Organizational behavior facts for kids

Organizational behavior (often called OB) is the study of how people act and interact within groups and organizations. It looks at how individuals behave, how work groups function, and how entire organizations operate. Think of it as understanding the "people side" of businesses and other groups.

People often act differently when they are part of an organization compared to when they are on their own. OB researchers study these behaviors to help organizations work better and understand their members.

OB and Psychology: What's the Difference?

Organizational behavior is closely related to industrial and organizational psychology, which is a branch of psychology that studies people at work. While they are similar and often overlap, OB focuses more broadly on the organization itself, while industrial psychology often looks at individual workers and their job performance. Both fields help us understand how people behave in the workplace.

A Look Back: The History of OB

Organizational behavior is a mix of ideas from many different fields, like sociology (the study of society), industrial/organizational psychology (the study of people at work), and economics (the study of how societies use resources).

The Industrial Revolution, which started in the 1760s, brought new machines and ways of making things. This changed how people worked and how organizations were set up. A famous thinker named Max Weber worried that this focus on efficiency might make workers feel trapped, like in an "iron cage", and lose their unique identity. He also studied bureaucracy, which is a way of organizing work based on clear rules and efficiency.

Many early experts shared their ideas about managing organizations. People like Henri Fayol, Chester Barnard, and Mary Parker Follet focused on how human behavior and motivation affect work.

Frederick Taylor, an engineer from the 1800s, developed "scientific management". This idea was about finding the most efficient way to do tasks using scientific methods. Later, Lillian and Frank Gilbreth used time and motion study to make workers even more efficient.

In the early 1900s, Henry Ford introduced "Fordism" with his car factories. This meant using assembly lines to make products quickly and cheaply, even with less skilled workers. These ideas of efficiency became very popular.

In the 1920s, the Hawthorne Studies looked at how lighting affected worker productivity. Surprisingly, productivity went up when workers were being watched, no matter the lighting! This became known as the Hawthorne Effect. Elton Mayo later found that good social relationships and interesting work were very important for how well people performed their jobs.

After these studies, understanding what motivates employees became a big focus in OB. In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers like Abraham Maslow and Douglas McGregor developed theories about employee motivation, work performance, and job satisfaction.

Herbert Simon introduced important ideas about how people make decisions in organizations. He argued that people don't always make perfectly logical decisions because their thinking is limited (this is called bounded rationality). For example, people often choose the first good-enough solution instead of searching for the very best one. Simon won the Nobel Prize for his work on decision-making.

Since the 1980s, OB has also looked at how an organization's culture affects its behavior and changes over time.

Today's OB: What's Happening Now?

Most research and teaching about organizational behavior happens in university business schools. Sometimes, it's also taught in psychology programs.

Today, OB researchers are looking at new areas:

• Organizational Culture: Understanding companies as communities with their own unique cultures, rituals, and symbols.
• Leadership: Studying what makes a good leader and how different leadership styles affect teams.
• Ethics: Looking at the importance of doing the right thing in organizations.

How OB is Studied: Research Methods

OB researchers use many ways to study behavior, similar to other social sciences.

Quantitative Methods

Quantitative research uses numbers and statistics to study organizations. This allows researchers to study large groups of people efficiently and compare different situations using data. They use methods like correlation (how things relate), analysis of variance (comparing groups), and multiple regression (how several factors affect an outcome).

Computer Simulation

Computer simulation uses computer models to understand how organizations or even individuals behave. Researchers can create virtual organizations to test different ideas and see what might happen in real life.

Qualitative Methods

Qualitative research focuses on understanding things in depth, often without using numbers. This can involve content analysis of interviews or written materials, or detailed written stories of observations. Methods like ethnography (studying a group in its natural setting), case studies (in-depth study of one organization), and interviews help researchers get a clearer picture of an organization's inner workings.

Key Topics in Organizational Behavior

Consulting

Consultants use OB principles to help companies solve problems and improve their services. They analyze how people and groups work together to offer good advice.

Counterproductive Work Behavior

Counterproductive work behavior is any employee behavior that harms or intends to harm an organization. This could be anything from being late often to more serious actions.

Decision-Making

OB research often looks at how decisions are made in organizations. It explores how people usually make choices, how they arrive at a judgment, and how to help them make better decisions.

Diversity and Inclusion

Companies that focus on diversity (having people from different backgrounds) and inclusion (making everyone feel valued) often have many benefits. These include happier employees, less stress, more creativity, and fewer conflicts. When a company values everyone's unique ideas, employees are more likely to be engaged and productive.

Employee Mistreatment

When employees are mistreated, they might start to withdraw from work. This can mean being late, not fully doing their duties, or looking for a new job. Mistreatment can take different forms:

Abusive Supervision

This is when a supervisor repeatedly acts in ways that harm their team members.

Bullying

Workplace bullying involves repeated harmful behaviors directed at someone who has less power.

Incivility

Workplace incivility means low-level rude and disrespectful behavior that violates social rules for how people should act at work. It's often not meant to cause serious harm, but it can make the workplace unpleasant.

