Organizational Behaviour Challenges Essay

Organizational Behaviour is academic study of organizations by examining them using the methods of economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology. Being of a multidisciplinary nature, organizational behaviour is all the more complicated to study as well. It is primarily the study of individual and group dynamics in an organizational setting, as well as the nature of the organizations themselves (culture, subcultures, psyche etc. ). Whenever people interact in organizations, many factors come into play. Organizational studies attempt to understand and model these factors and seek to control, predict, and explain them. There is some controversy over the ethical ramifications of focusing on controlling workers’ behaviour. As such, organizational behaviour has at times been accused of being the scientific tool of the powerful. Those accusations notwithstanding, OB can play a major role in organizational development and success. My six month long experience of setting up a design room in Romania was an eye opener into the aspects of organisational behaviour and how important it is for a manager to be able to deal with these aspects in the work arena. The project was fairly new to the manufacturing industry. Look more:Â  starbucks problem essay My job primarily consisted of setting up the design room and training people to run it. There were several problems that I faced and some of them are as follows: Problems at individual level Individuals make up a team. If there are problems among them, the whole team and its dynamics are affected by it. At Romania this was exactly the case which resulted in difficulty in making them work as a team, ask advise from one another, respect each other and in general increase job efficiency in order to meet targets. That is partly because the workforce in Romania is protected so there is not much that can be done by managers. Although the fact has been recognised by surveys etc. , nothing is done in the workplace officially in order to change things. The opposite is true for private companies however where management is very controlling and demanding. The human element I observed in such situations that the contingency approach to organisational behaviour in small teams only makes things difficult. Managers not only in my company but other companies that I had discussions with take it for granted that they will have to treat people in a different way in order to have their work done. Variations were stark due t the personal psyches of each individual in the team. This was however managed by trying to bring them at a standard level of thought and training. The above two problems can also be seen as a result of the fact that Romanians tend to keep their personal lives separate from the workplace (Steven 2003). I believe that managers should use Development Administration and Management techniques (Cooke 2004) to develop the workforce in places like Romania and other third world countries. Lack of responsibility Romanians, being used to the previous communist workplace, did not have to wrry about their work ethics much. They knew that they would have a job whether they did it well or not. This was something that didn’t change throughout the whole time I was there. It is clear that the reason for this failure was due to the fact that the external environment (communist culture) was at work here and an intrinsic part of their life conditioning. This ultimately meant that they did not learn from their mistakes and didn’t now show a commitment to improvement. Secondly I believe that the design room concept being new, it had to be implemented using change management techniques (Hay & Hartel 2003).