PSY 403- ORGANISATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

CLASS NOTE ON:

WORK AND ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

Work is part of our pre-occupations as human beings. As a matter of fact, work is synonymous to living because it is part of what add meaning to human’s life. This is why, as human beings, most mornings we set off to work in formal organisations such as banks, schools, insurance offices, hospitals, sport centres, police stations, hotels and factories. In work settings like these, people engage in a host of work related activities, communicate and interact, and learn with and from each other. For example, members of the organization may operate a computer, teach students, diagnose patients etc. the way these work-related activities are designed, and the regularities displayed by the people in the work place, are only partly the result of individual preferences or psychologies. People are exposed toa multitude of organizational processes and control systems, which limit, influence or determine their behaviour in work organisations. Work organisations are simply physical and legal structures within which people undertake paid work – and it is the people who ‘behave’, and not, of course, the organisations.

People acquire identities and roles in organization as they interact socially. ‘Identities’ refers to both the name we give ourselves – leader, colleague, subordinate etc and how other sees us. People play out organize scripts, in the form of specific duties and obligations that are attached to position in the organization, which are called roles.

For employees, the employment relationship might offer exceptional career opportunities, provide a high salary, require high levels of skill and personal development. In some situation, it could offer low pay, require low levels of skill etc.

Customers will find their experience of the organization affected by whether employees are adequately staffed, trained, motivated and supervised. Both employees and customers might have an experience of the organisation that is different again if they are disabled, a member of an ethnic group or a visible minority or female. These experiences may reign from discriminations, stigmatization etc.

Our experience of work organisations can be analysed and explained using a variety of contextual, individual, group or organizational processes. The study of organizational psychologycentres on how the behaviour of organizational members evolves and adapts, how employee behaviour is shaped by group dynamics and social interaction, and how work organisations are structured in different ways. It looks at why organizational controls occur in the way they do, and how organisational processes have an impact on societal and ecological stability or instability.

The emphasis is on how an understanding of human behaviour underscores management practices, and results in organizational efficiency and effectiveness. The essence of organizational psychology, in a nut shell, revolve round how the work settings influence people’s behaviour and how people behaviour in return influenced the work setting and how the study of all these can lead to effective management of human resources which is the key element in any organisations. It revolves round understanding how people undertake paid work, and how they interact with each other in the work place and how the organization or decisions made in the organisations affect the people in it. The entire idea centers on learning how to influence processes and shape events within organisations.

WHAT ARE ORGANISATIONS?

Individual or group behaviour occurs in organisations. A work organization is a socially designed unit, or collectivity that engages in activities to accomplish a goal or set of objectives, it has an identifiable boundary, and is linked to the external society. Work organization can be distinguished from other social entities or collectivities such as family, a clan or tribe or a complex society – by four common characteristics:

  1. Referring to organization as ‘a socially designed unit or collectivity’ means that one essential property of any organization is the presence of a group of people who have something in common, and who deliberately and consciously design a structure and processes.

The term social structure refers to those activities, interaction and relationships that take on a regular pattern.Work organisationshave some forms of hierarchy, and there are standard methods of doing things. It has norms, communications and control techniques that are coordinated and repeated every day. Organisationsare made up of people and they form relationship with each other and perform task that help attain the organisations goals. It has a formal social structure which is spelt out in the organogram. However, many aspect of human activities, relationship and interactions emerge in the work place that are not express in chart or organogram. This covers an array of human behaviour including the communication of rumors and other things. These activities are referred to as the informal social structure. The formal and informal social structures are the basic building blocks of an organization.

  1. The second common characteristic of organisations is that human activity is directed towards accompanishing a goal or set of objectives. For-profit organisations have financial goals: specific target towards which human action is oriented, normally of profit maximization. That is making money is the major priority of such organization. They survive by minimizing the cost in any way they can within the law. Benevolent nonprofit organisations have goals such as helping the destitute, or less privilege, educating students caring for the sick etc In addition, most organisations have survival as a goal.
  1. The third common characteristics is the existence of an ‘identifiable boundary’ that establishes common membership, distinguishing between the people who are inside and outside the organization.
  1. The fourth element of an organization in the definition connects the organization to the external society, and draws attention to the fact that organizational activities and action influence the environment or larger society and vice-versa. The impact on society may include consumer satisfaction or dissatisfaction, pollution of the eco system etc

Organisationalso varies in their size, the product or services they offer, their purpose, ownership and their management. An organizational size is normally defined in terms of the number of people they employed which can varies from less than 10 people to over 100 thousand people.

