Organizational Behavior Issue

Organizational Behavior Issue

Table of Contents

Introduction.

Historical Background of Organizational Behavior.

Elements of Organizational Behavior.

Models of Organizational Behavior.

Social Systems and Individualization.

Organization Development.

Quality of Work Life.

Conclusion.

1. Introduction.

Organizational Behavior is the study and use of knowledge about how people in general, and individuals and groups in particular, act in organizations. It does this by using a system approach in this case. It explains relationships between people and organizations in terms of the person, the entire group, all the organization, and all the social system. Its objective is to establish better relationships by achieving human purposes, organizational purposes, and social purposes.

Organizational behavior includes many topics, such as human behavior, change, leadership, teams, etc.

2. Historical Background of Organizational Behavior.

Taylorism and Scientific Management

The Industrial Revolution that began from the development of steam power and the founding of big factories in the late Eighteenth Century result in great alterations in the production of fabrics and other products. The factories that developed created great difficulties to organization that had not existed before. Governing these new factories and then new entities like railways with the requirement of governing large flows of material, staff, and information over great distances caused the need for some ways of dealing with the recent management problems.

The most significant of those who began to found a science of management was Frederic Taylor. He was one of the first who tried to analyze human behavior at a work place systematically. His sample was the machine with inexpensive, interchangeable details, each of which executes only one certain function. Taylor tried to do to great organizations what workers have done to machines. Just as machine details are easily interchangeable, inexpensive, and passive, so should people be the same in the machine sample of organizations.

Taylor tried to make a science for every aspect of work and restrict conduct ways facing employee. Taylor looked at interplay of human characteristics, social milieu, objective, and physical milieu, capacity, speed, duration, and price. The overall purpose was to remove human alteration.

The outcomes were serious. Efficiency under Taylorism went up greatly. New departments appeared such as personnel, industrial engineering, and quality check. There was also increase in middle management as there developed a separation of planning from controlling. Reasonable rules replaced test and mistake; management became formalized and effectively grew. Certainly, this did not happen without opposition. First the old group of managers opposed the fact that management was a science to be explored not something that was born with. After that of course, many employees opposed what some thought the "dehumanization of work." To be just, Taylor also studied problems such as lassitude and security and urged management to learn the relation between job breaks, and the length of the work day and efficiency and persuaded many companies that the careful performance of breaks and a shorter day could increase efficiency. However, the industrial worker with his stop watch and clip-board, standing over you measuring every little part of the work and one's motions became a hated person and caused to much sabotage and group opposition.

The basic elements of scientific management are popular nowadays. While a portrait of a factory of about 1900 might look like as something out of Dickens, one should not think the basic notions of scientific management have been forgotten. They have merely been changed and improved.

While many people consider bureaucracy in negative notions, this sample in its pure type was a dramatic improvement over the last sample of organization which was a feudal sample based on arranged status and position by birth, not disadvantage and unquestioned authority.

The Human Relations Movement.

In spite the economic development brought about in part by scientific management, critics were calling attention to the "obscure side of progress," which consisted of severe labour conflict, apathy, weariness, and spent in vain human resources. These notions made a number of researchers to study the discrepancy between how an organization was expected to work against how the workers actually conducted. In addition, notions like World War I, progress in psychology and later the depression, all resulted into question some of the main notions of the scientific management school. One of the main critics of that time, Elton Mayo, said that this "estrangement" appeared from the violation of the social frameworks caused by industrialization, the factory structure, and its related results like increasing urbanization.

The Hawthorne Studies.

The most known of these studies was the Hawthorne Studies which displayed how job groups provide mutual backing and efficient resistance to management samples to increase production. This study considered that workers did not correspond to classical motivational methods as it was thought in the scientific management and Taylor approaches, but rather employees were also interested in the bonuses and penalties of their own job group. These studies, led in the 1920's began as a simple attempt to define the relationship between work environment and effeciency. The outcomes of the research led investigators to feel that they had a business with socio-psychological factors that were not covered by classic theory which emphasized the formal organization and formal leadership. The Hawthorne Studies made us see that an organization is much more than a formal order of functions but is also a social structure.

Traditional statements:

1. People attempt to content one class of need at workplace - economic need;

2. There is no conflict between person and organizational purposes;

3. People act reasonably to maximize bonuses;

4. People act individually to content