Organizational behavior are the actions and attitudes of individuals and groups toward one another and toward the organization as a whole, and its effect on the organization’s functioning and performance. It is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups and structures have on behavior within an organization, to enable applying this knowledge towards improving organizational effectiveness. Organizational behavior examines how and why people act, think, and feel in corporate and other organized settings. The field is concerned with timeless questions such as the nature of leadership, how to motivate people, how to resolve interpersonal conflicts, and how to develop effective teams within organizational settings.
Organizational Behavior is an important concept for any organization, since it deals with the three determinants of behavior in organizations: individuals, groups and structure. Organizational Behavior then applies the knowledge gained about individuals, groups and the effect of structure on behavior in order to make organizations work more effectively. In a nut shell, organizational behavior is concerned with the study of what people do in an organization and how their behavior affects the organizations performance.
Since organizational behavior is concerned with employee related situations, it tends to emphasize behavior related to jobs, work, absenteeism, employment turnover, human performance and management. The organization’s base rests on management’s philosophy, values, vision and goals. This in turn drives the organizational culture which is composed of the formal organization, informal organization, and the social environment. The culture determines the type of leadership, communication, and group dynamics within the organization.
The workers perceive this as the quality of work life which directs their degree of motivation. The final outcomes are performance, individual satisfaction, and personal growth and development. All these elements combine to build the model or framework that the organization operates from. The ability to use the tools of organizational behavior to understand behavior in organizations is one reason for studying this subject. A second reason is to learn how to apply these concepts, theories, and techniques to improve behavior in organizations so that individuals, groups, and organizations can achieve their goals. Managers are challenged to find new ways to motivate and coordinate employees to ensure that their goals are aligned with organizational goals.
Organizational Behavior studies the factors that impact individual and group behavior in organizations and how organizations manage their environments, and provides a set of tools, theories and concepts to understand, analyze, describe, and manage attitudes and behavior in organizations. The study of organizational behavior can improve and change individual, group, and conduct within the organization to attain individual, group, and organizational goals. Some of the aims of organizational behavior are to:
Describe: The first goal is to describe, systematically how people behave under a variety of conditions. Achieving this goal allows managers to communicate about human behavior at work using a common language.
Understand: A second goal is to understand why people behave as they do. The managers would be frustrated if they could talk about behavior of their employees, but not understand the reasons behind those actions.
Predict: The managers would have capacity to predict which employees might be dedicated and productive or which ones might be absent, cause problem. And thus the managers could take preventive actions.
Control: The final goal of organizational behavior is to control and develop some human activity at work. Since managers are held responsible for performance outcome, they are vitally interested in being able to make an impact on employee behavior, skill development, team effort, and productivity. Managers need to be able to improve results through the actions they and their employees take, and organizational behavior can aid them in their pursuit of this goal.
Organizations operate their functional activities by some elements, which affect organizations. Some of the key elements of organizational behavior include:
People: People make up the internal social system in the organization. They consist of individuals and groups. Groups may be large or small, formal and informal, official or unofficial. Human organization changes every day. People are living, thinking and feeling beings that created the organization and try to achieve the objectives and goals.
Structure: Structure defines the formal relationship and use of people in the organization. Different people in an organization are given different roles and they have certain relationship with others. Those people have to be related in some structural way so that their work can be effectively coordinated.
Technology: The technology imparts the physical and economic conditions within which people work. With their bare hands people can do nothing. So they are given assistance of building, machines, tools, processes and resources. The nature of technology depends very much on the nature of the organization, influences the work or working conditions.
Social System: Social system provide external environment within which organization operates. A single organization cannot exist alone. It is a part of the whole. A single organization cannot give everything and therefore there are many other organizations. All these organizations influence each other.
Every field of social science has a philosophical foundation of basic concepts that guide its development. Some of the certain philosophical concepts in organizational behavior include:
Individual differences: Every individual in the world is different from others. This idea is supported by science. Each person is different from all others in many ways, just as each person’s DNA profile is different. The idea of individual difference comes originally from psychology. From the day of birth, each person is unique, and individual experiences after birth tend to make people even more different, which results into varied behavior.
Perception: People’s perceptions are also differ when they see an object. Two people can differently present a same object. And this is occurring for their experiences. A person always organizes and interprets what he sees according to his lifetime of experience and accumulated value. Employees also see work differently for differ in their personalities, needs, demographics factors, past experiences and social surrounding.
A whole person: An employee’s personal life is not detached from his working life. As an example, A mother who attends the office at 8:30 AM is always anxious about her children’s school time (if her children are able to attend the school or not). As a result, its impact falls on her concentration that means her working life. For this reason, we cannot separate it. So manager should treat an employee as a whole person.
Motivated behavior: An employee has so many needs inside him/her. So, they want to fulfill those needs. That’s why they have to perform well in the organization. Some motivations are needed to enrich the quality of work. A path toward increased need fulfillment is the better way of enriches the quality of work.
Desire for involvement: Every employee is actively seeking opportunities at work to involve in decision-making and problem solving. They hunger for the chance to share what they know and to learn from the experience. So, organizations should provide them a chance to express their opinions, ideas and suggestion for decision-making and problem solving. A meaningful involvement can bring mutual benefit for both parties.
Value of the person: Employees want to be treated separately from other factors of production (land, capital, labor). They refuse to accept the old idea that they are simply treated as economic tools. For this reason, they want to be treated with carrying respect, dignity and other things from their employers and society.
The nature of organization: Organizations are social systems governed by social and psychological laws. They have social roles and status, and their behavior is influenced by their group’s individual drives. Organization environment in a social system is dynamic. All parts of the system are interdependent. In order to develop the organization, a behavior that is mutually of interest to the organizations and people is necessary. Organizations need people and people in turn need organizations. People satisfy their needs through organizations and organizations accomplish their goal through people.
Ethics: In order to attract and retain valuable employees in an era in which good workers are constantly required, ethical treatment is necessary. To succeed, organizations must treat employees in an ethical fashion. Every organization is required to establish codes of ethics, publicized statements of ethical values, provided ethics training, rewarded employees for notable ethical behavior, publicized positive role models, and set up internal procedures to handle misconduct.
The study of organizational behavior and its various elements is significant and useful to managers in running the day to day operations in organizational settings. This enables managers to acquire skills that provide the building blocks for effective behavior management in organizations. Managers utilize organizational behavior in the following ways:
Outstanding self-insight and perceptual skills; Excellent managers understand their own behavioral styles and tendencies as well as their unique strengths and weaknesses. They know, for instance, what their preferred style or approach is when leading, resolving conflicts, communicating, and so on. But they also grasp the fact that what’s comfortable for them may not be the best fit in all situations. Likewise, excellent managers are aware of the assumptions that they make about the people around them and how this impacts their decision making. Such self-insight helps control, if not eliminate, prejudicial thinking and stereotyping. And that makes managers more open to diversity and better able to consider decisions from different perspectives. Armed with these skills, managers are more accurate when perceiving others. In other words, they are better able to understand what employees have to offer, what motivates them, and why they behave as they do.
The ability to analyze situations correctly; Effective behavior management also requires the ability to analyze the context accurately. People don’t work in a vacuum. They operate in a multilayered organizational situation that includes groups, task requirements, the company culture, and the competitive environment, just to name a few. This is where a contingency perspective clearly comes into play. For example, a manager should know how cohesive a work group is and whether its values are fully aligned with the company’s before trying to motivate group members. This is because the group may play a major role in how individual employees behave. In short, the group might make motivation more difficult in some cases (e.g., when group norms are strong but inconsistent with company goals) and easier in others (e.g., when group norms are strong and largely overlap with company goals). Excellent managers are sensitive to the important factors that need to be aligned with the situation. They begin by figuring out the management implications of those factors and then design their behavioral strategies to match.
The ability to inspire, motivate, and lead people; There’s more to behavior management than knowing ‘what makes other people tick’ and being able to diagnose situations. You may have excellent perception and diagnostic skills but still fail to effectively manage behavior. For instance, knowing what motivates subordinates in a particular context is useless unless the manager also has the ability to lead. Of course, there’s no fixed set of skills that constitutes that ‘ability.’ It might be more accurate to say that a particular constellation of characteristics and skills increases the odds that someone will be successful in a leadership role (e.g., confidence, inter-personal savvy, and so on). And which subset of those characteristics and skills is the most important also varies across situations. However, ‘leadership ability’ includes being able to develop personal sources of power and then leverage them to influence subordinates in a positive way. And the influence tactics used could range from a rational argument presented in an understandable form to a persuasive vision of the future that appeals to employees’ emotions.
Personal flexibility and adaptability; This is often the biggest behavior management challenge. For instance if the manager has thought about how to motivate a subordinate and then feels that the best solution requires a behavioral approach that he is uncomfortable with, perhaps because it intersects with one of his weaknesses. A manager who must help warring subordinates move beyond their interpersonal conflict may decide that a mediation approach is the best way to proceed, despite the fact that imposing a solution feels easier, quicker, and more comfortable. An unwillingness or inability to adapt, especially when it requires stepping outside of a personal ‘comfort zone,’ is a big reason why managers sometimes come up short, especially if they otherwise have good skills. Some managers cope by seeking out only those situations where they feel comfortable. Change is often unpredictable and rapid, with managers finding their “preferred context” morphing into something else at the drop of a hat. And that means that managers need to be flexible enough to either stretch and challenge themselves in weak areas or leave when the time comes for greener corporate pastures.
In essence, effective behavior management involves a series of basic steps. At each step, one or more of the organizational behavior skills must be brought to bear if you are to successfully navigate the ongoing process of managing behavior. Effective behavior management involves addressing the following issues:
Identify the behavioral challenge (whether to maintain, improve, or redirect behavior); This first step requires that managers understand what types of behaviors are critical for outstanding performance in their organizational context. Once that is done, managers should assess whether the behaviors they are currently seeing are consistent with those criteria. And “consistency” can be defined in a variety of ways. For example, if appropriate customer service behaviors are missing, management should redirect employees and encourage a different set of behaviors. On the other hand, good customer service behaviors may be present but may not be performed frequently enough to result in outstanding performance (e.g., record sales and customer retention rates). If so, then the management challenge is to encourage employees to improve what they’re already doing. Of course, it’s also possible that employees may be doing exactly what they need to do to achieve success. In that case, management’s job is to ensure that the environment continues to support such positive behavior. But regardless of what the behavioral challenge is, figuring it out is essentially a perception process. And that means managers need all the self-insight and perception skills they can muster. Without those skills, the chances of coming up with an accurate behavioral assessment are limited.
Identify the causes of current behavior; After determining the behavioral challenge, managers must identify what drives employees’ current behavior. In part, this means understanding what is important to employees and what motivates them. It also means looking in the mirror and asking how your goals, skills, and characteristics might be impacting employee behavior. So, good perception skills and self-insight continue to be extremely important. This is also the time to start examining how the context (e.g., how work is organized, the corporate culture, etc.) might be influencing employee behavior, either alone or in combination with employee and management factors. For instance, if employees are not behaving cooperatively or are otherwise failing to act as a team, consider whether the corporate culture implicitly encourages competition and rewards political gamesmanship. As earlier stated, employees exist in a multilayered environment. And that means that managers must be excellent diagnosticians if they are to accurately identify the causes of employee behavior.
Choose a solution or strategy for achieving behavioral goals; This involves generating options and selecting a strategy for maintaining, improving, or redirecting behavior. Managers’ analytical and diagnostic skills remain critical here, especially as they pertain to devising possible alternatives for responding to behavioral challenges. It’s at this point that a thorough grasp of what theories and practices ‘work’ in organizational behavior proves helpful. Managers are able to generate better solutions if they know what organizational behavior has to offer and can accurately weigh the pros and cons of alternatives within the demands of the context. And in many cases, managers won’t be doing that alone. They might consult with peers, superiors, and subordinates or lead a group charged with responding to the behavioral challenges facing the unit or company. So when generating options and choosing strategies, managers may have to persuade and inspire those involved in the decision-making process. Plus, once a solution or strategy is selected, managers may have to convince others of its merits before implementation can proceed. Of course, this presumes that managers’ inspiring, motivating, and leading skills are up to the task.
Implement the strategy, then monitor and adjust as needed. In many ways, this last step is the toughest of all. Implementation means that managers must develop a clear time frame for taking specific action steps. Managers also must be prepared to inspire, persuade, and motivate subordinates to embrace the steps necessary to actually modify existing behavior. Plus, it may be that the steps required fall outside managers’ personal styles or comfort zones. Managers need to be prepared for that possibility and able respond in an adaptive fashion. In addition, things rarely go exactly as planned. Ideally, managers should try to anticipate what might go wrong and develop some contingencies for dealing with them. Monitoring behavior and making adjustments as needed are usually necessary as well. Overall, this final step puts managers’ leadership, flexibility, and adaptability to the test.
In conclusion, the best way to improve, develop, and reinforce organizational management skills is to start with a firm understanding of organizational behavior. If nothing else, studying what organizational behavior has to offer as a field should help a manager to figure out what his/her strengths and weaknesses are. And in the long run, managers who have an understanding of the principles and practices that “work” in organizational behavior are more likely to develop the skills they need to be effective in the first place. Such a knowledge arsenal gives managers better insight into their own skills as well as an understanding as to why behavioral challenges occur and how to overcome them.
References;
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