ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
Organizations exist to achieve goals and someone has to define those goals and the means by which they can be achieved. This statement suggests that critical to the performance of an organizations are people. People who conceptualize, people who implement, people who manage, people who monitor, people who do the work. Organizations are all about people!
Despite all the modernization, in spite of all the technological advancements, people make an organization. The Fire Brigade remains one of those organizations that with all the new technology being introduced making the job easier but by and large the work of fire fighting will remain one where the fire fighter must physically do the job.
The study of Organizational Behaviour is predicated on and around humans who are undeniable an organization’s greatest resource. Generally speaking Organizational Behaviour is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups and structure have on behaviour within the organization for the purpose of applying such knowledge towards improving an organization’s effectiveness. Organizational Behaviour is specifically concerned with employment-related situations. You will not be surprised to find that it emphasizes behaviours related to management, turnover absenteeism and human performance
The study of what makes workers getting the same pay, working under the same conditions exhibit different levels of commitment must have fundamental implications on the efficiency of the organization.( Jealousy) and is an area that must be understood by management. Organizational Behaviour has implications for motivation, leader-behaviour, and power, learning, attitude development and perception, change process, conflict, and work stress.
A few years ago the study of Organizational Behaviour was of little significance until it became clear that the understanding of this subject was hinged to an organization’s production, productivity, staff morale, employee turnover and loyalty and image if not the company’s bottom line.
Once the employee was no longer obligated under the compulsion of the term of slavery managers were now compelled to find covert and overt ways to retain their workers (Higher pay) Factors such as competition from other companies was a cause for migration of workers. Losing some of your best worker was bad if they left because of better salaries and working conditions but not attracting them to your company although your company had better pay packages and working conditions is worst. The study of Organizational Behaviour seeks to find answers to these questions and more This meant that companies (managers) had to seek to understand the rationale behind the behaviour of workers.
Reading people is something we have been doing all our lives (Change) in an unsystematic way. We have been doing this from our early years. We have been trying to interpret what we see and hear. Having seen and heard some things over and over again we have been able trying to predict what people will do and why they do these things in certain circumstance. Sometime we are correct but sometimes we are wrong! and this is where our problem starts. It is against this background that the various studies came into being undertaken..
Hawthorne Research
From 1924[-]32, an innovative series of research studies was funded by the Western Electric Company at its Hawthorne plant in Chicago, then a manufacturing division of AT&T. The plant was one of the oldest in operation and employed approximately 25,000 of Western Electric's 45,000 workers. The research proceeded through five phases: (1) The initial Illumination studies (1924[-]27) were aimed at evaluating the effect of lighting conditions on productivity; (2) the Relay-assembly Room studies (August 1928[-]March 1929) assessed the effects of pay incentives, rest periods, and active job input on the productivity of five selected woman workers; (3) the Mica-Splitting Test group (October 1928[-]September 1930) in which a group of piece-workers were used to corroborate the relative importance of work-group dynamics vs. pay incentives; (4) the Bank Wiring Observation group (November 1931[-]May 1932) a covert observational design in which the dynamics of control in a work-group of 14 male employees on the regular factory floor were observed; and (5) the plantwide Interviewing program (September 1928[-]early 1931) essentially an attempt by the company to categorize concerns, mitigate grievances, and manipulate employee morale according to the principles of social control learned in the previous phases). The latter two phases were interrupted by the detrimental effects of the Great Depression on company production orders, but the interviewing phase was later reinstated as a "Personnel Counseling" program, and was even expanded throughout the Western Electric company system between 1936[-]1955.
The Hawthorne effect, defined as the tendency under conditions of observation for worker productivity to steadily increase, was discovered during the earliest "scientific management" phases of the research. It was suggested that when human work relations (ie., supervision and worker camaraderie) were appropriate, adverse physical conditions had little negative effect upon worker productivity. If the company could only learn more about the human relations aspects of the workplace, they might soon be able to utilize them to increase overall plant production. The latter phases of research, therefore, become more sociopsychological in design.