Organizational Behavior and Its Influence on Company - Research Paper Example

As Organizational Behavior is concerned with the study of what people do in an organization and how their behavior affects the organization’s performance, it includes the core topics of motivation, leader behavior and power, interpersonal communication, group structure and processes, learning, attitude development and perception, change processes, conflict, work design and work stress. With the increasing stress, anxiety insecurity caused by recession; Organizational misbehavior is on the surge in most of the organizations across the globe and is one of the leading points of attention for the most of the shrewd managers in the world. Responding to the globalization, working with people from different cultures, workforce diversity (heterogeneous mix of people in terms of gender, age, race, ethnicity and sexual ethnicity) are some of the reasons for misbehaviors in an organization. So, it is the organization’s responsibility to reduce the level of stress and misbehaviors among its employees. Observers of organizations recognize now that work related misconduct is pervasive, costly and denigrates the repute of the organization. The major reason for the misbehavior includes dissatisfaction, job insecurity, and resistance to change, personal problems etc. The employees mark their misbehavior by frequent and unplanned absenteeism, work place conflicts, lower performance, reduced working hours, job change etc. The paper highlights these major issues which are responsible for misbehavior and the ways with this can be tackled at the organization level so as to create an environment of healthy and positive growth both for the employee as well as the organization. Introduction: Organizational misbehavior can be referred as “Any intentional action taken by members of an organization which defies and violates shared organizational norms and expectations, and/or core mores, societal values, and standard of proper conduct” (Vardi & Weiner, 1996). When this type of behavior exists and eventually prevails in any organizational setup, it would likely grow into a certain stature of normalcy and seep into conventional wisdom. A majority of college and university students discuss that attaining a balance between personal life and work life is a primary career goal. They want “a life” as well as a job. Organizations that do not help their people achieve work-life balance will find it increasingly difficult to manage the misbehavior in the workplace. If an organization has to survive, it must respond to changes in its environment. An organization’s success or failure is essentially due to the things that its employees do or fail to do. So it is the responsibility of the organization to manage the misbehavior prevailing in the organization. Observers of organizations recognize now that work related misconduct is both pervasive and costly. There is ample evidence that members of organizations sabotage processes, steal company property, harass others, cheat the government, or mislead customers. Companies and the public pay dearly. What are the motivational forces that drive organizational members to exhibit such varied forms of misconduct? Are these forces different from those that drive them to engage in constructive behavior? What kinds of personal and organizational factors influence such acts of intentional misbehavior? Vardi & Weiner define Organizational Misbehavior as "any intentional action by members of organizations that violates core organizational and/or societal norms." A crucial element in the definition is the intention underlying the misbehavior. It therefore serves as the basis for the distinction among three types or organizational misbehavior1: (A) Misbehavior that intends to benefit the self (B) Misbehavior that intends to benefit the organization (C) Misbehavior that intends to inflict damage. The various instrumental and normative factors that influence this misbehavior are not only personal; they can also be organizational misbehaviors. On the personal level, we refer to such factors as the stage of moral development and personal need satisfaction as can be seen in Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. At the organization level, the role of such factors can be referred as organization culture and cohesiveness. Misbehavior in organizations can be difficult for management to detect and correct, and as a consequence, the cost to organizations can be high. Describe, explain, predict and control both attitudinal and behavioral problems in an organizational setting. The book analyses the current research, examines the causes of different types of misbehavior, and makes suggestions for remedies and managerial practices that can help to reduce its occurrence and impact. Outsourcing, attracting and retaining talent, work-life balancing, creating ethical climate, corporate reorganization, globalization, changed employee expectations, changing demography are the major challenges an organization is facing today. Following are the major challenges in an organization (Aswathappa, 2006): Outsourcing HR activities- Increasingly many large firms are getting BPO and Call Centers To balance work-life To make HR activities ethical To manage diversity Attitude towards unions Globalization Organizational restructuring Changing demographics of work-force Changed employee expectations There are varied reasons for misbehavior. Frequently, organizational Misbehavior may be due to one or more the following reasons: A) Dissatisfaction- Dissatisfaction is one of the prime reasons for Organizational Misbehavior. There may be varied reasons for dissatisfaction as well. Some of the common reasons for dissatisfaction are:- (i) Dissatisfaction with manager: - It is said by wise people that people do not leave organization, they leave their manager. More often than not, people are who are not satisfied with the leadership approach of the manager, resort to expressing their grudges to the higher management via misbehavior. (ii) Dissatisfaction with the Pay package: - Salary is one of the factors that is associated with dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction. A lower salary is more likely to generate dissatisfaction