Leadership and Teams

REFLECTION ESSAY

It has been very interesting studying the subject “Organizational Behavior” during this span of 12-13 weeks. It has helped me in understanding the behavior of an organization from a psychological as well as a practical point of view. I have been able to gain substantial information starting from the fundamental and important concept of the purpose of an organization to its structure, core values, culture and design. One of the topics that I found most relevant and fascinating among several others is how an organization grows and flourishes by evolving with its surroundings and adapting to the changes. This leads to an overall learning experience and therefore helps an organization in terms of growth and sustainability.

One of the key points for an organization to prosper is to incorporate an approach of progressive thinking. This includes a zeal of trying new techniques, strategies and products. According to this, an organization should expand in potential markets and segments. It should come up with ideas based on the evolution of its customers and the environment. The products that show signs of success and profits should be moved up in the ladder. On the contrary, the services that aren’t well received by its customers should be altered and worked upon. The average lifespan of an organization in today’s area is about 40-50 years. Once an organization reaches its goal, after a certain period it comes to a stand-still. It is essential for an organization to keep changing, altering and introducing services which cater to the current evolving customer base. This can be best described with the Darwin’s theory of evolution which focuses on survival of the fittest. An organization can be duly compared to an organism that should evolve over time to survive amongst its competitors. As much as it is important to expand and evolve profitably, it is also equally important to expand smartly. A rigorous research of the market and the demands and needs of the customers is of primary importance in this process of evolution.

I would like to further compare two examples and discuss how learning and adaption can work well for some companies, whereas fail for others if not implemented efficiently. Evolution is all about making smart choices, smartly defeating ones’ competitors and smartly climbing up the success ladder. Texas instruments, a successful company specializing in inventing chips and microprocessors was predominantly run by its engineers. Its engineers took pride in the products they made and didn’t consider the computers from other companies fit enough to hold their microprocessors. The came up with inventing their own computers along with their superior chips. Because of lack of research of the existing environment and surroundings, their new product incurred a huge loss. If a prior analysis regarding the need of an expensive computer was done in a systematic way, it could have been easily concluded that the current customers (at that time) didn’t view computer as a need or as a product for which they are ready to pay huge amounts. A major takeaway from this can be: The organization should only be as evolved as its current customers. On the contrary, J&J observed that their temporary product, talc, was becoming popular among its customers. The customers started buying the talc along with other products. J&J was able to understand how the requirements of the customers evolved and made use of this opportunity by selling J&J powder as one of their primary products. It was a huge success and J&J earned 40% of its revenue from this product. This can be referred as an example of positive learning and adaptation of a company with its surroundings. According to me, the theory of organizational evolution can be best described as – A open minded, innovative and unrestricted approach based on the current habitat. It can be inferred that organizational learning theory is motivated by the observation that organizations learn by encoding inferences from experience into their behavior. It seeks to answer the questions of what kinds of experiences influence behaviors, how and under what circumstances behaviors change, and how new behaviors are stabilized and have consequences for organizations’ adaptation to their environment.