Organizational Behavior

What organizational behavior is

Organizational behavior (السلوك التنظيمي) is a field of knowledge that studies how individuals and groups act inside organisations, and how the structure and processes of an organisation shape that conduct, in order to explain it, anticipate it and improve the decisions built on it. It does not describe a job in an organisation or a particular department. It is a way of looking at work, and its question is why people act as they do, not what they are asked to do.

An HR officer or a manager who hears that “the problem is behaviour” needs to know where to begin the examination, and for that purpose it is useful to know what the term means, how it is divided and where its limits lie.

The levels at which organizational behavior is studied

Those who work in the field divide its subject into levels, each with its own questions:

• The individual level. What moves an employee, how the employee perceives the work and colleagues, what the employee’s attitudes are, and how the employee learns and decides. Motivation, bias in judgement and differences between people belong here, among them the hierarchy of needs and implicit bias.
• The group level. How a team works together, what the roles are, and how a group decision is made and disagreement handled. Examples are the Abilene paradox in group decision making and the GRPI model for diagnosing what obstructs a team.
• The organisation level. How structure, culture and power affect what everyone does. Organizational culture, formalization and organizational politics belong here, and the written structure has a counterpart in informal communication, which is news passing between employees outside the approved channels.

The levels do not work in isolation. An employee who looks weakly motivated may sit in a team whose roles have not been made clear, and a team of that kind may work inside a structure that rewards what opposes the goal. A good explanation therefore starts with the question of which level the cause lies at, and it may lie at more than one.

An example of how organizational behavior explains a decline in a sales team

Suppose a sales team of eight has missed its target for three months in a row. The familiar explanation is that “the team is weak”. The organizational behavior view opens possibilities that are each examined against its own evidence:

• The individual. Does each seller know what the seller is measured on? Is performance uneven between individuals, or has everyone declined together? A decline across the whole team points to another level.
• The group. Are the roles clear between the person who opens the customer and the person who closes the deal? Is a disagreement about how to deal with customers being kept quiet?
• The organisation. Do the incentives reward what serves the goal? If commission is calculated on the number of deals and not their value, sellers may move towards whatever raises the number and weakens the goal.

The field does not say which of these possibilities is correct in this case. It supplies the questions with which they are examined, and the answer for one team at one time comes from knowing that team. If, say, the decline across the whole team began in the month in which the way of calculating commission changed, the question moves from the individuals to the organisation, and the examination becomes one of the effect of the new rule on what sellers do, not of the competence of each.

How behaviour, attitude and performance differ

Talk about employees can run together concepts that the field separates. Behaviour is what a person does and what can be observed, such as arriving late for an appointment or helping a colleague. Attitude is the opinion or feeling a person holds towards something, such as satisfaction with the work or wariness of the manager, and it is not observed directly but inferred. Performance is what the person’s work achieves measured against a standard. A negative attitude can coexist with good performance, and good behaviour can come from a lukewarm attitude, so none of the three is inferred from another without evidence.

Why people explain the behaviour of others by their character

One of the tendencies the field studies is that people explain the behaviour of others by the person’s character, and their own behaviour by the situation they are in. A manager sees an employee late with a report and says “not committed”, yet if the manager were late the explanation would be that requests had piled up. The literature calls this tendency the fundamental attribution error. A diagnosis can begin at the first level, the individual, and end by directing blame at the individual before anyone has asked about the situation.

The practical remedy is to ask about the situation in which a person works before judging the person: is the goal clear, are the tools available, and is what is rewarded what is asked for? The sequence resembles the GRPI model for examining teams, which takes goals first, then roles, then procedures and then relationships, so relationships are not examined before goals, roles and procedures have been checked.

Where organizational behavior came from

The origins of the field are traced to the early interest in the human side of work, including the series of experiments conducted at the Hawthorne plant. How the term Hawthorne effect is used and how its results are disputed are explained under Hawthorne effect. The field draws its material from other sciences, among them psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science, so its research methods vary between observation, questionnaires and controlled experiments, and the strength of a conclusion differs from one method to another.

How organizational behavior differs from neighbouring fields

• The HR function. HR is a function in the organisation that sets policies and carries them out. Organizational behavior is knowledge used to understand the effect of those policies, and it obliges nobody to take any step.
• Planned organisational change. Organization development is a planned and continuing effort to raise the effectiveness of the organisation. Organizational behavior supplies that effort with explanation, and it neither plans nor carries it out.
• Organizational culture. Culture is one of the subjects of organizational behavior, at the third level, and the field is wider than culture.
• The psychology of the individual. The field places the individual in the situation and explains behaviour by the characteristics of the person and of the situation together, not by the person alone.

What organizational behavior offers an HR officer

• In design. It supplies questions to ask before a policy is set, among them what behaviour the policy will in fact reward and whether that matches what the organisation wants. A policy is judged by what people do after it, not by what was written in it.
• In diagnosis. It supplies an order of examination from the individual to the group to the organisation, so a manager does not jump to the first explanation.
• In change. It points out that a new decision alters what is rewarded and what is feared, so behaviour changes for that reason and not because people were persuaded. That is the human side of the transition that change management addresses.

All of this consists of questions and frameworks, not ready answers.

How organizational behavior shows up in HR work

HR tools can listen for the reason behind behaviour and not only count it. An exit interview is held with someone who leaves and a stay interview with someone who remains, and what each says is examined to find the level at which the cause lies. If the same reason is repeated by different people, it may lie above the individual, and if it differs from one department to another, it may lie with the group.

Mistakes in using organizational behavior

• Reducing behaviour to personality. Personality type tools are used in training and team building, and one of them is the Myers Briggs type indicator. Organizational behavior combines the person and the situation, so a personality type is not sufficient in it.
• Thinking culture changes by announcing values. Changing it does not begin with announcing new values. It begins with changing what is rewarded and what is held to account. That shows that the third level is visible in decisions, not in wall posters.
• Judging every activity outside the formal channels as harm. Organizational politics and informal communication exist in every organisation, and each is judged by what follows from it and not merely by its departure from the formal chain.

How to use organizational behavior without turning the field into prejudgement

The hardest part of using the field is that the results it offers are probabilistic. It says what is likely to happen in certain conditions, and it does not say what will happen to a particular person. Three rules follow for someone using it in HR:

• Start from observation, not from a label. Describe first what is seen at work and then ask which explanation fits it, so the explanation is not decided before anything has been seen.
• Separate description from judgement. To say that a team “keeps quiet about disagreement” is a description, and to say that its members are “negative” is a judgement that rests on no observation.
• Test before generalising. What held in one team may not hold in another, even where the resemblance looks close.

Whether research results in organizational behavior apply to every workplace

One study differs from another according to its setting, its sample and its way of measuring: whether it was drawn from employees of large organisations or small ones, from one sector or more than one, and whether it measured behaviour by observation or by an employee’s answers to a questionnaire. Someone who wants to base a decision on a research result asks about those things first, then compares the setting of the study with the setting of the organisation, and tries what the result suggests on one team before generalising it.

In the sources we reviewed, we found no published Saudi study on which to base a ruling in this field.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.