Organizational Behaviour

Performance Management in Practice

Richard Pettinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415481427
• eBook ISBN: 9781135158248
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book offers a fresh and comprehensive approach to the essentials that constitute the discipline of organizational behaviour with a strong emphasis on the application of organizational behaviour and performance management in practice.

It concentrates on the development of effective patterns of behaviour, values and attitudes, and relates these issues to effective organization performance in times of organizational and environmental change and turbulence. The book is divided into four parts, providing a clear structure for the study of the subject:

• Part One: The context of organizational behaviour
• Part Two: The disciplines of organizational behaviour
• Part Three: Organizational behaviour in practice
• Part Four: Organizational behaviour – expertise and application

Organizational Behaviour is packed with references to current topics, practical examples and case studies from large corporations from around the world, including Ryanair, The Body Shop and RBS. This book covers examples of both good and bad practice, making it an interesting and unique introduction to the study of organizational behaviour.

Part 1
The context of organizational behaviour

The first part of the book deals with the context in which organizational behaviour has to be understood, and in which the particular disciplines are to be applied.

Chapter 1 draws particular attention to the wide range of disciplines that have to be understood, at least from an operational point of view; and these disciplines include economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology and mathematics. These disciplines form the foundations on which a true understanding of more directly applicable expertise can be applied subsequently: leadership, motivation and the effective structuring and ordering of teams and groups, and patterns of work.

The second chapter deals with organizational behaviour in its environment. This is to underline the point that organizations are flexible, dynamic and living entities, developing and advancing all of the time. Organizations that seek or aim to become steady and orderly actually become inert. Organizations have additionally to be able to exist in the context of the locations and markets that they exist in and serve; and in terms of the technology and expertise that they employ.

The other part of this context is change; and this is dealt with in Chapter 3. Organizations have to be capable of responding to changes and pressures in their environment; and they also have to be able to change themselves in order to meet fresh challenges and developments. Organizations have to be capable of accommodating advances in human and technological knowledge, and in harmonizing these to best effect in the pursuit of successful activities.

The overall context is bounded by the need for managerial expertise in integrating all of the lessons into a body of understanding that forms the basis for the study of knowing how people think, behave, act and react in a variety of situations.

1
Introduction

Organizational behaviour is concerned with the study of the behaviour and interaction of people in restricted or organized settings. It involves the understanding of, and prediction of, the behaviour of people, and of the means by which their behaviour is influenced and shaped.

Organizations are bodies or entities created for a stated purpose. They may consist of one or more people. In the case of the sole trader or single operator, he/she needs to build relationships with suppliers, contractors, customers, clients and the community. For those that consist of more than one person, internal as well as external relationships have to be created and maintained. Organizations therefore consist of individuals, groups and relationships. Objectives, structures, systems and processes are then created to give life, direction and order to activities and interactions.

Organizational behaviour is therefore of great concern to anyone who organizes, creates, orders, directs, manages or supervises the activities of others. It is also of concern to those who build relationships between individuals, groups of people, different parts of organizations, and between different organizations themselves because all of these activities are founded on human interaction.

The study of organizational behaviour is therefore concerned with:

• the purposes for which organizations are created;
• the behaviour of individuals, and an understanding of the pressures and influences that cause them to act and react in particular ways;
• the qualities that individuals bring to particular situations;
• the creation of groups – collections of people brought together for given purposes;
• the background and context within which activities take place;
• the energizing of activities;
• the use and combination of resources for productive purposes;
• relationships and interactions with the wider environment and with other organizations and groups;
• the management and ordering of the whole and its parts into productive and effective work relationships.

Organizations exist for the particular purposes for which they were constituted; and in order to deliver these purposes effectively and profitably, strong and enduring patterns of behaviour have to be created and managed.

The context of organizational behaviour

Gratton (2006) states that organizations exist in time; but they exist for a purpose; and that they have a fundamental humanity as well as aims, objectives and priorities.

The factors are all of critical importance in understanding the crucial nature of organizational behaviour in the effective management, direction and ordering of organizations and those who work within them, and in creating the conditions in which organizations and their activities can be developed.

‘In time’ means that organizations have to be capable of delivering their stated purposes in the present and future, according to the conditions prevailing, and the current needs, wants and demands of markets and societies.

The development of organizations presumes that every process, practice and activity is capable of improvement and advancement; nothing is perfect or finished. This is a self-evident truth; every activity is capable of being delivered more quickly, with greater accuracy, with fewer mistakes and with less wastage. Collectively and individually, people find ways of learning things more quickly, and of developing ever-more effective tools, technology, practices and procedures along the way.

The humanity of organizations has too often been neglected in the past. In many cases, those in top and senior management positions have assumed that either by making strident pronouncements, or creating restrictive and supposedly assured standards and patterns of behaviour, the humanity of organizations can be made predictable. This is not so; anyone seeking any position of influence in organizations needs to know and understand the uncertainties of human behaviour, and from this to learn and understand how to develop their expertise, so that they are able to better achieve their organization and business objectives.

