Role of General Intelligence in Organizational Behavior - Essay Example

Task: An individual's work achievement can be best predicted by measuring their intelligence. Discuss. Whether it is General Intelligence or modern trends of Emotional Intelligence, performance in the jurisdiction of an organization is the scale to assess the talents and ability of an individual set amongst the group dynamism. We can easily predict an individual achievement by measuring their intelligence primarily assessing their previous profiles. Order#: 199977 Deadline: 2008-01-04 18:30 Style: Harvard Language Style: English UK Pages: 8 Sources: 2 Writer ID: 6746 INTRODUCTION: INDIVISUAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE ORGANISATIONAL GOAL Despite the economic progress brought about in part by Scientific Management, critics were calling attention to the "seamy side of progress," which included severe labor/management conflict, apathy, boredom, and wasted human resources. These concerns lead a number of researchers to examine the discrepancy between how an organization was supposed to work versus how the workers actually behaved. In addition, factors like World War I, developments in psychology (eg. Freud) and later the depression, all brought into question some of the basic assumptions of the Scientific Management School. One of the primary critics of the time, Elton Mayo, claimed that this "alienation" stemmed from the breakdown of the social structures caused by industrialization, the factory system, and its related outcomes like growing urbanization. Organizational Behavior (OB) is the study and application of knowledge about how people, individuals, and groups act in organizations. It does this by taking a system approach. That is, it interprets people-organization relationships in terms of the whole person, whole group, whole organization, and whole social system. Its purpose is to build better relationships by achieving human objectives, organizational objectives, and social objectives. As we can see from the definition above, organizational behavior encompasses a wide range of topics, such as human behavior, change, leadership, teams, etc. Since many of these topics are covered elsewhere in the leadership guide, this paper will focus on a few parts of Organizational Behavior: elements, models, social systems, work life, action learning, and change. The organization's base rests on management's philosophy, values, vision and goals. This in turn drives the organizational culture, which is composed of the formal organization, informal organization, and the social environment. The culture determines the type of leadership, communication, and group dynamics within the organization. The workers perceive this as the quality of work life, which directs their degree of motivation. The outcome is performance, individual satisfaction, and personal growth and development. All these elements combine to build the model or framework that the organization operates from. This involved breaking down each task to its smallest unit and to figure out the one best way to do each job. Then the engineer, after analyzing the job should teach it to the worker and make sure the worker does only those motions essential to the task.. Taylor attempted to make a science for each element of work and restrict behavioral alternatives facing worker. Taylor looked at interaction of human characteristics, social environment, task, and physical environment, capacity, speed, durability, and cost. The overall goal was to remove human variability. INTELLIGENCE COUNT THE CHICKENS BEFORE THEY HETCH Since every success depends on judicious planning with appropriate strategy based on the work force, an organization can considerably rely on the workforce that possess intelligence demonstrated in their earlier records. Intelligence is a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn. In some cases, intelligence may include traits such as creativity, personality, character, knowledge, or wisdom. Despite the variety of concepts of intelligence, the most influential approach to understanding intelligence is based on psychometric testing. Such intelligence quotient (IQ) tests include the Stanford-Binet, Raven's Progressive Matrices, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Wechsler-Bellevue. The traditional view is that these tests measure general intelligence factor. However, psychometricians can also measure a wide range of abilities, which are distinct yet correlated. Many believe that these abilities are hierarchically arranged which is by no means universally accepted. Intelligence, as measured by IQ and other aptitude tests, is widely used in educational, business, and military settings because it is an effective predictor of behavior. Intelligence is significantly correlated with successful training and performance outcomes. According to research by Ree and Earles (1992), General Intelligence is the single best predictor of job performance, with minimal statistical improvements gained by the addition of more specific ability measures. Using data from thousands of cases, they demonstrated that the average magnitude of correlation of g with various criterion measures ranges from r =.33 to .76. In a recent review of the empirical research, David Geary found that General Intelligence is highly correlated with many important social outcomes. Individuals with low IQs are more likely to be divorced, more likely to have a child out of marriage, more likely to be incarcerated, and more likely to need long-term welfare support. Furthermore, he found that high IQs are associated with more years of education, higher status jobs, and higher income. Rendering opportunities to the ones that possess quality of reasoning, ethics and responsibility definitely would yield results in an organization. THE GROWTH OF ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR After the First World War, the focus of organizational studies shifted to analysis of how human factors and psychology affected organizations, a transformation propelled by the identification of the Hawthorne Effect. This Human Relations Movement focused on teams, motivation and the actualization of the goals of individuals within organizations. The Second World War further shifted the field, as the invention of large-scale logistics and operations research led to a renewed interest in rationalist approaches to the study of organizations. Interest grew in theory and methods native to the