Introduction and Foundations of Organizational Behaviour

It is essential for every manager to have a proper understanding of organization behavior. This unit introduces the basic idea about organization behavior as a subject and traces the development of OB as a discipline. Now, it may be an obvious question that why the understanding of OB is required? Some of the reasons are: To learn about yourself and how to deal with others. Organizations are increasingly expecting individuals to be able to work in teams, at least some of the time. Some of you may want to be managers or entrepreneurs.

In order to be effective, organizations need to develop their interpersonal or people skills. According to Robbins (2003), Organizational behavior (OB) is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within an organization, then applies that knowledge to make organizations work more effectively. Specifically, OB focuses on how to improve productivity, reduce absenteeism and turnover, and increase employee citizenship and job satisfaction. An organization consists of people and so it is also a social system. The field of organizational behavior (OB) draws primarily from the behavioral science disciplines of psychology, social psychology, sociology and cultural anthropology. The areas on which OB focuses are individuals who will often be working within groups, which themselves work within organizations, as well as all the interrelationships between them. OB Involves the study of process-how people in social systems function with each other to get work done.

Some of the specific themes embraced by OB are personality theory, attitudes and values, motivation and learning, interpersonal behavior, group dynamics, leadership and teamwork, organizational structure and design, decision-making, power, conflict, and negotiation.