Part I
Getting to Grips with Organisational Behaviour
In this part . . .
In Part I, we introduce organisational behaviour and work psychology and explain how an understanding of psychology and behaviour can help organisations. We briefly look at the variety of topics the book covers and consider how to gather information about such topics; for example, through using workplace questionnaires or conducting face-to-face interviews with employees or managers. We also think about what’s going on in today’s workplace and why applying psychology in workplaces can help organisations to be successful.
Chapter 1
Introducing Organisational Behaviour
In This Chapter
Introducing organisational behaviour
Using organisational behaviour in the workplace
Seeing how people behave at work
The three of us writing this book (Cary, Sheena, and Lynn) are all work psychologists, which means that we use some of the principles of psychology to study people and behaviour in organisations.
When asked, we tend to describe ourselves as work psychologists rather than organisational behaviourists. Why is that? Well, introducing yourself as a psychologist is bad enough with the questions that follow (for example, can you read my mind?). Imagine calling yourself an organisational behaviourist at a party – not the best opening line! At least people have heard of psychology, and it doesn’t take too much thought to figure out that work psychology is basically psychology applied to the workplace.
You may be wondering, then, why this book isn’t called Work Psychology For Dummies as opposed to Organisational Behaviour For Dummies? Well, organisational behaviour and work psychology look at similar ideas and have similar aims. Both involve looking at the ways in which people behave at work and what this behaviour means for organisations. However, the term ‘work psychology’ can imply a more focused look at individuals. Organisational behaviour, on the other hand, is a broader term because the name implies an overall look at behaviour (that is, from the perspective of people, groups, and the overall organisation), and that is our approach in this book.
We look at organisational behaviour in more detail throughout this chapter and focus on the application of organisational behaviour/psychology at work in Chapter 2. Reading these chapters gives you a good understanding of what organisational behaviour is and, perhaps more importantly, why it’s relevant to you and your workplace.
Describing Organisational Behaviour
We define organisation behaviour for you in full in this section, but first take a look at the following questions. These questions are the sort that organisational behaviourists consider when looking at people at work. Having an idea of what questions are of interest in organisational behaviour gives you an understanding of what it is and why it’s relevant to you and your studies or workplace. We provide answers to all these questions in different parts of this book.
Typical questions that an understanding of organisational behaviour can begin to answer for you are:
What do you think about work?
Why do you behave in certain ways at work?
How do you react to the things that happen to you at work?
What impact can your reactions have on the wider workplace?
How does work affect you?
What does your manager need to know about managing and motivating you at work?
If you’re a manager, here are some more questions that organisational behaviour can begin to answer that you’re sure to be interested in:
What can I do to ensure that I recruit the best person for a job?
How can I best motivate my employees?
What is the best way to identify training needs in my employees?
How can I instigate change without risking losing employee trust?
Offering a helpful definition
You can probably come up with an explanation of what organisational behaviour is without looking in a dictionary or searching on the Internet. It’s how organisations behave, yes? And because you know that organisations aren’t living things, then organisational behaviour has got to be about how the people and groups within organisations behave.
To elaborate a bit, here are some basic themes that cover what organisational behaviour is all about:
Appreciating how people affect each other at work
Applying knowledge at work based on what we know about how people act at work
Understanding how people are affected by work
Studying how people, individuals, and groups act at work
Using organisation behaviour principles to improve an organisation’s effectiveness and productivity
What organisational behaviour isn’t
Organisational behaviour isn’t about reading minds or reading body language. Organisational behaviour helps you understand how people behave at work and what’s important to them and their organisations. But organisational behaviour doesn’t give you amazing powers of insight so that you suddenly just have to look at people to know what their attitudes are toward things.
Organisational behaviour doesn’t enable you to perfectly predict what will happen at any given time at work. Having an understanding of some general rules about the types of behaviours you may see at work doesn’t mean that you can predict exactly how someone will behave!
Who Needs to Know about Organisational Behaviour?
Anyone who’s ever worked, or who’ll work in the future, can benefit from finding out about organisational behaviour – in other words, pretty much everyone needs to know about organisational behavi...
