OB- fundamental

assumptions
1. OB recognizes that organizations are dynamic and always changing
2. There is no one best way to behave in organizations, and different
approaches are called for in different situations
The dynamic nature of Organizations

 OB scientists concerned about the nature of organizations

 Under what conditions will organizations change?
 Organizations` structure?
 Organizations interact with their environment?
organizations are open systems- self- sustaining connections between entities
that use energy to transform resources from the environment (raw materials)
into some form of output (finished product)
Organizations as open systems-Open system
receive input from their environment and continuously transform it into output.
This output gets transformed back to input, and the cyclical operation continues
There is no ``One Best``approach

To study human behavior in organizations, there is a `contingency approach.

This approach recognizes that behavior in work settings is the complex result of
many interacting forces.
Example – how an individual`s personal characteristics (attitude and belief) in
conjunction with situational factors (relations between coworkers) may all work
together when it comes to influencing how a particular individual is likely to
behave on the job.
OB then and now: A capsule history

 The early days: scientific management, time and motion study, human
relations movement and the Hawthorne studies
 Classical organizational theory, division of labor
 Late 20th century: organizational behavior as a social science
 OB in today`s infotech age
Scientific management- time and motion
study
 Industrial efficiency experts desires to improve worker productivity- what
could be done to get people to do more work in less time?
 Rapid industrialization and technological change in the US happened.
Engineers attempted to make machines more efficient and extend their
efforts to make people more productive
 Frederick Winslow Taylor noticed the inefficient practices of the employees in
the steel mill in which he worked and attempted to change them. He
searched ways for fewest wasted movements of the laborers doing different
jobs- Time and motion studies.
 Time and motion study- a type of applied research designed to classify and
streamline the individual movements needed to perform jobs with the intent
of finding `the best way` to perform them.
Scientific management

 Taylor advance the concept of scientific management- it identified ways to

design manual labor jobs more efficiently and also emphasized carefully
selecting and training people to perform them.
 He was first to study human behavior at work. He was credited with
destroying the soul of work and dehumanizing factories by transforming men
into automatons.
 Scientific management- an early approach to management and organizational
behavior emphasizes the importance of designing jobs as efficiently as
possible
Human relations movement

 A perspective on OB that rejects the primarily economic orientation of

scientific management and recognizes, instead the importance of social
processes in work setting.
 More humanistic approach. It gave more importance to the social factors
operating in the work place determine the effective work done by the people.
Elton W. Mayo was regarded as the founder of human relations movement.
 The social conditions existing in organizations- the way employees are treated
by management and the relationships they have with each other- influence
the job performance.
The Hawthorne studies

 The earliest systematic research in the field of OB. This work was performed
to determine hoe the design of work environments affected performance.
 Hawthorne studies begin in 1927 at Western Electric`s Hawthorne Works near
Chicago. Mayo and his associates were interested in determining- how to
design work environments in ways that increased performance.
 By systematically altered keys aspects of the work environment (illumination,
the length of rest pauses, the duration of the workday and work week) to see
their effects on job performance.
 Findings- productivity improved following almost every change in the working
conditions. Even the conditions returned to normal-the way they were before
the study.
Hawthrone effect

 How effective people will work depend upon the physical characteristics of
the work environment and also the social conditions encountered. Knowing
that they were being studied made them feel special and motivated them to
do their best.
 The tendency for people being studied to behave differently than they
ordinarily would.
 Hawthrone studies suggests that to understand the way people behave on the
job, we must fully appreciate their attitudes and the processes by which they
communicate with each other.
Classical organizational theory,
Bureaucracy
 The interrelationships between people and their jobs?
 Focus on the efficient structuring of overall organizations- there is an
efficient way to organize work in all organizations
 Henri Fayol, a French industrialist advocated for a division of labor, the
practice of dividing work into specialized tasks that enable people to
speacialize in what they do best.
 Max Weber, a German sociologist proposed the `Bureaucracy`- a form of
organization in which a set of rules applied that keep higher ranking
organizational officials in charge of lower ranking workers, who fulfill the
duties assigned to them. A clear hierarchy of authority in which people are
required to perform well- defined jobs.
 Contemporary OB owes a great deal to Weber.
 Thank you