amongst employees than a higher salary generating satisfaction. (iii) Dissatisfaction with organizational work culture: - Generally, because of the resentments with the work culture of an organization, employees mark their dissatisfaction by misbehavior. (iv) Dissatisfied with rewards: - Not getting a reward or recognition may be a reason of dissatisfaction amongst a few employees in the organization. The reward here may be a monetary reward or even be a promotion or any other recognition award. Apart from this, rewards for a particular employee may also be a reason for dissatisfaction amongst his/her coworkers, who may have an increased feeling of dissatisfaction about the suitability of the chosen employee for the reward, as compared to his peers. B) Job insecurity- Job Insecurity is another reason for misbehavior. Employees if do not have a faith on the security of their future prospects with the organization, tend to misbehave. The misbehavior here is generally represented by the employees by job hopping or by absenteeism. C) Family/Personal problems- Family problems hassles and burdens also irritate a person leading to misbehavior in an organization. Fights with spouse, stress, and burden must be cured in order to reduce the burden. The health of the parents, education of children, loans, work pressures lead to tension in an employee’s life. D) Resistance to change- One of the most well documented findings from studies of individual and organizational behavior is that organization and their members resist change. In a sense, it is positive. It provides a degree of stability and predictability to behavior. If there were not some resistance, organizational behavior would take on the characteristics of chaotic randomness. Resistance to change can also be a source of functional conflict or a productive conflict. (Robbins and Judge, 2007) For example, a resistance to a change in a product line can stimulate a healthy debate over the merits of the idea and result in a better decision. Bu there is a definite downside to resistance to change. It hinders adaptation progress. Following are the forces for change: 1. Nature of the work force – The nature of the work force is getting more and more diverse due to the globalization. We can find increased mixture of gender, age group, races and nationality. Also many new entrants with inadequate skills are also being hired ion order to cut the cost. 2. Technology – Faster, cheaper and more mobile computers have forced the employee in an organization to change himself. He has to adopt to this new era of technology in order to be competitive in this cut throat competitive world. 3. Economic shocks – The rise and fall of dot-com stocks, the recession period of 2008-09, the stock market collapses and cost cutting of various organizations through the termination of various existing employees is an economic shock. 4. Competition – The increasing no of global competitors have led to increase in the competition. Mergers, acquisitions and consolidations also, the growth of commerce have increased the competition and thereby compelled the employee to change. 5. Social trends – Internet chat rooms, social networking sites, rise in discount and “big box” retailers are also forcing to adapt to the change. 6. World politics – The Iraq-US war, opening of markets in China, war on terrorism on 9/11/01 have also changed the economic growth throughout. If an organization is to survive, it must respond to changes in its environment. An organization’s success or failure is essentially due to the things that its employees do or fail to do. Change agents are responsible for managing the change activities. These change agents can be managers or non-managers, current employees of the organization, newly hired employees, outside consultants. By following ways employee shows the misbehavior: 1. Absenteeism: - Absenteeism is one of the manners by which employees show their discontent with the organization. Generally in their misbehavior, they take unplanned and sudden leaves without the approval of their managers and the work at organization is left to suffer. 2. Conflicting with colleagues or higher authority: This is one of the most common ways by which the employees mark their dissatisfaction. Generally they present conflicting ideas with their managers in the group meetings or other platforms so as to showcase the poor performance or in capabilities of higher authorities in front of other employees. Apart from this, some of the times they also indulge in verbal conflicts with their colleagues to showcase their dissatisfaction. 3. Teasing female co-workers/ sexual harassment - Sexual harassment is wrong. Not only are there legal dangers to sexual harassment, it obviously can have a negative impact on the work environment too. Research shows that sexual harassment negatively affects job attitudes and leads those who feel harassed to withdraw form that organization. 4. Lower performance: Lower performance is one of the ways by which the employee tries to present his dissatisfaction and an increased way of misbehavior. Generally the psychology behind lower performance of employees is to make the higher management realize their worth in the organization, in case there are grudges with respect to the recognition or pay package. The misbehaving employee then starts to deliver an output with a much lesser efficiency as compared to his normal output. 5. Job hopping: - Job hopping is also one of the most common ways of misbehavior from the employees’ side. Generally the employees have the feeling that no one in the organization can resolve their dissatisfaction so they feel that the best possible action is trying their hands with some other organization. Its in a managers best interest to keep stress levels in the workplace to a minimum so as to decrease the misbehavior. Managers must act as positive role models, especially in times of high stress. Following are the ways to manage the misbehavior: 1. Communication through counseling- Counseling could play an important role while managing any type of misbehavior in an organization. The counselor has to communicate with the particular employee who is misbehaving. Communication serves four major functions within a group or organization: control, motivation, emotional expression and information. Communication provides a release for the emotional expression of feelings and for fulfillments of social needs; which otherwise can lead to a misbehavior. 