Lecture 2
THE ORIGINS OF
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Class Overview
• Lecture on development of OB over the last
100 years
• Critical incident “you just can’t get good
help anymore” (pages 21-22)
Emergence of OB - Historical
View
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1900’s Scientific Management
1930’s Human Relations Approach
1950 ‘s Contingency Approach
1980’s Culture/Quality Movement
1990’s Knowledge & Learning
1900’s Scientific Management
• Developed by Frederick Taylor
• Careful analysis of tasks and time-andmotion studies
• “One best way” to perform task
• Identification of the ‘best man for the
job’
• Piece-rate pay schemes to improve
productivity
Criticisms of Scientific
Management
• Takes a highly mechanistic view of people
and motivation
• Very time consuming to develop work
rate standards
• Workers resist having their effort and
productivity measured
• Workers often oppose attempts to change
work standards & pay
1930’s Human Relations
Approach
• Emphasized importance of social
relations, motivation and attitudes in
explaining worker behavior
• Roots in Mayo’s Hawthorne Studies
Hawthorne Experiments: The
Relay Assembly Room Study
• Objective: to determine what effect
changes in work setting would have on
women’s productivity
• changes included: rest periods, free
lunch, shortened work day, five day work
week, variations in pay method
• All changes followed an upward trend in
productivity over the course of the study.
Hawthorne Effect
• General principle: people act differently
when being studied than they do in
normal situations.
– Does this sound familiar?
• A second interpretation:
– People appreciate management taking an
interest in their well-being and work harder
in return (a social exchange interpretation)
Bank Wiring Room Study
• Involved observation of groups of men
doing their jobs
• Observed social pressure to conform to
group norms concerning work output
• Deviants from group norms were chastised
by ‘binging’ and ridicule
• Implications: group dynamics are an
important determinant upon performance in
some tasks
Conclusions
• Individuals can be motivated by more
than money: e.g. working conditions,
social rewards, informal recognition
• Results of research have to be critically
examined (Hawthorne effect)
• There are important group influences
upon individual behavior at work (Bank
Wiring Room)
Contingency Approach
• What are the ‘boundary conditions’ for a
given principle to hold
– e.g. when does job redesign increase
satisfaction?
• Acknowledges the difficulty of offering
simple general principles to explain or
predict behavior
• Recognizes interdependency of
motivations, abilities, and situations
Illustration of a Contingency
Job
Satisfaction
Job
Enrichment
Job
Performance
Skills;
Personality
Culture/Quality Movement
• Interest in corporate culture and quality
improvement
• Emphasizes the place that key values
have in work settings
• Does not integrate findings from previous
eras, it replaces them
• Bottom line outcomes are emphasized:
productivity and financial returns
1990’s and beyond: Knowledge
& Learning
• Focus is upon knowledge and human
capital
• How is it accumulated, assimilated and
employed?
• How can organizations ‘learn’?
• What is the impact of learning upon
organizational survival and success?
Review
• Modern OB has developed from many
threads
• Beginnings are in the late 19th century
• Most of what we discuss in this class is
the result of much scientific research in
the ‘contingency approach’
• The future of OB is in knowledge and
organizational learning