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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