What is organizational behavior summary?

Organisational behaviour is the study of what people think, feel and do in and around organisations. Organisations are groups of people who work interdependently toward some purpose. Although OB doesn't have a specific career path, it offers knowledge and skills that are vitally important to anyone who works in organisations. OB knowledge also has a significant effect on the success of organisations. This book takes the view that OB is for everyone, not just managers.

Organisational effectiveness is a multidimensional concept represented by four perspectives: the open-systems, organisational learning, high-performance work practices and stakeholder perspectives. The open-systems perspective says that organisations need to adapt to their external environment and configure their internal subsystems to maximise efficiency and responsiveness. For the most part, the other perspectives of organisational effectiveness are detailed extensions of the open-systems model. The organisational learning perspective states that organisational effectiveness depends on the organisation's capacity to acquire, share, use and store valuable knowledge. Intellectual capital is knowledge that resides in an organisation, including its human capital, structural capital and relationship capital. Effective organisations also ‘unlearn’, meaning that they remove knowledge that no longer adds value.

The high-performance work practices (HPWP) perspective states that effective organisations leverage the human capital potential of their employees. Specific HPWPs have been identified, and experts in this field suggest that they need to be bundled together for maximum benefit. The stakeholder perspective states that effective organisations take into account how their actions affect others, and this requires them to understand, manage and satisfy the interests of their stakeholders. This perspective incorporates values, ethics and corporate social responsibility into the organisational effectiveness equation.

The five main types of workplace behaviour are task performance, organisational citizen-ship, counterproductive work behaviours, joining and staying with the organisation, and work attendance. These represent the individual-level dependent variables found in most OB research.

Three environmental shifts challenging organisations include globalisation, increasing workforce diversity and emerging employment relationships. Globalisation refers to economic, social and cultural connectivity with people in other parts of the world. Workforce diversity includes both surface-level and deep-level diversity. Two emerging employment relationship changes are: demands for work–life balance and virtual work.

Several conceptual anchors represent the principles on which OB knowledge is developed and refined. These anchors include beliefs that OB knowledge should be multidisciplinary and based on systematic research, that organisational events usually have contingencies and that organisational behaviour can be viewed from three levels of analysis (individual, team and organisation).

08. Key Terms

Learning Outcomes

Describe how organizational behavior evolved into its own unique field

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.

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Much of the content of this topic came from this book:

Strongly Suggested Pre-Reading

Organizational Performance Management

Sections of This Topic Include

Types of Practices to Influence and Sustain Desired Behaviors in Organizations

Also consider

Description

Be sure to read the description in Organizational Performance Management to understand that organizational behavior and organizational structures are ultimately strategies to help increase the performance of an organization.

In this topic, the Library aims to convey the core practices in guiding organizational behaviors, as well as how the practices might be organized and integrated. You will recognize most of the practices because many of them are commonplace in our lives and work.

Understand that the practices are cyclical and highly integrated in nature. Like any component in a cycle, the learning from implementing the practices should, in turn, improve the other components.

Remember that the nature of how the practices are implemented depends on whether the leaders in the organization choose traditional or progressive approaches to performance management. See
Performance Management: Traditional and Progressive Approaches

The purpose of the information in this topic is to convey the core concepts in organizational behavior. Your proficiency in the concepts would come from applying them over time, especially under the guidance of a person who is highly experienced in applying them, as well.

(Those who naturally prefer to focus on the “human” side of organizations, rather than on the “business” side, might particularly appreciate this topic on organizational behavior.)

What is Organizational Behavior?

Definitions

Organizational behavior focuses on how humans behave in organizations, including how they interact with each other, as well as how they work within the organizations’ structures to get their work done. Here are some other definitions:

Organizational behavior is the “the study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself.” iEduNote
“Organizational behavior is directly concerned with the understanding, prediction, and control of human behavior in organizations.” — Fred Luthans

Goals

This description specifies the goals of organizational behavior:

“The goals of OB [organizational behavior] are to explain, predict, and influence behavior. Managers need to be able to explain why employees engage in some behaviors rather than others, predict how employees will respond to various actions and decisions, and influence how employees behave.” — Open Class

However, organizational behavior holds benefits for employees, as well. The field is rich with research, findings, guidelines and tools for employees to clarify their own goals, understand what motivates them and increase their job satisfaction.

