What Are the Focus and Goals of Organizational Behavior?

  1. 11-1 Identify the focus and goals of organizational behavior (OB).

The material in this and the next four chapters draws heavily on the field of study that’s known as organizational behavior (OB). It’s concerned with the subject of behavior—that is, the actions of people—and organizational behavior is the study of the actions of people at work.

One of the challenges in understanding organizational behavior is that it addresses issues that aren’t obvious. Like an iceberg, OB has a small visible dimension and a much larger hidden portion. (See Exhibit 11–1.) What we see when we look at an organization is its visible aspects: strategies, objectives, policies and procedures, structure, technology, formal authority relationships, and chain of command. But under the surface are other elements that managers need to understand—elements that also influence how employees behave at work. As we’ll show, OB provides managers with considerable insights into these important, but hidden, aspects of the organization.

Exhibit 11–1

Organization as Iceberg

A diagram presents the visible and hidden aspects of an organization.

What Is the Focus of OB?

Organizational behavior focuses on three major areas:

  1. Individual behavior. Based predominantly on contributions from psychologists, this area includes such topics as attitudes, personality, perception, learning, and motivation.

  2. Group behavior, which includes norms, roles, team building, leadership, and conflict. Our knowledge about groups comes basically from the work of sociologists and social psychologists.

  3. Organizational aspects, including structure, culture, and human resource policies and practices. We’ve addressed organizational aspects in previous chapters. In this chapter, we’ll look at individual behavior, and in the following chapter we’ll look at group behavior.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset