Organizational Behaviour

People, Process, Work and Human Resource Management

Stephen J Perkins, Raisa Arvinen-Muondo

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780749463618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

There is a large body of shared knowledge between the study of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management but despite the crossover, they are often treated as very distinct disciplines. Written by a team of experts across both fields, Organizational Behaviour bridges the gap between OB and HRM, with an emphasis on inter-cultural and cross-cultural perspectives of organizational development, talent management, and leadership. Through a critical analysis of existing literature and case studies, the contributors cover topics such as corporate governance, ethical business practices, employee morale and motivation, performance management, corporate politics and conflict resolution, workplace diversity, creativity, and change management - all within the framework of current global employment standards and best practices.

PART ONE

Introduction

Introduction

STEPHEN PERKINS and RAISA ARVINEN-MUONDO

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Identify what we mean throughout this book when talking about management – as a ‘thing’ managers do and as a process they are involved in.

• Establish a sense of where the body of knowledge referred to as ‘organizational behaviour’ (OB) has come from and how it interacts with management and managing – specifically people management.

• Present an overview of debates that the human resources management (HRM) community has been engaged in and how that surfaces a need for some means by which to frame analysis and interpretation of the claims and issues.

• Present an overview of what is on offer over the course of the remaining chapters making up this book.

Managing others to a purpose

Many volumes written under the title of ‘organizational behaviour’ (OB) are positioned to inform readers at the most introductory level of management studies. We have written this text specifically to appeal to those who have already been exposed to ‘basic’ commentary and are ready to engage with argument and evidence that is at once more sophisticated and more critical – ie not only introducing but evaluating ideas and research findings. We hope that if you are a final year undergraduate honours student or beginning a master’s course you will find the book both relevant and stimulating as a study aid. And we hope your tutors will too. Our intention is to put before you and assess knowledge interacting between the boundaries of OB and HRM as we consider that each can benefit from this, in the sense that HRM can ground socio-psychological and other social science theory grouped under the OB banner while a fuller understanding of HRM will be informed by social science knowledge that moves consideration of ‘people management’ in organizations beyond a preoccupation with recipes and techniques. Whether your management studies course is generalist or specialist, we believe you will find the material in the chapters that follow useful.

Management in its simplest definition is ‘getting things done through other people’. That’s, in turn, what ‘managers’ do: their task is to organize the work capacity of others to achieve purposeful outcomes. There are all sorts of questions we might ask about the nature of that purpose, and its likely impact on people involved in setting and trying to achieve it. These questions will be discussed in this book – with a view to understanding how such matters have an impact on the task we’re discussing here: getting things done involving a group of people playing various roles.

As you can see, we’ve already extended our simple ‘management’ definition: now we’re signalling that groups of people are involved in activities covered by management – that’s the managers and those who managers are trying to organize to a purpose, interacting with one another. Each of these players is undertaking roles – roles that have been set for them by people influencing the purpose of organization, and roles that as self-determining human beings they choose for themselves. In turn, as we’ve begun expanding on the opening statements, we’re using words such as ‘interaction’, ‘organization’, ‘self-determination’ and ‘groups’ as distinct from although made up of individual ‘actors’.

You’ll have noticed the way these descriptions are increasingly formed using metaphors – a figure of speech to represent something, used frequently in management and organizational writing – metaphors that use the language of theatre. A well-known line from a play by William Shakespeare, ‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players’ says it all. The text (from the play As You Like It) continues: ‘They have their exits and their entrances; And one man [or woman] in his time plays many parts.’ Even in this section, another word to convey an idea of a human activity has been introduced – perception. That idea – perceiving, and then interpreting to make sense of the environment in which people are acting out their roles – also has an important place in the kinds of things we’re going to discuss in this book.

We hope this volume will help not only students of management, but also practising managers. There is plenty of debate about what ‘practising’ implies for management. Is management all about a series of practices – things that can be separated from the people and places and times in which they occur? Do managers need to learn about these practices – practices on their own and in bundles – as ‘things’ or ‘objects’ to be applied to others when trying to get them to do things to achieve some purpose? Alternatively, rather than objects that can be understood independent of the context (people, place, time) in which they may occur, should we view what goes on under the label ‘management’ as a process, or series of processes – hence (in British English) signalling something different by using an ‘s’ not a second ‘c’ to complete the word, in the sense that management is something practised (a verb not a noun or object). It’s something dynamic not static, that unfolds in a particular setting, and so is a creation of the people and the place and time in which they are interacting (another word we need to pay attention to).

If it’s a creation of ‘social interaction’ then the practice resulting, let alone the outcome, could have been different, something difficult to predict in any generalized way. And if the practice has been constructed by a group of human beings – managers and other organizational actors – there’s also the potential for it to be reconstructed. And in some variants of management study, analysts would call for the practices to be deconstructed to reveal aspects that while maybe unstated, ‘below the surface’ of an observable organizational setting, have had an important influence on what becomes visibly apparent. As we’ll see later in the book, concepts for articulating and interpreting those implicit influences have been identified and specified in academic writing on management and the social sciences; eg cultures, conflicted interests between groups, and differences in the levels of authority, power and/or influence they may bring to legitimize their actions. There are plenty more.

Why is all this important and worthy of inclusion in a course of study on management – with the goal of preparing people to become ‘professional’ managers? (‘Professionalization’ – as a process and an implied state of being, itself dynamic – is yet another concept we’ll encounter along the way working through the discussions to follow.) One answer is that if management is a social construct concerned with achieving purposeful action where groups of people interact, then people who want to lay a claim to competence in ‘doing management’ are likely to enhance their credibility if they have mastered a body of knowledge and how this is debated brought together as a ‘social science’.

The notion of ‘science’ is used here in the sense of offering a way of systematically specifying assumptions and ideas about organizing people managerially, so that the issues in play, including the contextual conditions, the choices to be made, and some ideas around the likely consequences from what’s done and how it’s translated from idea to action can be more readily grasped. In the general field of organization studies and management, the body of social science knowledge has come to be grouped under the heading of OB. OB can include inputs from a variety of social science disciplines specializing in their own right in the search for meaning and understanding in how humans individually and collectively function: anthropology, occupational and social psychology, political science, organizational and work sociology, labour economics or ‘personnel’ economics, transaction cost economics and industrial relations.

The summary argument here, then, is that getting a grasp of a body of knowledge that can help us in approaching our task as professional managers can be seen as a prerequisite to success in completing that task. It’s a very complex activity – as is human life in general, as we know from a moment’s reflection on all the things we experience in the society we inhabit. And, of course, given that the body of knowledge is subject to debate, as students of management we’re likely also to benefit from learning about the ways in which to sift and evaluate the competing ideas making up that body of knowledge.

Given the emphasis on management as getting things done through other people, as what management in general is about, we’re not proposing to embark on a detailed study of discrete areas in management literature such as accounting and finance, marketing, or logistics to name but a few specialist directions. Here we’re focusing in particular on a body of knowledge that’s been grouped under the general heading HRM. This can of course be read as a management specialism too – able to offer long lists of techniques developed within its disciplinary boundaries: for recruiting, developing, engaging, rewarding and discharging employees, and so on. But advocates of HRM as a distinctive way of getting people to do things to a purpose specified managerially would suggest that beyond separate and bundled techniques the ideas that it brings together as a holistic view of organizing people and other organizational ‘resources’ are at the core of what managers can do to fulfil their core accountability – what they’re employed to achieve (see the case study below). We’ll see that using the word ‘resources’ to include people is itself controversial – with the implication that just as a resource such as money or land or machinery (inanimate, or lifeless, objects) can be put to work, so too can people (in the course of living a life), perhaps setting aside their own priorities as human beings in the world to serve an organizational goal.

CASE STUDY Shifting from piecemeal to holistic HRM

Cathie Wright-Smith, Head of HR in Nampak, the UK’s ‘market leader’ in plastic milk bottle manufacturing, was reported reflecting on the shift in thinking about how to organize to get things done through a workforce since she was hired in 2007 (Churchard, 2011): Nampak didn’t really have people management procedures. When Nampak’s Managing Director interviewed Wright-Smith for the job he ‘basically said: “We’ve hired and fired people, we’ve disciplined people, we do day-to-day HR, but now I want an engaged culture in the business – how do we start?” [concluding] I think it was the challenge I was looking for.’

(For more on Nampak, see Smedley, 2011.)

In this book, we’ve set out to bring together ways of thinking about getting things done through individuals and groups of people in organizational settings, drawing on published writings collected under the general heading of HRM. Our goal has been to examine this body of knowledge using what social scientists tell us about the ways in which to specify and weigh up alternative choices around getting people to do things and to behave in certain ways in the course of these actions (collected together as OB commentary). Achieving a critical grasp of this is likely to help managers in practising their craft, with an awareness of the issues they will encounter and how to decide what to do – in all the variety of settings in which their organizational stagecraft may occur. So we see another interaction taking place: between ideas about getting things done through other people, these ideas themselves remember the product of social construction. We see the diversity of issues managers are likely to encounter when interacting with other organizational actors and see that OB commentary can show how these managers can make interpretations to inform what they decide to do. In other words, using another well-known metaphor, they will be able to ‘look before leaping’ into management activity.

How did OB get onto the management curriculum?

Taking a brief look at how – and where – OB as a discipline in its own right emerged will help us understand what’s involved and how we can make critical use of the ideas and evidence bundled together under the OB banner. We’ll follow this with a complementary section discussing the HRM paradigm (a way of thinking proactively about managing people), motivated by the same reason – to make sure we have a solid foundation for ongoing discussion.

Definition of OB

A simple definition of OB is offered by Stanford University in the United States. OB is ‘the study of human behavior in organizational settings’. In its micro variant, generally informed by psychology, OB investigates ‘how individuals and groups affect and are affected by organizations’. And in its macro form, incorporating organizational theory and economic sociology, OB studies ‘organizations as social systems; the dynamics of change in organizations, industries and markets; and the relationships between organizations and their environments’.

In one article, George Strauss traces the origins of organizational behaviour as an academic discipline back to controversies around what became known as the human relations school o...