Lecture 2

THE ORIGINS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

• Lecture on development of OB over the last 100 years

• Critical incident “you just can’t get good help anymore” (pages 21-22)

Class Overview

Emergence of OB - Historical View

• 1900’s Scientific Management

• 1930’s Human Relations Approach

• 1950 ‘s Contingency Approach

• 1980’s Culture/Quality Movement

• 1990’s Knowledge & Learning

1900’s Scientific Management

• Developed by Frederick Taylor

• Careful analysis of tasks and time-and- motion studies

• “One best way” to perform task

• Identification of the ‘best man for the job’

• Piece-rate pay schemes to improve productivity

Criticisms of Scientific Management

• Takes a highly mechanistic view of people and motivation

• Very time consuming to develop work rate standards

• Workers resist having their effort and productivity measured

• Workers often oppose attempts to change work standards & pay

1930’s Human Relations Approach

• Emphasized importance of social relations, motivation and attitudes in explaining worker behavior

• Roots in Mayo’s Hawthorne Studies

Hawthorne Experiments: The Relay Assembly Room Study

• Objective: to determine what effect changes in work setting would have on women’s productivity

• changes included: rest periods, free lunch, shortened work day, five day work week, variations in pay method

• All changes followed an upward trend in productivity over the course of the study.

Hawthorne Effect

• General principle: people act differently when being studied than they do in normal situations.– Does this sound familiar?

• A second interpretation:– People appreciate management taking an

interest in their well-being and work harder in return (a social exchange interpretation)

Bank Wiring Room Study

• Involved observation of groups of men doing their jobs

• Observed social pressure to conform to group norms concerning work output

• Deviants from group norms were chastised by ‘binging’ and ridicule

• Implications: group dynamics are an important determinant upon performance in some tasks

Conclusions

• Individuals can be motivated by more than money: e.g. working conditions, social rewards, informal recognition

• Results of research have to be critically examined (Hawthorne effect)

• There are important group influences upon individual behavior at work (Bank Wiring Room)

Contingency Approach

• What are the ‘boundary conditions’ for a given principle to hold– e.g. when does job redesign increase satisfaction?

• Acknowledges the difficulty of offering simple general principles to explain or predict behavior

• Recognizes interdependency of motivations, abilities, and situations

JobEnrichment

JobSatisfaction

JobPerformance

Skills;Personality

Illustration of a Contingency

Culture/Quality Movement

• Interest in corporate culture and quality improvement

• Emphasizes the place that key values have in work settings

• Does not integrate findings from previous eras, it replaces them

• Bottom line outcomes are emphasized: productivity and financial returns

1990’s and beyond: Knowledge & Learning

• Focus is upon knowledge and human capital

• How is it accumulated, assimilated and employed?

• How can organizations ‘learn’?

• What is the impact of learning upon organizational survival and success?

Review

• Modern OB has developed from many threads

• Beginnings are in the late 19th century

• Most of what we discuss in this class is the result of much scientific research in the ‘contingency approach’

• The future of OB is in knowledge and organizational learning