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Organizational Behavior

Introduction

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Organizational behavior (OB) is "the study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself."

OB can be divided into three levels.

1. individuals in organizations (micro-level),
2. work groups (meso-level),
3. how organizations behave (macro-level).

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Overview

Chester Barnard recognized that individuals behave differently when acting in their organizational role than when acting separately from the organization. Organizational behavior researchers study the behavior of individuals primarily in their organizational roles. One of the main goals of organizational behavior is to revitalize organizational theory and develop a better conceptualization of organizational life.

Relation to industrial and organizational psychology: there is a certain arbitrariness in identifying a point at which organizational behavior became established as a distinct discipline It emerged in the 1940s or 1950s. The industrial psychology division of the American Psychological Association did not add "organizational" to its name until 1970, long after organizational behavior had clearly come into existence, noting that a similar situation arose in sociology. Although there are similarities and differences between the two disciplines, there is still much confusion as to the nature of differences between organizational behavior and organizational psychology.

History

As a multi-disciplinary field, organizational behavior has been influenced by developments in a number of allied disciplines including sociology, psychology, economics, and engineering as well as by the experience of practitioners.

The Industrial Revolution is the period from approximately 1760 when new technologies resulted in the adoption of new manufacturing techniques, including increased mechansation. The industrial revolution led to significant social and cultural change, including new forms of organization. Analysing these new organizational forms, sociologist Max Weber described bureaucracy as an ideal type of organization that rested on rational-legal principles and maximized technical efficiency. However, Weber also raised concerns about the iron cage: that the efficiency of bureaucracy came at the cost of individuality.

A number of practitioners documented their ideas on management and organisation. Perhaps the best known today are Henri Fayol, Chester Barnard, and Mary Parker Follet. Each developed a theory of organization and management, drawn from their experience. These theories all include the idea that human behaviour and motivation are essential for understanding effectively managing organisations.

One of the first management consultants, Frederick Taylor was an engineer and applied engineering principles to increase the efficiency of human work. Taylor advocated the scientific study of work tasks to identify the most efficient way of conducting the task – an approach known as scientific management in the late 19th century. Lillian Gilbreth and Frank Gilbreth extended Taylor's ideas to develop the time and motion study to further improve worker efficiency. In the early 20th century, Fordism – named for Henry Ford– relies on the standardisation of products and the use of assembly lines allowing unskilled workers to operate efficiently. While not explicitly based on either Weber's or Taylor's work, Fordism can be seen as the application of bureaucratic and scientific management principles to the entire manufacturing process. The success of both scientific management and Fordism in general led to the widespread adoption of assembly lines and the use of scientific methods to improve the productivity of workers.

In the 1920s, the Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric factory, commissioned the first of what was to become known as the Hawthorne Studies. These studies began in the tradition of scientific management, investigating whether workers would be more productive with higher or lower lighting levels. The results showed that regardless of the lighting levels, the worker's productivity increased; when the studies ended, productivity declined. Further studies adjusted a range of environmental conditions, all of which resulted in a short-lived increase in productivity. The cause of the so-called Hawthorne Effect is widely debated, but the results led Elton Mayo to conclude that job performance was dependent on social relationships as well as job content. The One consequence of the Hawthorne Studies was to focus on motivation in organisations. A range of theories of motivation in organisation emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, including theories of Frederick Herzberg, Abraham Maslow, David McClelland, Victor Vroom, and Douglas McGregor. These theories explored what motivated individuals to work in organizations and how to improve both their work performance and job satisfaction.

Herbert Simon's Administrative Behavior introduced a number of important concepts to the study of organizational behaviour, most notably decision making. Simon - along with Chester Barnard - argued that people make decisions differently in organizations than outside of them. While classical economic theories assume that people are rational decision makers, Simon argued that limits on cognition mean that decision were made using bounded rationality where decision makers satisficed: by finding a solution that was acceptable, rather than optimal. Simon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on organizational decision making.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the field became more quantitative and produced such ideas as the informal organization, and resource dependence. Contingency theory, institutional theory, and organizational ecology also emerged.

Starting in the 1980s, cultural explanations of organizations and organizational change became areas of study. Informed by anthropology, psychology and sociology, qualitative research became more acceptable in OB.

Current state of the field

Research in and the teaching of OB primarily takes place in university management departments in colleges of business and in schools of social work. Similar micro OB topics are taught in industrial and organizational psychology graduate programs.

During the last 20 years, there have been additional developments in OB research and practice:

• Anthropology has become increasingly influential, and led to the idea that one can understand firms as communities, by introducing concepts such as organizational culture, organizational rituals, and symbolic acts.
• Leadership studies became part of OB.
• OB researchers have shown increased interest in ethics and its importance in an organization.
• OB researchers have become interested in the aesthetic sphere of organizations, drawing on theories and methods from the humanities, including theater, literature, music, and art.

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