Behavioral Approach of Management Science: OB(Organizational Behavior)

Managers GTD(get things done) by WWP(working with people).

This explains why some writers have chosen to look at management

by focusing on the organization’s human factors.

since they have recognized the importance of people to an organization’s success,

Organizational Hehavior (OB):

actions(behavior) of people at work as the objective of study, Much of what managers do today when managing people:

leading, motivating, building trust, working with a team, managing conflict,

and so forth—has come out of OB research.

Hawthorne Studies(A series of studies during the 1920s and 1930s):

that provided new insights into individual and group behavior :

a series of studies conducted at the Western Electric Company Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois.

These studies, which started in 1924, were initially designed by Western Electric industrial engineers

as a scientific management experiment. They wanted to examine the effect of various lighting levels on worker productivity.

Like any good scientific experiment, control and experimental groups were set up, with:

• the experimental group exposed to various lighting intensities
• the control group working under a constant intensity.

If you were the industrial engineers in charge of this experiment, what would you have expected to happen? It’s logical to think that individual output in the experimental group would be directly related to the intensity of the light. However, much to the surprise of the engineers, they found in the experimental group that:

• as the level of light was increased, output for both groups increased.
• as the light level was decreased, productivity continued to increase in both groups.
• In fact, a productivity decrease was observed only when the level of light was reduced to that of moonlight.

What would explain these unexpected results?

The engineers weren’t sure, but concluded that lighting intensity was not directly related to group productivity and that something else must have contributed to the results.

They weren’t initially able to pinpoint what that “something else” was, though.

In 1927, the Western Electric engineers asked Harvard professor Elton Mayo and his associates to join the study as consultants. Thus began a relationship that would last through 1932 and encompass numerous experiments:

• in the redesign of jobs,
• changes in workday and workweek length,
• introduction of rest periods,
• and individual versus group wage plans.

For example, one experiment was designed to evaluate the effect of a group piecework incentive pay system on group productivity. The results indicated that the incentive plan had less effect on a worker’s output than group pressure, acceptance, and security.

The researchers concluded that social norms or group standards were the key determinants of individual work behavior.

In terms of the original lighting experiment, the researchers learned that just the awareness of being observed alters the behavior of people.

Scholars generally agree that the Hawthorne Studies had a game-changing impact on management beliefs about the role of people in organizations. Mayo concluded that:

people’s behavior and attitudes are closely related:

• that group factors significantly affect individual behavior,
• that group standards establish individual worker output,
• that money is less a factor in determining output than group standards, group attitudes, and security.
  
  These conclusions led to a new emphasis on the human behavior factor in the management of organizations.

HOW TODAY’S MANAGERS USE THE BEHAVIORAL APPROACH

The behavioral approach has largely shaped how today’s organizations are managed.

• the way managers design jobs
• the way they work with employee teams
• the way they communicate
  
  we see the elements of behavioral approach.

Much of what the early OB advocates proposed, and the conclusions from the Hawthorne Studies,

have provided the foundation for our current theories of motivation, leadership, group behavior and development, and numerous other behavioral approaches.