Teams

Understanding how teams work together is a big part of OB, as many tasks in organizations are done in teams.

Job-Related Attitudes and Emotions

OB looks at how employees feel about their jobs. This includes:

• Job satisfaction: How happy an employee is with their job.
• Organizational commitment: How much an employee feels connected to their organization.
• Job involvement: How much an individual identifies with their job and sees it as part of who they are.
• Emotional labor: When an employee has to show certain emotions (like smiling at customers) even if they don't feel that way.

Leadership

Leadership is a huge topic in OB. Researchers study what makes leaders effective. Some theories focus on a leader's traits, while others look at their behaviors or the situation they are in.

• Contingency theory: Says that good leadership depends on both the leader's traits and the specific situation.
• Leader-member exchange (LMX) theory: Focuses on the unique relationships between a leader and each team member.
• Transformational leadership: Describes leaders who inspire their followers to achieve high levels of motivation and performance. This often includes charismatic leadership, where leaders have a strong, inspiring presence.

Managerial Roles

Henry Mintzberg studied what managers actually do and found they play three main types of roles:

• Interpersonal roles: Dealing with people (like being a figurehead or a leader).
• Decisional roles: Making choices (like being an entrepreneur or a problem solver).
• Informational roles: Sharing and receiving information (like being a monitor or a spokesperson).

Motivation

Keeping talented employees is very important for a company to succeed. Motivation is about the processes that start, guide, and keep human behavior going toward a goal. There are many theories about motivation in OB, including:

• Equity theory: People want fairness in what they give to and get from work.
• Expectancy theory: People are motivated if they believe their effort will lead to good performance, which will lead to desired rewards.
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs: People are motivated by a pyramid of needs, from basic survival to self-fulfillment.
• Two-factor theory: Some things (like achievement) make people satisfied, while others (like pay) only prevent dissatisfaction.

Types of Motivation

• Intrinsic Motivation: This comes from inside a person. You do something because you enjoy it or feel it's important, not for an outside reward. It's about proving your own worth.
• Extrinsic Motivation: This is driven by outside rewards. You do something for a pay raise, bonus, gift card, or other external benefits.

National Culture

The culture of a country can affect how people behave in organizations. Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory identified six ways national cultures differ, such as:

• Power distance: How much people accept unequal power distribution.
• Individualism vs. collectivism: Whether people focus on themselves or their group.
• Uncertainty avoidance: How much people feel threatened by uncertain situations.

Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Organizational citizenship behavior is when employees do things that help the organization, even if it's not part of their official job description. For example, helping a coworker or volunteering for a task.

Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is like the personality of a company. It includes the shared values, beliefs, and behaviors that are common in an organization. Edgar Schein described three levels of culture:

• Artifacts and behaviors: Things you can see, like office layout or how people dress.
• Espoused values: What the organization says it believes in.
• Shared basic assumptions: Deep, often unspoken beliefs that guide behavior.

Personality

Personality refers to a person's consistent patterns of behavior, thinking, and emotions. In OB, researchers often look at how specific personality traits, like the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), relate to how well employees perform.

Occupational Stress

Occupational stress happens when the demands of a job (what the job requires) are out of balance with the resources available to handle those demands.

Work–Family Conflict

Work–family conflict occurs when the demands of your job and your family life clash, making it hard to do both roles well.

Understanding Organizations: Organization Theory

Organizational theory tries to explain how entire organizations work. It looks at their structure, processes, and how they interact with each other and society.

Bureaucracy

Max Weber thought that bureaucracy was the most efficient way to organize work. It involves clear rules, a formal hierarchy, and people being chosen for jobs based on their skills. The goal is to apply the same rules to everyone and maximize efficiency.

Systems Theory

Systems theory sees organizations as complex systems with different parts that work together to achieve goals. Just like a human body has different systems (digestive, circulatory), an organization has different parts that need to function together.

Organizational Ecology

Organizational ecology looks at organizations like living things in an environment. It studies how organizations are founded, grow, change, and sometimes fail, based on how well they fit with their surroundings.

Scientific Management

Scientific management is an approach to management based on engineering principles. It focuses on using incentives and other methods to improve productivity.

Who Helps Study OB?

Many fields contribute to organizational behavior:

• Anthropology (study of human societies and cultures)
• Human resources management (managing people in an organization)
• Industrial/organizational psychology (psychology in the workplace)
• Personality psychology (study of personality)
• Social psychology (study of how people interact)
• Sociology (study of society)

How Organizations Work: A Simple Model

OB often uses a simple model to understand how organizations function:

Inputs

These are the starting points, like the personalities of employees, the structure of a team, or the overall culture of the organization. They set the stage for what will happen.

Processes

These are the actions that individuals, groups, and the organization take because of the inputs. For example, how a team communicates or how decisions are made.

Outcomes

These are the results you want to explain or predict. They are affected by the inputs and processes. Examples include employee job satisfaction, productivity, or how well the organization performs.

See also

In Spanish: Comportamiento organizacional para niños