Lecture 2

1. Lecture 2 THE ORIGINS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

2. Class Overview • Lecture on development of OB over the last 100 years • Critical incident “you just can’t get good help anymore” (pages 21-22)

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 1930’s Human Relations Approach • Emphasized importance of social relations, motivation and attitudes in explaining worker behavior • Roots in Mayo’s Hawthorne Studies

7. 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.

8. 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)

9. 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

10. 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)

11. 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

12. Illustration of a Contingency

13. 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

14. 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?

15. 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