DEFINITION OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

Actions and attitudes of individuals and groups toward one another and toward the organization as a whole, and its effect on the organization's functioning and performance.

-          Organizational behaviour is the study of the many factors that have an impact on how individuals and groups respond to and act in organizations and how organizations manage their environments.

-          OB provides the knowledge base for understanding behaviour within organisations.

-          A field of study that specifically focuses on the impact that people have on organisational effectiveness and efficiency.

-          Organizational Behaviour is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups and structure have on behaviour within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness.

-          It does this by taking a system approach à it interprets people-organization relationships in terms of the four levels – the whole person, whole group, whole organization, and whole social system

Organizational Behavior is the key aspect to maintain and enhance interaction levels amongst employees in the company. Other attributes like leadership, openness to discuss problems, challenge-initiative are all tied in to this base concept of Organizational Behavior to help the business achieve its strategic and in some cases business objectives. The proper definition of organizational behavior with its understanding and management has resulted in development of few key offshoots to the concept of Organizational Behavior.

What concepts make up the definition of Organization Behavior?

Organization Design - This is the simple framework of creating roles and formal reporting relationships for employees in an organization. An effective organization design is reflected in the joining letter which is handed over to a new employee. The joining letter would talk about his role, his immediate line manager and the processes which he would need to adhere to.

Organization Development - Every organization has a mission statement and the time when the organization formalizes the mission statement it may not have the resources or the expertise to execute the mission effectively. Organization Development involves the combined, planned effort of all the resources of the company to ensure that the company carries its mission forward. As defined by Richard Beckhard, organization development would involve a site-wide, planned effort from all the employees, with the top management intervening in the organization purposes.

Organizational empowerment - This is one of the buzzwords of organizational behavior principles in most of the companies which are evolving today. Organizational empowerment means the level of responsibility that an organization places on its employees at all levels so that decisions can be taken without any manager interference. The key is here though many organizations advocate this approach in text, most of them have a certain element of mentoring and guidance to their employees at all times.

Organizational engineering - This is a typical advancement of Organization development with the only difference that it takes a completely mathematical approach to organization development. The mathematical equations of the company's business model is studied and different people are inserted into the model based on formulas, and better still the outcomes are predicted from the people's roles. This is done to ensure that company's efficiency is increased and it gets more effective with its communication.

It is most important to understand that any definition of organization behavior would be incomplete without studying the change management curve of the employees. If you are a company planning to introduce some OB initiatives, you would need to ensure that the OB initiatives are transitioned out smoothly to the employees. This needs to be done very carefully because this may lead to a lot of disgruntled employees if enough care is not taken to transitioning the processes. If one had to define organizational behavior, it will be a set of principles followed by employees at all levels to ensure that the company meets its strategic objectives.

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