sciences, including systems theory, the study of organizations with a complexity theory perspective and complexity strategy. In the 1960s and 1970s, the field was strongly influenced by social psychology and the emphasis in academic study was on quantitative research. An explosion of theorizing, much of it at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon, produced Bounded Rationality, Informal Organization, Contingency Theory, Resource Dependence, Institutional Theory and Population Ecology theories, among many others. Starting in the 1980s, cultural explanations of organizations and change became an important part of study. Qualitative methods of study became more acceptable, informed by anthropology, psychology and sociology. A systemic view on organizations is transdisciplinary and integrative. In other words, it transcends the perspectives of individual disciplines, integrating them on the basis of a common "code", or more exactly, on the basis of the formal apparatus provided by systems theory. The systems approach gives primacy to the interrelationships, not to the elements of the system. It is from these dynamic interrelationships that new properties of the system emerge. In recent years, systems thinking have been developed to provide techniques for studying systems in holistic ways to supplement traditional methods. INTELLIGENCE: INDIVISUAL CONTRIBUTION TO GROUP DYNAMISM As society consists of individual members, organization consists of individual resources that contribute in the accomplishment of its aims. They not only work together but they are interdependent with emotional bond of team spirit and responsibilities. The most famous of these studies was the Hawthorne Studies, which showed how work groups provide mutual support, and effective resistance to management schemes to increase output. This study found that workers did not respond to classical motivational approaches as suggested in the Scientific Management and Taylor approaches, but rather workers were also interested in the rewards and punishments of their own work group. These studies, conducted in the 1920's started as a straightforward attempt to determine the relationship between work environment and productivity. The results of the research led researchers to feel that they were dealing with socio-psychological factors that were not explained by classic theory, which stressed the formal organization and formal leadership. The Hawthorne Studies helped us to see that an organization is more than a formal arrangement of functions but is also a social system. In the following chart, we can see a comparison of traditional assumptions vs. a newer "human relations" view. In an educational context, one's intelligence should not be equated with one's academic performance, or with the volume of knowledge, one has acquired through formal education. A person's ability to think critically and analytically about his or her knowledge and experience is more important than command of a large number of facts. Intelligence is not confined to thinking either. Purposeful actions demonstrating appropriate responses to the situation and reasoned application of one's knowledge are evidence of intelligence. It is also important to note that analytic skills only constitute one part of intelligence - mimesis synthesis creative and the ability to find innovative solutions to unfamiliar problems are also important. CONCLUSION: ORGANIZATION AT THE CONFLUENCES OF TRIBUTARIES Every bit of small brooks, streams meet their tributaries, which lead to the confluence of seas and oceans. This confluence can be compared with the organizations and every individual as the unique intelligent flow of anticipating powers. When the managerial power can locate the distinct potential of the organization attributed with goodwill and previous achievement, they can avail more production provided they facilitate adequately to perform towards the common goals. organizational behavior, and organizational theory are related terms for the academic study of organizations, examining them using the methods of economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, communication studies, and psychology. Organizational behavior refers to individual following the traits of group dynamics in an organizational setting. To this distinction, some scholars have added an interest in "meso" -- primarily interested in power, culture, and the networks of individuals and units in organizations -- and "field" level analysis which study how whole populations of organizations interact. Whenever people interact in organizations, many factors come into play. Organizational studies attempt to understand and model these factors. Like all social sciences, an organizational study seeks to control, predict, and explain in order to take action. There is some controversy over the ethics of controlling workers' behavior. Daniel Goleman has developed the concept of Emotional intelligence and claim it is at least as important as more traditional sorts of intelligence. These theories grew from observations of human development and of brain injury victims who demonstrate an acute loss of a particular cognitive function -- e.g. the ability to think numerically, or the ability to understand written language -- without showing any loss in other cognitive areas. IQ proponents have pointed out that IQ's predictive validity has been repeatedly demonstrated, for example in predicting job performance. Once, again to testify the worth of emotional value and the prediction of the outcome we need to trace out the earlier experience of the individual in an organization where the person had remarkably demonstrated emotional intelligence. REFERENCES 1. Knoster, T., Villa, R., & Thousand, J. (2000). A framework for thinking about systems change. In R. Villa & J. Thousand (Eds.), Restructuring for caring and effective education: Piecing the puzzle together (pp. 93-128). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. 2. Professor Edward G. Wertheim, College of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115) 3. Rushton J P(1990). "Creativity, intelligence, and psychoticism". Personality and Individual Differences 11: 1291-1298. 4. Snow, R. E., Kyllonen, P. C., & Marshalek, B. (1984). The topography of ability and learning correlations. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Advances in the Psychology of Human Intelligence, Volume 2, (47-103). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Read More