Emerging Disciplines in Analyzing The University Workplace - Research Paper Example

Organizational Behavior: Emerging Disciplines in Analyzing The University Workplace The traditional contributing disciplines of organizational behavior are fairly obvious in what they bring to the table. To understand how an organization works, one needs to understand how people work. Psychology studies the behaviors of individuals and small groups in the modern era. Anthropology studies people in general over time. Both clearly have their role. Sociology and political science, meanwhile, have theoretical and practical lenses in understanding the behavior of institutions and quantifying them. Industrial engineering and economics play to the nitty-gritty, the practical, the numbers, the devils in the details. They help to quantify how organizations work, what transactions are at play, and what hierarchies are formalized and how that operates. Yet there are emerging disciplines that have begun to change the analysis of organizations irrevocably. Women's studies reminds researchers and analysts of the role of kinship, gender and sexual relations in determining how institutions work: They submit that, without understanding gender roles and inequalities, it is impossible to understand everything from the glass ceiling in corporate America to the mommy track to the second shift. Communications as a discipline informs researchers and analysts that the way that organizations communicate internally and externally, with individuals and with organizations, formally and informally, all are vital to determine how the organization behaves and fares in terms of survival and managing change. It is impossible, for example, to understand a media institution without knowing how information is communicated up the ladder to the top then disseminated to other institutions like households and businesses. Information systems try to analyze both the usage of computers within institutions and institutions themselves as computational arrangements. And marketing looks at how institutions market their culture internally and externally. Understanding all these disciplines is essential to understanding the operation of the University of Pittsburgh. Psychology of organizations focus on factors like threat rigidity (Staw et al, 1981). Threat rigidity is the tendency of institutions and people alike to respond to threats or changes by falling back on established habits that worked in the past. The problem is, like the famous Chinese joke of the farmer who saw a rabbit break its neck on a stump and thereafter waited for another rabbit to do so in order to get a meal again, that patterns change and past practice is not always applicable. Sometimes, weathering the storm by sticking to one's guns and using prior effective practices is the right strategy. But other times, rigidity is a problem, and dynamic and creative responses are necessary. Staw et al analyzed, using both sociological and psychological mechanisms, the tendency of institutions to behave like people and freeze up in the face of danger, sticking to the most rigid and subconscious patterns until disaster struck. “The Penn Central Railroad, for example, continued paying dividends until cash f l o w dried up completely ...Chrysler Corporation, when faced with the oil crisis and rising gasoline prices, continued large (but efficient) production runs o n its largest and mo s t fuel-inefficient cars until inventories overflowed” (Staw et al, 1981). Universities like my workplace, the University of Pittsburgh, seem to be particularly vulnerable to this, and the reasons why are helpful to the rigidity hypothesis in general. The university is faced with a major change, say the increasing obsolescence of a particular academic department. It is hard to tell prima facie if this will be a temporary or a permanent phenomenon. Tenure prevents the department from being easily cut or repurposed. In any respect, it makes no sense to remove a vital discipline from the field. Maybe the discipline will be of declining importance, but it surely still needs analysis even if only historically, correct? Or a more personal matter: When a student is sick or struggling with a problem, there is a very inflexible regime to make sure that the system isn't abused. The problem is that when someone is sick, it is very hard to go to the doctor to get a note, so they will only do so if they need treatment. Many students therefore come to school ill because they don't want to make a special doctor's appointment just to prove they are sick! Similarly, one element of political science that has received a lot of attention is the charismatic leader phenomenon. This is also tied in with anthropology, because it is the same organizational and psychological patterns that made Enron's collapse inevitable, causes cult leaders to have the power they do, and gives dictators from Mubarak to Gaddafi the ability that they are currently demonstrating to ignore obvious developments and speak Orwellian nonsense. Conger and Kanungo (1987) draw on social psychology and political science to create an organizational theory of charismatic leadership. These leaders have “by the force of their personal abilities” the capability to have “profound and extraordinary effects on followers” (Conger and Kanungo, 1987, 637). Conger and Kanungo point out that charisma on its own is not enough: It is not just the personal traits of the leader that cause the behavior of charismatically