Why is the understanding of behavious of people at work necessary? Discuss the critical behavioural issues the modern managers are facing.
Necessity of understanding behaviours of people of work necessary
Organizational behaviour is directly concerned with the understanding, prediction, and control of human behaviour in an organization. In other words - organizational behaviour is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups and structures have on behaviour within an organization with the purpose of applying such knowledge for improvement of organization's effectiveness.
Understanding organization is important because we spend our lives interacting with them. If the world is a stage, it is a stage filled with organizations. We play our roles/parts on an organizational stage. By acting our parts, we influence organization and organizations also influence us. In this regard, it is extremely important to understand these behavioural aspects of organization. The necessity to understanding OB is explained through the following points.
The study of OB helps us understand ourselves and others in a better way. This helps greatly in improving our inter-personal relations in the organizations. Friendly and cordial relations between employees and management and also among the employees create a congenial work environment in organizations.
The knowledge of OB helps the managers know individual employees better and motivate employees to work for better results. It helps managers apply appropriate motivational techniques in accordance to the nature of individual employees who exhibit glaring differences in many aspects.
One of the basic characteristics of OB is that it is human in nature. So to say, OB tackles human problems humanly. It helps understand the cause of the problem predicts its future course of action and controls its evil consequences. Thus, treating ernployees as human beings enables the managers to maintain cordial industrial relations which in tum, create peace and harmony in the organization.
Another popular reason for studying OB is to learn how to predict human behaviour and then apply it in some useful way to make the organization more effective. Thus, knowledge of OB becomes a pre-requisite to students of BBS who are going to assume a managerial job.
Finally, all organizations are run by humans. Human working in the organization makes all the difference. This is where OB comes into the picture. OB helps managers to efficiently manage human resources in an organization. It enables managers to inspire and motivate employees towards productivity and better results.
Critical behavioural issues faced by Modern Manager
Human beings are a complex phenomenon. Two people act differently in same situation. As behaviour of an individual and group are different, complexities occur. Regulating an organization smoothly hence has become a challenge. In this regard, the critical behavioural issues confronting the managers are explained briefly:
- Responding to globalization: Globalization has turned the world into one small village. Managers of today are required to work with people from different cultures. Globalization requires managers to modify their management practices to suit differences among people from different cultures and countries.
- Work force diversity: Work force diversity refers to different types of work force in organization in terms of gender, race and ethnicity. Due to work force diversity, there is a great challenge for the manager to manage and coordinate them towards the goal of the organization.
- Skill deficiency: Skill deficiency is another critical behavioural issue for the manager. Due to the development of IT sector, companies are installing advance technologies to cope with competition. Company at one hand install the advanced technology, oh the other hand they lack the required skill to operate. The existing human resources do not possess the required skill and can't be replaced. Providing training to the existing staff to eliminate the deficiencies in skill is another critical issue.
- Managing change: Change is an on-going activity for most of the organizations. Change is essential for both employee and managers. Employee needs change to continually update their knowledge and skill to meet new job requirements. Managers need change to sustain and succeed in complex work environment. In this regard, it is important to manage change in organization which is a critical issue to confront.
- Improvising ethical behaviour: Managers of today face a lot of ethical dilemmas. Managers need to create an ethically healthy climate for employee. They should establish codes of conduct and offer training and seminars to improve ethical behaviour.