Practices to Influence and Sustain Desired Behaviors in Organizations

There is a vast array of different types of practices that leaders and managers use to influence their employees toward achieving the organization’s goals. More recently, they use a variety of practices to help employees to achieve their own goals, as well. Thus, it can be a challenge to efficiently categorize and explain the practices in a manner that is comprehensive and yet well organized.

IEduNote‘s listing of the eight objectives of organizational behavior seems a reasonable way to categorize them, as well. The titles of their objectives have been slightly reordered and modified in the following categories. The categories are cyclical and highly integrated with each other.

NOTE: Descriptions of each of the following practices are included in each of their respective topics in this Free Management Library. Thus, the descriptions are not duplicated here.

Cultivating the Right Organizational Culture

Organizational culture can be explained as a combination of the members’ values, beliefs, assumptions and ways that they interact with each other. Basically, an organization’s culture is its personality. A person’s personality influences every aspect of their life.

The same is true of an organization’s culture. That is why experts on strategic planning often assert that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” — that is, culture often determines whether strategies are successful or not. That is why so much of what happens in an organization starts from its culture, especially the behaviors that occur in it. The following topics refer to practices that might influence an organization’s culture, and thus the overall behaviors in it.

Applying the Right Leadership

The culture of the organization, its current life cycle and the nature of its strategic goals all help to suggest the types of leadership needed in an organization.

For example, a start-up organization might want leaders who are visionary and charismatic in attracting more employees to join it. It might also want leaders who have strong expertise in the types of products and services that it delivers. However, as the organization evolves, it might want leaders with expertise in developing internal systems and practices to form a firm foundation for further growth.

A complicating factor about leadership is that different leadership skills are required for leading oneself versus leading another individual versus leading a group versus leading an organization. See Understanding All Aspects of Leadership.

If the organization’s culture is quite traditional, then it might prefer a rather autocratic style of leadership; whereas, a more progressive organization might prefer a more participatory style.

Also, it is important to remember that leaders cannot successfully lead others unless they first can successfully lead themselves.

Motivating Yourself
Being Authentic
Asserting Yourself

Understanding How to Develop Great Leaders

The leaders in an organization are the “engines” that drive the activities in organizational performance. Thus, the expertise of the leaders is a critical component in the success of the organization itself. As discussed above, the nature of the leaders must match the models and styles preferred by the organization. That often requires further development of the leaders, including its executives, managers and supervisors.

Leadership Development
Management Development
Supervisor Development

Finding the Right People

The most important asset in an organization is its people. As important as having the right kind of leaders and managers is having the right kind of employees — employees who can do a great job in doing the necessary work to best achieve the goals of the organization. This is where expertise in human resource management is vital to the success of the organization. However, small- to medium-sized organizations can still do that 20% of effort that generates 80% of the success in finding and equipping the right people.

Understanding Nature and Needs of Employees

Historical approaches to management treated employees like machines. The top priority was on efficiency — on producing more results in less time. However, today’s approaches have changed dramatically. Today’s leaders are realizing that they will get better performance if they treat their employees as individuals, each of whom is unique in their own interests and capabilities — and also in what motivates them. For the new generations in today’s workforce, it is often far more important to find meaning and fulfillment in their work than to make more money.

Sustaining Strong Job Satisfaction

Research shows that the cost of hiring and re-training employees is one of the highest of labor costs in organizations. Research also shows a strong correlation between job satisfaction and employee retention. Fortunately, there are a variety of approaches to support strong job satisfaction for employees.

Developing High-Performing Teams

Most of the significant accomplishments in organizations is done in teams. However, a team is often comprised of a wide diversity of values, perspectives and opinions among its members. So teams must be carefully planned, organized and supported. Also, a team is an organization — just a small one. Thus, team performance management is also critical to the success of a team.

Maintaining Strong Performance

Strong performance is the result of very effectively and efficiently achieving the goals, whether they are for an employee, team or the overall organization. Performance management means establishing the goals, monitoring their achievement and making the necessary corrections in order to achieve them even better.

For the Category of Organizational Development:

To round out your knowledge of this Library topic, you may want to review some related topics, available from the link below. Each of the related topics includes free, online resources.

Also, scan the Recommended Books listed below. They have been selected for their relevance and highly practical nature.