Organizational behaviour

Résumé du document

Organizational behavior is a discipline of the social sciences, much like cultural anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. It uses the scientific methodology to establish truth and to validate its theories. There are three basic building blocks for organizational theory: anthropology, sociology, and psychology. These key disciplines will be developed in the second part of the document. This field is a relatively new discipline as compared to other social sciences, because it has its origins in the middle of the twentieth century. The behavioral movement in management was is a direct result of the frustration experienced with the classical school's failure to explain individual behavior within organizations. Organizational behavior therefore focuses on the behavior and nature of the people within organizations, and also with the behavior and nature of organizations within their environments. This interdisciplinary behavioral science is consequently theoretical and micro-oriented. It refers to individual and group dynamics in an organizational setting.

Extraits

[...] The graph next page is a short summary of Organizational Behavior key disciplines. It features the contribution of each discipline. Source: Power Point presentation on Organizational Behavior by Do Tien Long (see sources) We can consequently say that Organizational Behavior has a multidisciplinary approach: Political Science Economics 3. Analyses of 2 theories The behavioral movement was highly influenced by Mary Parker Follet's and Herbert Simon's researches, as well as numerous psychologists' works, which turned from studying individual behavior to organizational behavior. [...]

[...] Complying with individual expectations, building participative management, motivating employees are the new stakes for organizational behavior. Valuing human capacities and encouraging their full utilization enables an organization to increase significantly its efficiency and to develop individuals' interest for their tasks. This technique of empowerment of employees in one of the main levers for performance. Those knew notions of integrity and ethics highly influence the way OB is driven. Technological changes: For about 30 years, the massive arrival of software has been leading to a deep social disruption. [...]

[...] This is the reason why organizational behavior still has much importance and has to face new challenges every day. Context of globalization: for several years, globalization (worldwide interdependence of resource flows, product market and business competition) has been implying many differences in the way organizations work. The increase of foreign assignments and the obligations to get to work with people from different cultures brought a new kind of stress in companies. Managing people from different cultures, with diverse backgrounds and values, and making them working together efficiently in a global and international field, has created new difficulties which organizational behavior must take into account to improve organizations' efficiency. [...]

[...] Herbert Simon therefore showed that an individual's rationality is limited. After demonstrating this fact, Simon then wondered whether, given those inevitable limits on rational decision making, other techniques or behavioral processes a person or an organization could use to achieve approximately the best result existed. Toa answer this question, Simon writes: human being striving for rationality and restricted within the limits of his knowledge has developed some working procedures that partially overcome these difficulties. These procedures consist in assuming that he can isolate from the rest of the world a closed system containing a limited number of variables and a limited range of consequences.” According to Simon, it consequently appears that individuals are rational, but their rationality is limited by three criteria: Uncertainty and imperfect information: no one can be aware of each and every tool existing to solve a problem, or of each and every consequence at stake when taking a decision. [...]

[...] Mary Parker Follett, an American social worker of the early 1900's, was a pioneer in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behavior. Thanks to her substantial work on human relations, organizational behavior and conflict resolution, she was considered as of the two great women management gurus in the early days of classical management theory” along with Lillian Gilberth. As a management theorist, Mary Parker Follett pioneered several fields, such as the understanding of lateral processes within hierarchical organizations, the importance of informal processes within organizations, and the idea of the "authority of expertise". [...]