ORGANISATION AND MANAGEMENT
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, Chapter 1
Organizational behaviour: the study of the structure and management of organizations, their
environments, and the actions and interactions of their individual members and groups.
In many cases, a combination of factors explain the behaviour in question (poor staff training,
increased work pressure, anxiety).
The focus on management is seen by some commentators as unhelpful, for at least four
reasons:
Power inequalities: management is an elite group, with privileged access to
information and resources. Should academic research support only the affluent and
powerful?
The agenda: a managerialist perspective focuses on issues of importance to managers,
concerning control and performance. Issues that are significant to individuals and
groups, theories that have limited practical use, and criticisms of the managerial role
are pushed aside.
Multiple stakeholders: management is only one group with a stake in organizational
behaviour. Organizational behaviour is a subject of individual, social and economic
significance.
Fashion victims: managers follow the latest trends in thinking and technique, to
improve personal and organizational effectiveness. A managerialist perspective
encourages a focus on fashion. Some fashions survive while others fade. As some fads
are old ideas with new packaging, we can only make an informed assessment if we
understand the history of the subject.
Organization: a social arrangement for achieving controlled performance in pursuit of
collective goals.
Organizations are concerned with controlled performance in the pursuit of goals.
Controlled performance: setting standards, measuring performance, comparing actual with
standard, and taking corrective action if necessary.
The need for controlled performance leads to a deliberate and ordered allocation of functions,
or division of labour, between an organization’s members.
It can be argued, therefore, that it is the preoccupation with performance and the need for
control which distinguish organizations from other social arrangements.
Organizational dilemma: how to reconcile inconsistency between individual needs and
aspirations, and the collective purpose of the organization.
One of the main mechanisms of organizational control is the hierarchy of authority. It is
widely accepted (often with reluctance) that managers have the right to make the decisions
while lower-level employees are obliged to comply, or leave. It seems to be difficult to design
organizations that use resources efficiently, and which also develop human potential. That is a
pessimistic view. Organizations are social arrangements, designed by people who can also
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,change them. Organizations can be repressive and stifling, but with thoughtful design, they
can also provide opportunities for self-fulfilment and expression.
Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to explain the behaviour of others based on
their personality or disposition, and to overlook the influence of wider contextual influences.
We need to be aware of how context affects behaviour, through less visible and less obvious
influences. Here are some possibilities:
Context factors: economic factors, social issues
Individual factors: learning deficit, personality traits, motivation problem
Group factors: group formation issues, group structure problems, group norms
Structural factors: hierarchy problems, work design problems, decision making issues
Management process factors: leadership style, change problems, management decision
making problems
Organizational effectiveness: a multidimensional concept that can be defined differently by
different stakeholders.
Balanced scorecard: using a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures
(environmental concerns, employee development)
Quality of working life: an individual’s overall satisfaction with their job, working
conditions, pay, colleagues, management style, work-life balance, and training, development
and career opportunities.
Natural science gives us material technology. Social science has not given us a convincing
social engineering which, perhaps, would reduce car theft, or eliminate terrorism.
Nevertheless, managers expect organizational research to help solve organizational problems.
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, Natural science describes an objective reality. Social science describes how people understand
and interpret their circumstances.
The first goal of science, however, is description. To achieve this, social science has only
three methods: observation, asking questions, and studying documents. Physicists and
chemists use only one of these methods – observation. How do we study phenomena that
cannot be observed directly, such as learning? We do this through inference. The term
‘learning’ is a label for an invisible (to a social scientist) activity whose existence we can
assume. Questions can be asked in person in an interview, or through self-report
questionnaires. The validity of responses, as a reflection of the ‘truth’, is questionable for at
least three reasons: subjects may lie; subjects may not know; subjects may tell what they think
we want to hear.
A second goal of science is explanation. If your test score is higher after reading this book
than before, then we can infer that this book has caused your score to improve. We are not
born with pre-programmed behavioural guides. We have to learn the rules of our society at a
given time. We cannot expect to discover laws that explain human behaviour consistently
across time and place. Social and cultural norms vary from country to country, and vary
across subcultures in the same country.
A third goal of science is prediction. Social science can often explain events, but without
making precise predictions. This problem is not critical. We are often more interested in the
behaviour of groups than individuals, and more interested in tendencies or probabilities than
in individual predictions and certainties. Some predictions are self-fulfilling. Simply saying
that something will happen can either make it happen, or increase the likelihood of it
happening.
A fourth goal of science is control, or the ability to change things. Social science findings are
often designed to encourage change. Social science can be critical of the social and
organizational order that it uncovers, because that order is only one of many that we are able
to create.
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