Organisations can be grouped into four major categories according to their products:

  1. The first category grows food and extracts raw materials e.g family farms, forestry and mining organsations.
  2. The second category manufactures a vast array of commodities e.g Construction item, cars, mobile phones, different apparel etc.
  3. The third category provides services e.g hair dressing, car repairs, train and air transportation.
  4. The fourth category of work organization supplies and processes information, offering services such as market and public opinion researche.g MTN, Glo mobile industries

Work organisations can also be categorized into those that operate for profit and non-profit institutions. The purpose of for-profit organisations is to make money and they are judge primarily by how much money is made or loss. But for not-for –profit organisations such as charity homes, public libraries etc measure their success or failure by the quality of services rendered for example a university may measure its success by the total number ofstudents graduating or obtaining ground from research bodies

Many organisations are owned by one person, one family or a small group of people and individual may own and manage a small business, employing a few other people. Not all businesses are incorporated, many companies are owned by only a few individuals.

In contrast, publicly held organisations issued share that are traded freely on a stock market and are owned by a large number of people. These organisations normally paid dividends – a proportion of their profits – to their shareholders. The owners of the organisations are its principals, and these individuals either manage the activities of the organisations themselves or employ agents to manage it on their behalf. It should be noted also that privately and publicly owned organisations have the rights, privileges and responsibilities of a person in the eyes of the law. But because a company is not actually a ‘person’, its director or directors are held responsible for its actions; and directors have been jailed for crime committed by the ‘organisation’

Having reviewed the basic characteristics and type of work organization we can now look at the meaning and scope of organizational behaviour.

WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR?

Organisational behaviour is an extremely complex concept with wide ranging area which draws upon numerous theoretical frame work and research traditions; and this has led to different definitions of the concept by scholars with individuals talking from a unique perspective. But in summary they all tend to a direction which explains that organizational behaviour involves the systematic study of attitudes and behaviours of individual and groups in organisations. Organizational behaviour is an inter disciplinary field concerned with studying the behaviour of people in the work place, why things happen the way they do, what purposes they serve and what effects change or transformation have on people. Organisational behaviour is best understood as a series of complex active processes in which people participate formally and informally, at several level including the micro, macro and global, in ways shaped by organizational roles and power.

In a nut shell, organisational behaviour is a multidisciplinary field of enquiry concerned with the systematic study of formal organization, the behaviour of people within organization and important features of the social context that structures all the activities that occurred inside the organization (Callinan et al, 2007)

Work place behaviour in this context includes face to face communicating, decision making, ethical practice, leadership styles, and corporation overwork processes, learning and innovation. Behaviour also includes cognitive behaviour such as thinking, feeling or perceiving and values. It also include power struggle within the organization, absenteeism, gender discrimination and other forms conflict.

In every organisation people participate formally and informally at several levels including micro, macro and global. These three levels of social structure surround people and shape their work behaviour. Global, macro and micro social structures are also interrelated: they are shaped by each other, and action or change in one stimulates or affects action in the other e.g a change in the pattern of global trade and investment might cause the government to amend macro public policy by increasing the length of the working week, with a view to improving labour productivity.This change in Macrostructure may generate action inside the organization, the microcosm zone, as workers may stop work and take to the street to protest against the government policy. A good example is a change in the demand and price of crude oil which affected the Nigerian government; and which led the nation into economic recession that affected also, all sector/segments of government. The recession led into several government policies which made several organisations to downsize or reduced work force; with workers protesting the action ____ i.e Global structure affecting the macro structures and leading to reaction at micro structures. We can think of these 3 levels of structures – Global, macro and micro – surrounding and permeating the workplace and influencing behaviour of people in the workplace.

Therefore, we can only gain a full understanding of human experience when we look beyond individual experiences and locate those experiences within the larger economic, political and social context that structures them. In a nut shell, the behaviour of individual in the workplace (owners, managers and workers) cannot fully be understood without reference to the outer organizational context or macrocosm. The workplace is therefore an arena of competing social forces – owners, managers and workers – which mirror and generate paradox, tension, conflict and change. The focus here on the organization as an ‘arena’ provides a theoretical framework for examining the behaviour of managers and other employees in relation to politics, power and ideology..

Although there are many valid ways of studying the behaviour of people in work organisations, but by recognizing the interplay between global, macro and micro social dimensions we are left to acknowledge the dynamic linkages between external economic, political and social forces on the other hand, and internal management processes, power and political activities, and individual and group agency on the other hand.