lead institutions. Rather, there are elements of the followers that cause them, through fear (in the case of dictatorships especially), lack of self-esteem (cults), etc. to embrace the leader. It is important to note that ordinary people can famously embrace charismatic leaders: Nazi Germany was not filled with depressed simpletons, yet the charismatic leadership of Hitler was able to align itself to psychological trends like rage and frustration and the social trends of a failing economy to achieve success. In the university, cults of opinion emerge not least through the process of charismatic leadership. Professors are able to get their students to accept ideas that the students would have scoffed at in another context. But it is vital to note that, while certainly a Professor would ideally be charismatic to accomplish this goal, that is far from sufficient and sometimes not even a necessary condition. Some Professors who have created cults of authority and influence were themselves famously uncharismatic or plain: Social critic Noam Chomsky, an immensely important individual in the fields of political science and sociology, himself is a very boring and plain speaker in many ways. Rather, professors in charismatic leadership circles leverage many parts of the institution that they are operating in as well as the psychologies of their students. This includes Students' fear of not adapting to university life, fear of new ideas, seeking out of simple solutions, desire to understand complex situations or make positive changes, etc. The prestige and power afforded the Professor in normative educational institutions and in society Intimidation by the usage of opaque, technical jargon Exclusion and punishment of dissent by fear of bad grades Everyone from Madoff to Ken Lay has found themselves capable of using a combination of past success (or, in the case of our Professor, the success at being a Ph. D, being published, etc.) and opacity (in the case of the Professor, the difficult intellectual content they are teaching) to defer dissent, stop outsiders from peering in too closely, and keeping people engaged. Note that the cult leader can themselves be a victim. Jim Jones was an orthodox Marxist: The man who drank the Kool-Aid was not the same man who founded the Church. A wind tunnel effect wherein cult leaders weed out dissent and thereby create only positive feedback, as Conger and Kanungo (1987) note, can create irrationality very quickly: The leader begins to believe their own hype. Charismatic leadership professors can certainly begin to have this problem. Workplace values and ethics in the university can be distorted as charismatic professors seek to enlarge their influence and prestige. Finally, women's studies certainly has a major impact on the university. Women and men pursue different majors, have different academic behaviors and approaches, are found at different percentages in classes, etc. Duxbury et al (1991) found that “redistribution of roles within the family to match increased role responsibilities outside the home has not yet occurred”; that is, like Hochschild (1991)'s famous “second shift”, women have taken on far more economic tasks yet their monopoly over domestic tasks has not slipped, meaning women are in a double bind of having both economic and social tasks, causing conflict. The same can be true in relationships in universities that move towards cohabitation: Women and men both attend class and have just as hard of educational problems, yet women do more of the cleaning and domestic work (Duxbury et al, 1991). In fact, the university may be the case study for why women's studies is essential to add to organizational behavior. It is impossible to describe the different orientations and trajectories of students in the university without noting the differences in gender power, roles, norms and socialization. Diversity in the work force can't be understood without looking at why women and men choose different paths. And globalization's impact at causing more people to have to work two jobs, as Hochschild (1991) notes, is not completely understood without also understanding distributions of domestic labor. Thus, it is clear that organizational behavior benefits both from its traditional connections to disciplines like sociology and psychology, and from new disciplines, like women's studies. Ironically, though, detailed analysis of the university as a workplace and as a governing unit seems to be yet to be done. It may be time to turn the gaze inwards. References Conger, J.A. And Kanungo, R.N. (1987). Toward A Behavioral Theory of Charismatic Leadership in Organizational Settings. The Academy of Management Review. 12(4): 637- 647. October. Cornell University Law School (2010). Organizational Behavior. Ed. Lamb-Deans, D. Retrieved 2/24/2011 from http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/research/subjectguides/organizationalbehavior.html DiMaggio, P.J. And Powell, W.W. (1983). The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review. 48(2): 1983. Duxbury, L.E., Higgins, C.A. (1991). Gender differences in work-family conflict. Journal of Applied Psychology. Hochschild, A. (1991). The Second Shift. Pfeffer, J. (1983). Barriers to the Advance of Organizational Science: Paradigm Development as Dependent Variable. Academy of Management Review. 18(4): 599-620. Staw, B.M., Sandelands, L.E. And Dutton, J.E. (1981). Threat Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly. 26:501-524. Read More