designed to discern how changes in environment and design changed the productivity of their employees.

Their various studies, conducted between the years of 1924 and 1933, were broad and meticulously measured over large periods of time. The studies included the effect of various types of breaks (lots of small breaks, a few long ones, etc.) on productivity, productivity in isolation, and productivity in varying levels of light. The most famous finding resulting from the of the Hawthorne Studies is what is now called the Hawthorne Effect, the change in behavior of a test subject when they know they’re being observed. 

To focus on that one finding, some have argued, is to ignore a wider set of studies that would become credited for the development of organizational behavior as a field of study and the human resources profession as we now know it. The idea of looking scientifically at behavior and productivity in the workplace with the goal of increasing the amount and quality of work an employee can get done, along with the idea that workers were not interchangeable resources but were instead unique in terms of their psychology and potential fit with a company. These ideas were radically new when Hawthorne first began the studies, and they helped create a field of study and an entire professional field. 

Organizational behavior has focused on various different topics of study. In part because of the second world war, during the 1940’s the field focused on logistics and management science. During this period the emphasis was on using mathematical modeling and statistical analysis to find the best answers for complex problems. Studies by the Carnegie – or freshwater – School economics in the 1950’s and 1960’s furthered these rationalist approaches to decision making problems. 

In the 1970’s, theories of contingency and institutions, as well as organizational ecology, resource dependence, and bounded rationality came to the fore as the field focused more on quantitative research. These findings and sets of theories helped organizations better understand how to improve business structure and decision making. 

Since the 1970’s, a good deal of the work being done in the field of organizational behavior has been on cultural components of organizations, including topics such as race, class, gender roles, and cultural relativism and their roles on group building and productivity. These studies, a part of a shift in focus in the field towards qualitative research, and among other things, take into account the ways in which identity and background can inform decision making. 

Academic Focuses

Academic Programs focusing on organizational behavior are usually found in business schools, and schools of social work and psychology. They draw from the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and leadership studies and use quantitative, qualitative, and computer models as methods to explore and test ideas. Depending on the program one can study specific topics within organizational behavior, or broader fields.

The topics covered by Micro OB include cognition, decision making, learning, motivation, negotiation, impressions, group process, stereotyping, and power and influence. 

Macro OB covers organizations as social systems, dynamics of change, markets, relationships between organizations and their environments, as well as identity in organizational process, how social movements influence markets, and the power of social networks.

OB In Practice

Findings from organizational behavior’s body of research can be used by executives and Human Relations professionals better understand a business’ culture, how that culture may facilitate or hinder productivity and employee retention, and how to best evaluate candidates skill set and personality during the hiring process. 

The application of theory and knowledge from the field of organizational behavior can be broken down into sections of Personality, Job Satisfaction and Reward Management, Leadership, Authority, Power, and Politics. There is rarely one correct way to asses the right way to manage any of these things, but OB research can provide a set of guidelines and topics to follow.