People, Management and Organizations

Anna Sutton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781137605047
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350305113
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This brand new and innovative core textbook fuses topics from the related fields of organizational behaviour and human resource management to provide new insight into the interconnectedness of these important and complementary areas. The text takes an integrated and dynamic approach to the study of how work and people are organized and puts the human at the centre of human resource management and organizational behaviour. The accessible student-centred focus and wide range of learning features makes the book an ideal course text for students at all levels. Combining a strong applied approach with a concise and jargon-free writing style, this book will help readers to understand underlying principles and apply them to their future careers as managers and HR practitioners. This textbook caters for undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA students studying modules that synthesise human resource management and organizational behaviour topics. It is also an ideal text for those studying any HRM module that takes an applied approach.

FOUNDATIONS OF OB AND HRM

In Part 1, we are building the foundations of our study of Organizational Behaviour (OB) and Human Resource Management (HRM). In Chapter 1, we start by reviewing the history of OB and HRM, drawing out their common themes and challenges and seeing how they can complement each other in efforts to understand and manage people at work. In Chapter 2 we move on to consider what work is all about, its meaning in our lives and the kinds of work there are. We will also address some of the inequalities in work, considering, for example, why ‘emotional’ work is often paid less well than other types of work. In Chapter 3, we review the foundation of the employment relationship and the decisions that need to be made about how the organization will attract, recruit and select its workers. The Part 1 case study provides an insight into the work that care workers do and draws out several of the interesting themes covered in these first three chapters, including how we value different types of work, the internal motivations we have for working and the impact of recruitment decisions on the quality of work and nature of the workforce.

INTEGRATING OB AND HRM

INTRODUCTION

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book. We will see how different approaches to Organizational Behaviour (OB) and Human Resource Management (HRM) have, at their root, basic assumptions about what these fields of study are for. Are people in organizations to be treated as individual human beings or as resources to be controlled? We will see that both OB and HRM have grappled with this question in different ways.

We start with a short history of both subjects: it is important to have an understanding of how current thoughts and models have their foundations in the concerns and approaches of the past. Seeing the development of both disciplines in this way will help us to identify parallels and differences between OB and HRM. It will also allow us to gain an insight into how theoretical frameworks can often be limited by the assumptions we have about how businesses should function, a question we will return to in the final chapter after we have worked through all the topics in the book. We conclude this introductory chapter by discussing how the integration of insights from OB and HRM can help us to address some major challenges in our study of people, management and organizations.

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LEARNING FEATURES

Applications: Why study OB?

Applications: Humans or resources?

Applications: Analytical HRM Applications: Measuring performance

Weighing the Evidence: Are happy workers productive?

Web Explorer: Professional bodies and reflective practice

In the News: HRM principles and national governments

Transferrable Skills: Identifying underlying assumptions

Practice Insights: Jennifer Dootson

Video overview

Julian Perkins

Go online to www.macmillanihe.com/sutton-people to access a video of Anna Sutton introducing the chapter’s main themes.

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

Organizational Behaviour (OB) is the study of how people behave in organizations and how the organizations themselves behave. As an applied field of study, OB is not just an attempt to understand what is happening in organizations, but also why it happens and how we can develop models to manage or change certain behaviours. OB is also a multidisciplinary field: with the emphasis on how useful a theory or model is to the real world of management, OB draws on a wide range of academic disciplines. There is no doubting that this makes OB a very broad subject. Ultimately, it could encompass any topic that affects behaviour in or of organizations. But, by exploring how OB has developed and some of the main drivers behind this development, we can gain a clearer overview of the subject.

Introducing OB

The study of management and how people behave in organizations has a long history. Perhaps the beginnings of OB as a topic of study can be traced back to the emergence of scientific management, which was an attempt to apply scientific principles to the study of work, seeking the most efficient way to organize jobs and workplaces.