2. Motivation – It is a process that accounts for an individual’s intensity, direction and persistence of effort towards attaining a goal. Intensity is concerned with how hard a person tries. However, high intensity is unlikely to lead to favorable job performance outcomes unless the effort is channeled in the direction that benefits the organization. Finally persistence is a measure of how long a person can maintain effort. Motivated individuals stay with a task long enough to achieve their goal. Below is the Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs model: The fact that employees have a basic human need and a right to attain self-actualization, just as much as the corporate directors and owners want to attain, was known by Maslow and so he built the model. Increasingly, the successful organizations and employers will be those who genuinely care about, understand, encourage and enable their peoples personal growth towards self-actualization - way beyond traditional work-related training and development and thus decreasing the misbehaviors. 3. Reward- Rewards and awards should be provided by the managers in order to reduce the misbehavior. If the employee is misbehaving then he is doing so because he is not happy. The rewards can be monetary or non- monetary. 4. Recognition- Every employee wants to get recognition so good work performance should be praised verbally and institutionally. There must be a proper career planning in order to fell secured. An “entrepreneurial” work climate must be promoted by the manager to give the employees more control over their daily work. 5. Going out for picnics, Parties and celebrations with family- Managers should promote the celebrations and there must be get-togethers, picnics and parties organized time to time in order to reduce the stress, thereby reducing the misbehavior in the organization. 6. Exercises (Physical and mental) - Aerobic exercise and other physical exercises could be an effective anti-anxiety treatment lifting mood, increasing energy, sharpening focus and relaxing mind and body. Also mental exercises like playing Chess or Sudoku could be a stress reliever. Conclusion: Misbehavior is not something very new to the organizations. However, OMB becomes an issue if the organization sits idle and does not take any action to rectify the misunderstandings between their employees. It is the responsibility of an organization to take corrective steps by introduction of suitable policies to chuck any such instance of misbehavior. Organizational misbehaviors exist even in the world class companies and organizations which are recognized for their professional excellence. Recently there have been discussions about understandings whether the phenomenon of organizational misbehavior is normal or not. A closer look of the terms ‘normal’ and ‘misbehavior’ will lead us to think on two things. First that nothing in the world is perfect and it is perfectly normal for individuals to commit mistakes, willingly or unwillingly. The responsible people can always draft rules and regulations to counter only a certain number of misconducts. Organizations will always have to innovate and in some cases even deviate from these rules to attain their objectives. In such cases, there is nothing like a perfect law governing the misconduct and there is no such thing as a perfect business strategy. In normal circumstances as well, mistakes are inherent part of the learning curve of an individual. As the cycle continues to this day, organizational misbehavior has already come to a point where people have started considering it to be an inherent part of their everyday life. The one thing that people consider as an issue in organization misbehavior is the level or degree to which it affects the society. Second, in order to survive in this competitive market, some organizations have to take a few risks, which may put them in the burner for good or even may elevate their standing within the business community. The risks are normally taken in their business strategies, objectives, structure, culture etc. They can choose to follow the business rules by the book and even then sometimes they end up earning nothing or they may deviate from certain set rules and norms but still reap huge profits. Again, it is quite normal for organizations to take risks and reap the higher returns. Even very knowledgeable people in the top rung of an organization may commit blunders at times. It is the structure of the organization and the internal policies that limits or expands the scope of the effect of these decisions. As a result of the leading cases of organizational misbehavior, it has now become an implications for the mangers as well the HR workforce to resolve this issue successfully and effectively. Organizational misbehavior not only does a huge amount of revenue loss for the organization but it also denigrates the repute of the organization. Therefore the need of the hour is to manage the cost as far as possible still maintaining the image of the organization by promoting healthy work culture in the organization and reducing the cases of such misbehavior as far as possible. References: Aswathappa, K. (2006) Human resource and personnel management. 4th ed. New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill. Biron, Michal. Negative Reciprocity and the Association between Perceptions of Organizational Ethics and Organizational Misbehavior. Tilburg University. Available from: [Accessed 13 April 2009]. Chapman, Alan. maslows hierarchy of needs. Businessballs.com. Available from: [Accessed 19 April 2009]. McNary, Lisa D. (2004) Organizational Misbehaviour. Entrepreneur.com. Available from [Accessed 13 April 2009]. Robbins, Stephen and Timothy Judge. (2007) Organizational Behavior. New Jersey: Pearson Education. Segal, Jeanne. (2008) Stress at Work. Helpguide.org Available from: [Accessed 15 April 2009]. Vardi, Yoav and Yoash Wiener. (1996) Misbehavior in Organizations: A Motivational Framework. Organization Science. Available from: [Accessed 13 April 2009]. Read More