Organizational Behavior

1. Literature review
LO1
Analyze the influence of culture, politics, and power on the behavior of others in an
organizational context.
Every single company is demonstrated by its individual employees’ behavior along with its
group’s behavior. Behavior of a person is quite complex nature wise as every single person is
different from others behavior of other people working in the same place. When it comes to
individual or a groups behavior the culture, politics, and power plays a sufficiently great role.
The organizational culture involves its psychology as well as values and beliefs along with its
experiences. The positive company culture provides people the path to behave in a positive
way thus helping the employees to work positively thus achieving great excellence as it helps
the employees in enhancing their satisfaction, hiring right people and providing them great
training to help achieve company goals (Coccia, 2014; Taylor, 2018). Whereas the study by
Kitchin (2017) revealed that culture of company negatively influences the overall individual
as well group behavior as when competitiveness among the companies increases it eventually
influences overall company as well, as all the employees start considering each other as their
competitors. Due to this the overall performance of company also gets effected as people are
no more focusing on achieving goals rather they want to compete and win at their
workplaces. Thus it overall recommends that positive culture brings increase in performance
and negative culture decreases it.
Politics is another important factor which influences the individual and group behavior thus
influencing the overall company performance. Politics involves the irrational behavior of
people which helps individuals in gaining such benefits which they cannot gain in actual
terms due to lack of control which eventually leads to negative ambience as people get more
involved in ruining others image rather than focusing on their career (Pereira et al., 2017).
The negativity among employees eventually leads to negative behavior of people working
within the organization. Such people behave very differently with the people in their
surroundings due to which a situation of frustration and anger eventually occurs. Whereas
Pettigrew (2014) illustrated that politics helps people in growing as it provides them with
understanding of how to deal with others at the work place, thus enhancing their performance
as well as the performance of overall company.
Another important factor is power which effects the overall behavior as well as performance
of company as when people with more power on individual basis or within certain teams,
there are more chances of their decisions influencing the overall company. People with more
power have more controlling factor within them due to which they are more focused on
making people in their surrounding work as they want. Due to this the performance of
company gets increased as within a group when leader is having more power his decisions
are better implemented ultimately bringing effective and positive results when it comes to
performance of company (Anitha & Begum, 2016).
The culture, politics, and the power are highly linked with companies and are always having
sufficiently great influence on behavior of individual as well as group thus bringing changes
within the performance of company as well (Argyris, 2017). There are 4 types of cultures
including the role of group or individual, task of group or individual, power of group or
individual, and person involved in all the works individually or in groups. The culture within
company helps in developing diversity and contributing in creative ideas which were not
 Organizational Behavior
available before. Along with that through culture the better communication capacity of a
company also increases as people interact with different people having diverse nature. But
this also gives way to problems among the employees as well due to totally diverse culture.
As per the culture theory by Geert Hofstede culture involves 6 dimensions being a properly
coordinated system of people’s mind which highly contributes in performance of company by
providing it a better direction. Politics within a company has eventually adverse effects as
when people get involved in doing bad to others rather than being cooperative at work place
the overall efficiency and performance of people gets effected thus leading to decrease in
performance of company. Senge (2014) illustrated that power involves the decisions made by
managers of the company where people are only responsible for primary decisions rather than
secondary decision making due to which coming up with creative ideas has become very
difficult and whenever innovation is required there is always need of an approval from the
top management due which people are unable to work properly thus influencing the overall
performance of the company. When power is used in a positive way the results are good
while when used in a negative way the results are adverse (Huczynski et al., 2013). There two
theories of motivation including process theory and content theory. The process theory is
linked with how behavior of a person is motivated whereas theory of content explains the
things which motivates or boosts up people working within an organization. The content
theories includes Maslow’s theory of hierarchy and Herzberg’s hygiene theory. The
Maslow’s theory illustrates that there are certain needs and requirements of people and they
don’t look for superior needs until and unless their current needs get fulfilled. A person has 5
levels of needs including the psychological, safety, love, esteem, and safety needs. There are
different benefits provided by people to companies and companies should focus on providing
a very friendly and healthy environment which involves a positive culture along with
providing the employees with different incentives on good performance which eventually
encourages them to give their best in their work. When the company takes care of needs of
people it encourages them which enhances their as well as company’s performance (Einstein
et al., 2016). The McCelland’s theory illustrates that there are 3 motivating factors including
achievement, affiliation, and power where achievement of certain thing reveals the
competence of individual. When there is low motivation there is low performance thus
leading to low results whereas when there is high motivation for achievement there is high
performance. Likewise when a person is having belongingness and love at workplace he is
expected to perform much better which eventually enhances the performance of company as
well (Dittman & Bunton, 2012).