Organizational Behavior Study Guide, A Vital Tool In The Study Of Different Groups
Lets pretend that you are now in a beginners course in organizational behavior. On the first day of class, your professor asks you why some employees arent as motivated at work today as they were some thirty or forty years ago. Perhaps with some reluctance, you would probably be able to come up with an explanation to this question on motivation. This is the start of the wonderful journey to the organizational behavior study guide.
Organizational behavior is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organizations effectiveness. It studies three determinants of behavior in organizations - that of individuals, groups and structure. The beauty of OB is that the knowledge one gets from it is readily applied to a system to make the organization work more effectively. It is concerned with what people do in an organization and how each persons behavior affects the performance of the entire organization.
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OB is an umbrella study that encompasses a great deal of important and integrated topics such as motivation, leader behavior and power, interpersonal communication, group structure and processes, learning, attitude development and perception, change processes, conflict, work design, and work stress. To further illustrate the significance and co-effectivity of each subtopic, consider the following example: Lets say a boss comes to work cranky and under a lot of stress. As such, he is unable to motivate his employees to work more effectively. He becomes neglectful, and this lack in management skills then leads to a decrease in leader power. His interpersonal communication with his staff becomes strained, and gossips fly around the office regarding speculations about his problems. The group structure becomes clearly divided as employees take sides. During meetings, no learning takes place because of the clearly delineated line between those who are for him and those who take offense in his ineffective management strategies. There is then a need for change management and attitude development for everyone, from the boss right down to the last person affected by this chain of reaction. For change processes to occur, conflict must be studied in order to find out what started everything and what can be done to remedy it. OB can create a better work design to lessen the work stress felt by the boss, raise his organizational effectiveness, and generally reinstate the balance that was once lost during the time when he had not been able to address his problems properly.
This is only one example of how the following subtopics can relate to each other in the study of OB. There could be different perceptions as to how one might look at it, so the key in OB is to know as many of these perceptions in order to anticipate and react to whatever problems may arise. OB is such a useful topic that one can easily apply its lessons in problems at home, in school, or in other social or civic organizations. After all, the definition of organizational behavior it is still the study of people and relations and groups - whether these groups are confined within the four walls of the office or not.
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