In conclusion, organizational psychology is a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary study of:

The behaviour of individual and groups

Orgnisational design and technology

Control processes over resources, people and work activities

Management processes, for example the recruitment and training of workers and the rewards they receive

Interactions between the organizational, external and evaluative contexts

The relationship between organizational agency and societal stability or instability at large.These collectively control and shape the behaviour of people in organisations. Below is a simple integrative framework for studying organizational behaviour.

A FRAMEWORK FOR STUDYING ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

From the above explanation of what constitute organizational behaviour, a framework can be formulated to reflect a model like the one below. The model is divided into four components. They are:

Environmental forces as external context inputs

Processes for converting the inputs into outputs in an individual group managerial context

The evaluation of organizational processes as outputs

A feedback loop which links the organizational processes and external environmental forces, with the feedback flowing into the organisation and from the organization into the external environmental context.

  1. The external environmental context (Globalisation): This revolve round how the external work environment affects organizational processes through issues like cultural and social influences, economic activities, government policies, technological change etc. All these issues will affect the activities of workers and in turn their behaviour.Globalisation underscores the need to examine the organization within its totality, the embedded nature of the organizational behaviour and the processes by which those in leadership position in the organization respond to the demand of the external context. For example in Olabisi Onabanjo University, when non release of result of students became an issue, the university began to lose its patronage; and these led to serious reduction in the students’ population. At a point the state government issued a marching order on the matter to the vice chancellor (Prof. Saburi), and in response to this order, a lot of policies were rolled out by the management of the university which affected workers attitudinal disposition to prompt release of students’ results. Although globalization is a contested concept, depending whether it is viewed as primarily an economic, political and social phenomenon. But the fact that work organizations operate in a globally interconnected world has become a cliché. But for the purpose of this course, the main issues are the effect of the globalization on the management of opportunities and constraint, and on the strategic choices facing the organization. In other words, external environmental context here refers to how external environmental factors impacted on work organisations, and how these external factors influence the behaviour of people in the organization.
  1. The organisational context (i.eOrganisational structure): The way work is designed/structured affects the behaviour of individual and groups within the organization. Organizational structure or context describe the regular, patterned nature of work related activities, technology and processes, which is repeated day in day out. There are at least five issues that impact on the active interplay of people within the structure of the formal organization:
  1. Strategy: this refers to what senior managers do to accomplish organizational goal. It can be viewed as a pattern of behaviour over time to achieve performance goal. It involves the transformational processes tailored at attaining the organizational goal; and these may include the standard work activities, the technology used and people employed to meet organizational goal etc.
  2. Organisational Structure: this involves the manner in which an organization divides its work activities and achieves coordination and control of these activities. The structure of formal organization can take many forms for example a mechanistic organizational structure resemble a bureaucracy where communications take the form of orders and decisions issued by top managers to subordinate. In contrast, an organic structure focuses on low specialization where communication is highly decentralized. In a nut shell, the way individual and group interact within the formal organization will be strongly influenced by the way work is designed. The way work is designed affects both the experience and the behaviour of individuals and groups.
  3. Technology:Within the organization, technology affects the behaviour of individuals, groups and operating processes. Researches on the impact of technology suggested a relationship between type of technology and organizational structure, and by extension the behaviour of organizational members.

People are a central feature of organizational behaviour, and a necessary part of any social interaction, whether it is performed in an individual capacity or as a member of a work group, and whether it was prompted by external forces or by organizational expectations and processes of control. People differ on a number of dimensions that are relevant to organizational behaviour. Demographic variations, such as age, education, experience, skills, abilities and learning styles, are just a few of the variables that can affect how individuals and groups behave and relate to each other in the workplace.

  1. The People:The individuals who enter the organization bring with them different attitude and values about work and all these affect their behaviour.
  2. The control processes: These refer to the ability of organizational members to promote their own objective, and to resist other people’s objectives when they do not suit them. Managerial behaviour revolve around the range of managerial policies, procedures, rules and mechanisms concerned with regulating individual and group behaviour. All these control processes affect human behaviour
  1. Evaluative context:The evaluative context addresses questions concerning the activities that take place within an organization, whether they are necessary or not. Questions such as: do certain organizational behaviour actually leads to high performance of workers? Why is control necessary?Etc. information on these variables is needed if we are to evaluate the behaviour of individual and groups in formal organisations. While there is growing evidence that certain organizational behaviours are associated with positive outcomes, the link between organisational behaviour and organizational performance is by no means proven.

WHY STUDY ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR?