Findings from organizational behavior research are used by executives and human relations professionals to better understand a business’s culture, how that culture helps or hinders productivity and employee retention, and how to evaluate candidates’ skills and personality during the hiring process.
Organizational behavior theories inform real-world evaluation and management of groups of people. There are a number of components:
Personality plays a large role in the way a person interacts with groups and produces work. Understanding a candidate’s personality, either through tests or through conversation, helps determine whether they are a good fit for an organization.
Leadership, what it looks like and where it comes from, is a rich topic of debate and study within the field of organizational behavior. Leadership can be broad, focused, centralized or de-centralized, decision-oriented, intrinsic in a person’s personality, or simply a result of a position of authority.
Power, authority, and politics all operate inter-dependently in a workplace. Understanding the appropriate ways these elements are exhibited and used, as agreed upon by workplace rules and ethical guidelines, are key components to running a cohesive business.
The leaders of the Hawthorne study had a couple of radical notions. They thought they could use the techniques of scientific observation to increase an employee’s amount and quality of work. And, they did not look at workers as interchangeable resources. Workers, they thought, were unique in terms of their psychology and potential fit within a company.
Over the following years, the concept of organizational behavior widened. Beginning with World War II, researchers began focusing on logistics and management science. Studies by the Carnegie School of Home Economics in the 1950s and 1960s solidified these rationalist approaches to decision-making.
Today, those and other studies have evolved into modern theories of business structure and decision-making.
The new frontiers of organizational behavior are the cultural components of organizations, such as how race, class, and gender roles affect group building and productivity. These studies take into account the ways in which identity and background inform decision-making.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Organizational behavior is the study of how people behave within groups.
Early studies determined the importance of group dynamics in business productivity.
The study of organizational behavior is a foundation of corporate human resources.
Where Organizational Behavior Is Studied
Academic programs focusing on organizational behavior are found in business schools as well as at schools of social work and psychology. These programs 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 within it. Specific topics covered include cognition, decision-making, learning, motivation, negotiation, impressions, group process, stereotyping, and power and influence. The broader study areas include social systems, the dynamics of change, markets, relationships between organizations and their environments, how social movements influence markets, and the power of social networks.
If you have ever held a job, taken a class, or participated in an organized activity, you have seen levels of influence. The three levels of influence are the individual, the group, and the organization. The three levels are interconnected so it is critical to understand each one.
The Individual
The individual level includes each individual person within an organization. Each individual acts differently which affects group dynamics and the organization as a whole. If there are a lot of happy and efficient individuals, the work environment will be an efficient and productive one. However, if there are a lot of negative and disgruntled individuals, it can create a toxic environment.
It is impossible for a company to study each individual employee’s behavior, however, it is important for a company to create guidelines and expectations that will attract employees with desirable behaviors. For example, a company may hire employees based on their personality or how they answer behavioral based interview questions. At the same time, companies can help influence individual behavior. They do this by creating a code of conduct, establishing policy and procedure guidelines, and by developing incentives and consequences.
The Group
The group level includes any groups within an organization. Groups can range in size from a couple people working together, to a large group with dozens or hundreds of members. As we just discussed, individuals can affect a group and a group can affect an organization. And at the same time, a group can affect individuals and an organization can affect a group. Imagine organizational behavior as a large spider web over each organization. The spider web connects each level of influence with the two others, creating a pathway between each one.
The Organization
Finally, the organization level incorporates the organization as a whole. In case you haven’t picked up on the trend, it’s important to point out that the organization impacts the individual and group behavior and that individual and group behavior impacts an organization.
In a nutshell, organizational behavior is the study of how human behavior affects an organization. Organizational behavior aims to learn how an organization operates through the behaviors of its members. Instead of taking a strictly numerical approach to determine an organization’s operations, it takes a more psychological approach. By understanding people, you can better understand an organization.
Organizational behavior is intended to explain behavior and make behavioral predictions based on observations. If you can understand behaviors, you can better understand how an organization works. In addition, organizational behavior studies how an organization can affect behavior. So, if you think about it, behavior affects an organization and an organization affects behavior. Let that sink in for a second—it’s all connected! They each affect the other, creating a never ending loop between the two. Therefore, in order to have a healthy and successful organization, it is extremely important to understand the ins and outs of organizational behavior!
Evolution of Organizational Behavior
The academic study of organizational behavior can be dated back to Taylor’s scientific theory as we discussed earlier in this module. However, certain components of organizational behavior can date back even further. In this section we will discuss how organizational behavior developed into a field of its own.
Looking back thousands of years we can find components of organizational behavior. Famous philosophers like Plato and Aristotle discussed key components of today’s organizations including the importance of leadership and clear communication. While these seem like very basic and broad concepts today, at the time they were innovative ideas and helped to lay the foundation for organizational behavior.
If organizational behavior were a simple topic, this course would be short and sweet. We could simply say that organizational behavior is how people and groups act within an organization. But it’s not so simple!
When organizational behavior grew into an academic study with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, it began to complicate what could appear to be simple topics. People began asking a lot of questions and started critiquing how organizations operated. Like many academic ventures, people began to deep dive into how behavior plays a role in organizations and why changes in behavior alter the way organizations operate. Along the way, organizational behavior has grown to incorporate components of management, psychology, leadership, personality traits, motivation, etc.
Organizational behavior has grown into its own niche within a wide variety of other genres. This is exciting because it allows us to really investigate each and every aspect of behavior within an organization! Today, organizational behavior is recognized as an essential component of an organization. Scholars and businesses alike recognize its importance and continue to help it adapt to current issues and new findings.
One of the great things about organizational behavior is that it is constantly changing. The rest of this module will discuss contemporary issues in organizational behavior and how organizations are adapting to and learning from these challenges.
McClelland has identified three basic motivating needs, Viz. Need for Power, Need for Affiliation and Need for Achievement and, along with his associates performed a considerable research work on these basic needs.
Definition: McClelland’s Needs Theory was proposed by a psychologist David McClelland, who believed that the specific needs of the individual are acquired over a period of time and gets molded with one’s experience of the life. McClelland’s Needs Theory is sometimes referred to as Three Need theory or Learned Needs Theory.
Need for Power (n-pow): What is Power? Power is the ability to induce or influence the behavior of others. The people with high power needs seek high-level positions in the organization, so as to exercise influence and control over others. Generally, they are outspoken, forceful, demanding, practical/realistic-not sentimental, and like to get involved in the conversations.
Need for Affiliation (n-affil): People with high need for affiliation derives pleasure from being loved by all and tend to avoid the pain of being rejected. Since, the human beings are social animals, they like to interact and be with others where they feel, people accept them. Thus, people with these needs like to maintain the pleasant social relationships, enjoy the sense of intimacy and like to help and console others at the time of trouble.
Need for Achievement (n-ach): McClelland found that some people have an intense desire to achieve. He has identified the following characteristics of high achievers:
High achievers take the moderate risks, i.e. a calculated risk while performing the activities in the management context. This is opposite to the belief that high achievers take high risk.
High achievers seek to obtain the immediate feedback for the work done by them, so as to know their progress towards the goal.
Once the goal is set, the high achiever puts himself completely into the job, until it gets completed successfully. He will not be satisfied until he has given his 100% in the task assigned to him.
A person with a high need for achievement accomplishes the task that is intrinsically satisfying and is not necessarily accompanied by the material rewards. Though he wants to earn money, but satisfaction in the accomplishment of work itself gives him more pleasure than merely the cash reward.
Hence, McClelland’s Needs Theory posits that the person’s level of effectiveness and motivation is greatly influenced by these three basic needs.
Although subtle, there are differences between groups and teams. These are typically the reason the group or team was assembled and the goal they are trying to obtain.
Groups Versus Teams
The words ‘group’ and ‘team’ are, for the most part, interchangeable – at least most people use them that way. But there are distinct differences between groups and teams. For example, we have a football team, not a football group – or we have a special interest group, not a special interest team. While the differences are subtle, they are indeed different, and we need to understand what those differences are.
The main difference is that a team’s strength or focus depends on the commonality of their purpose and how the individuals are connected to one another. On the other hand, a group can come from having a large number of people or a cohesive willingness to carry out a focused action – political reform, for example.
While these differences might be subtle, we have to understand that a group is a number of individuals forming a unit for a reason or cause, and a team is a collection of accomplished people coming together for a common goal that needs completion. The subtleness of these differences are more pronounced when we take these words a step further and look at a work group and work team.
Work Groups and Work Teams
In the business world, we have work groups and work teams. A work team has members who work interdependently on a specific, common goal to produce an end result for their business. A work group is two or more individuals who are interdependent in their accomplishments and may or may not work in the same department. Once again, the differences are subtle, but the main thread is a team works together and shares in the outcome, while a group is more independent of each other.
Additional aspects of work groups and teams are:
Work Team
Work Group
The leader acts as a facilitator.
The leader dominates and controls the group.
The members have active participation in the discussions and eventual outcome.
The leader is apparent and will conduct the meeting.
The team members decide on the disbursements of work assignments.
The leader usually assigns work to the members.
So, as we can see, a work team is much more formal, with a focused goal and objective, while also having its members take a participative role in how the work team functions. On the other end of the scale, we have work groups who work more independently of each other and usually have one leader directing work flow.
The Real World is Here 