To bring all this together: understanding the ways in which people behave in organizations, what drives their actions and how activities are energized has never been so important. The industrial, financial, banking, political and social crises of the early twenty-first century have all been caused by people in organizations; they have not occurred by chance, or as the result of the forces of nature. The decisions that have driven such diverse organizations as the UK House of Commons, General Motors, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the BBC into crisis, disrepute, extensive financial loss and the point of bankruptcy have all been taken by managers. These decisions have been taken without reference to how people think, believe, behave and react; they have been taken either on the basis of narrow expediency, short-term advantage or self-interest, rather than that of wider society and the environment. In many cases too, these decisions were taken on the basis of an unwillingness or inability to do the work that should have formed their core. These decisions lie at the root of these crises and they show a fundamental lack of understanding of how people behave, and an unwillingness to learn this as part of managerial expertise.

The basis of organizational behaviour

Organizational behaviour is not a natural or absolute science, nor is it a distinctive field of study. It draws on a range of disciplines and is viewed from a variety of perspectives. Rather than provide an absolute or perfect body of knowledge and expertise, each of these offers a different point of view on the whole, so that as complete an understanding as possible may be built up. Consideration of organizational behaviour from each standpoint indicates both the broad context, and also some of the specific areas, of concern.

Moreover, each discipline and perspective is incomplete and imperfect. Each is in itself an ever-developing and enlarging field. However, this at least indicates why a full understanding of organizational behaviour is not yet achieved and the context in which studies in the field are to be seen.

The disciplines of organizational behaviour

The main disciplines that contribute to the study of organizational behaviour are as follows. In summary, they are concerned with the capabilities and potential of people; influences on capabilities; the attitudes and behaviour of people; influences on behaviour; the organizational context; organizational processes and the execution of work; and interaction with the environment.

• Psychology: the study and understanding of human personality and behaviour, the traits and characteristics of individuals; their perceptions, attitudes, values, beliefs and motives; their goals and priorities; their capabilities and potential.
• Sociology: the study of behaviour in groups; influences on this behaviour; interactions between groups; the extent to which people organize themselves and the ways in which they do this; processes of socialization (the ordering and limiting of individual behaviour by groups and the environment); the creation of norms, rules and regulations.
• Anthropology: the study of large groups, nations and cultures; global beliefs, customs, ideas and values; the wider processes of socialization (for example, through religious activities, caste systems, aristocracies, technocracies).
• Economics: the study of the ordering, use and distribution of the world’s resources; of gathering and using these to best effect in particular situations and in the pursuit of stated aims and objectives.
• Ethics: the establishment of absolute standards which relate, above all, to the nature of interpersonal relationships and interactions, including standards of honesty, integrity, probity, value, esteem and respect.
• Mathematics and statistics: the need to prove absolutes and facts wherever possible; to give a basis of certainty to particular situations; to provide the means by which logical and demonstrable conclusions from bodies of knowledge and research can be drawn.

Each of these disciplines offers a different point of view and contributes to understanding; none, however, offers the complete picture. The major problem is the inability to arrive at absolute facts and conclusions. This is in direct contrast to the study of physics, mathematics, mechanics, chemistry and biology, each of which is capable of:

• absolute and logical reasoning;
• the combination of components and variables to produce certain and predictable results;
• consistent relationships between variables through time and space that are incapable of being reinterpreted due to differences in nationality or location;
• capability of validation and demonstration through experimentation.

In particular, the validation of human behaviour requires extensive experimentation, and constant reconfirmation, as a condition of the strength of the conclusions drawn. A single experiment, however wide-ranging, can never ‘prove’ that people will behave, act and react in certain and assured ways. Even well understood organizational behaviour ‘proofs’ such as the forming-storming-norming-performing approach to group development and the motivation theories of Maslow and Herzberg require constant and current validation and re-validation if their strength and integrity are to be maintained.

The development of organizational behaviour

As the result of the sheer volume of work carried out in the field, and as the result of the validation and re-validation referred to above, there is an extensive body of information available. Studying this body of information needs to become a priority of all those who seek or aspire to managerial positions. Learning and understanding the complexities, uncertainties and vagaries of human behaviour ought to be part of the professional discipline of management.

It is necessary to study extensive bodies of information from the field of organizational behaviour because of the fact that it requires this validation and re-validation. Other than mathematics and statistics, none of the component disciplines of organizational behaviour have any certainty or predictability. Especially, people do not behave in consistent or rational ways. Every situation is unique and so it is impossible to recreate the conditions under which one experiment took place in order to repeat it. Rather than controlled experimentation, organizational behaviour investigations rely on observed experiments, case studies, the analysis of documentation and the use of qualitative investigations and questionnaires to provide the information with which th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of boxes
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 The context of organizational behaviour
• Part 2 The disciplines of organizational behaviour
• Part 3 Organizational behaviour in practice
• Part 4 Organizational behaviour – expertise and application
• Bibliography and references
• Index