Understanding Organisational Behavior

1. Organisational Behaviour
SOFT SKILLS WORLD

2. Workshop plan
►Structure of the workshop
►Issues to explore in the workshop
►Historical overview

3. Structure of the workshop
► Day long session
► Duration: 6 to 8 hours
► Any question?

4. SOME RECOMMENDED SOURCES
Organization Studies
Organizational Science
Organization Behaviour
Human Relations
Harvard Business Review
Introduction to Organizational behaviour
Research in Organizational Behavior
Economists, Financial times…

5. Issues to explore in the
workshop
Organizational behaviour (OB)
“the study of human behaviour in organizational
contexts with a focus on individual and group
processes and actions” (pp.2)

6. Issues to explore in the workshop
Hong Kong stock exchange, 1994

7. Issues to explore in the workshop
“An entitative approach [to organisations]
fails to represent what it means to be human,
misrepresents the qualities of the relational
processes and, more
generally, grossly distorts
the relationships between
person and organisation”
(Hoskings and Morley 1991:IX)

8. Issues to explore in the
workshop
“The relationship between a person
and a context involves accommodation
(changing oneself) and assimilation
(changing the context)… people are
both products of their contexts and
participants in the shaping of those
contexts.” (Hoskings and Morley, 1991:5)
Any Question?

9. Historical overview
The notion of an organisation as an imperative,
absolute entity, is the direct outcome of historical
transformations occurred in Europe and North America
from the end of the 18th century onwards:
Before the 19th Century:
► Experience of Artisan work (e.g. Ironsmith)
 Technical skills, personal competence and craft pride
constitutive of the working process.
Industrial revolution in the 19th Century
 Close relationship between the subject of work and his/her
activity was lost

10. Historical overview
Early 20th Century: ‘Classical approach’
Advent of scientific management (F.W. Taylor)
 Aim: controlling labour through science
 Far-reaching process of establishing control and surveillance:
to discipline the mind and body of the productive subject was
the central concern.
 Deconstruction of the task from „within‟
 Rigid control over time and body movements
 Conception and execution as separate domains in hierarchical
relationships
Technology for social control

11. Historical overview

12. Historical overview
Hawthorne Studies and the Human Relations
Movement (Elton Mayo, 1923-1933)
 Hawthorne studies: environment and productivity?
 Results: organizations are social systems, not just technical
economical systems
 Groups, teamwork, different job roles, human relations are of great
significance in organizations
 We are motivated by many needs
 Leadership should be modified to include concepts of human
relations
A new discipline of human behaviour and, by extension,
Organisational behaviour. (1960s)

13. Historical overview
Systems Rationalist approach
Modern Approach
Organisation (open system view)
inputs Transformation process outputs
1. The organization seen as an open socio-technical
system.
2. The existence of subsystems which interact with one
another.
3. Management is a distinct subsystem which is
responsible for direction and coordination of all other
subsystems.

14. Historical overview
Symbolic-Interpretative
perspective
Andreas Gursky’s The factory
► People‟s subjectivity in relation to organisational processes.
► Political and cultural nature of social relations.
► Social construction of organisational reality, co-creation of the
phenomenon you are seeking to study.

15. To explore in the workshop
BY INTRODUCING
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
TO THE UNDERSTANDING
OF PEOPLE AND
ORGANISATIONS, WE HOPE:
TO STIMULATE YOUR SEARCH
FOR NEW KNOWLEDGE,
CREATIVITY AND SKILLS AS
ORGANISATIONAL
PRACTITIONERS