Efficiency vs complexity

One of the earliest writers in this area was Max Weber (1864–1920) who was, among other things, a sociologist. He wrote several books and essays in the early 1900s about capitalism, Protestant Christianity and their effects on society and the way we work, including possibly his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber was very influential in what has now evolved into OB. He suggested that bureaucracy was the most efficient and rational way to organize modern workplaces, although he acknowledged that bureaucracy in the real world would rarely match up to his ‘ideal’ type. As part of this, he made some recommendations to organizations that seem so obvious to us now it is hard to imagine how ground-breaking they were at the time. Here are some of the things he proposed that an organization provide to employees in order to work efficiently (Waters and Waters, 2015):

selection of job applicants on the basis of relevant qualifications

a permanent place to work (e.g. office)

a career structure with promotion decided by superiors

fixed salary or wages

pension.

Try to imagine for a moment what a job would be like that did not have those things. While you can probably think of unusual jobs for which these are not the norm, the majority of modern jobs take these principles for granted.

Working around the same time as Weber, Frederick Taylor (1856–1915) promoted a scientific approach to management. He said that the ‘principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee’ (Taylor, 1911, p. 9). However, he also had a slightly pessimistic view of people’s approach to work, suggesting that we have a tendency towards working at a ‘slow, easy gait’ and therefore the role of management should be to try and increase workers’ productivity. He suggested that this could be done using his five principles of scientific management:

1.The manager should organize the work and do all the ‘thinking’. The worker should ‘just work’.

2.The manager should precisely define how the worker should do the work, using scientific methods.

3.The best person should be selected for each job.

4.Workers should be trained properly.

5.Workers’ performance should be monitored.

Taylor’s focus was on efficiency but the downside of this approach was that it could deskill workers, removing autonomy and increasing boredom. This was because one of the simplest ways to increase efficiency was a division of labour, which broke down tasks into small components and gave each small part to one worker to repeat over and over. It also suggested that there was ‘one best way’ to organize work and underplayed the role of human factors. Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933), another early management theorist, addressed this issue by recommending that organizations try to address employees’ human needs. Instead of seeing interpersonal relations as a source of inefficiencies, Follett (1924) looked at how they could best be managed to promote organizational effectiveness. For example, she described how good management of conflict – by moving from coercive to participative ways of managing workers – could result in higher quality outcomes.

A turning point in OB came with the Hawthorne studies (1929–32) conducted by Elton Mayo and colleagues. Originally an attempt to apply scientific management principles to identify the most productive physical environment for workers, the researchers concluded that social relationships and informal group dynamics had a much greater impact on productivity than changes to lighting levels and so on (Mayo, 2003). This paved the way for many theorists to begin to examine motivation at work, with the focus being on the inter- and intra-individual aspects of work behaviour. Rather than recommending a ‘one best way’, OB began to develop as an academic discipline addressing the multi-level complexity of human behaviour at work.

The Weighing the Evidence box examines the commonly held assumption that more satisfied workers are more productive.

Weighing the Evidence: Are happy workers productive?

It is a commonly held belief that we work better when we are happier in our jobs. Much of the current emphasis on well-being at work or promoting job satisfaction rests on an unspoken assumption that if we can help people feel more positive at work, they will be more productive. But how true is this? It is a question that has long interested both HRM and OB researchers and there are hundreds of studies investigating the link between job satisfaction and performance.

A significant review of this published research has given us a fairly definitive answer: there is a correlation of about 0.3 between job satisfaction and performance (Judge et al., 2001). While not very large, this is a significant association and the relationship is stronger for more complex jobs than it is for simpler jobs. However, one of the difficulties in understanding this relationship is knowing in which direction the causality goes. Most studies in this area have been cross-sectional, that is, they measure satisfaction and performance at the same time point, so don’t tell us whether performance influences satisfaction or vice versa.

This causal problem is common to much...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Abstract
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• About the author
• About this book
• Chapter features and activities
• Tour of the book
• Online resources
• Note to lecturers
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1: Foundations Of Ob And Hrm
• PART 2: The Management Relationship
• PART 3: Creating Organizational Effectiveness
• PART 4: Sustaining Organizational Effectiveness
• Glossary
• Index