Understanding Human Behaviour in Organizations - Essay Example

What do you consider to be the main contributions of the Human Relations School to our understanding of human behaviour in organizations? The Illumination Studies occurring between 1924 and 1927 at Hawthorne was the first genuine movement that steered away from Taylorism (Scientific Management) in which it was believed that the organisation, job design and labourers could be statistically ordered to improve efficiency and productivity. These studies recognised that it was not only the tangible factors of the organisation (e.g. lighting) that contributed to worker motivation and commitment. Though Taylor recognised that there was disparity between talented and untalented, or unmotivated workers and finding proper job alignment to exploit their human capital, by the 1920s and 1930s it was becoming clear to management theorists and practitioners that more emphasis would need to be placed on aligning human needs with job design in order to gain commitment and motivation. The early 20th Century was a period in which organisations were both mechanistic and highly centralized where employees were considered to be much like machines, which through time and motion studies, could be better organised and controlled to improve their work efficiency. The Human Relations School began to evolve and change its research methodologies to focus on more inherent characteristics of workers, including external influences such as home life, to improve not only inter-professional relationships between managers and workers, but to understand how to model the organisation to improve worker productivity and efficiency incentives. The Relay Assembly Test occurring between 1927 and 1929 is a prime example of this change in thought about workers being mechanistic and capable of being statistically measured for performance. Even when worker conditions were improved or made worse, productivity increased in the experiment. Again, this refuted the Taylorism view of scientific management when the Relay Assembly Test researchers realised that productivity was actually a product of the experiment itself, making the test group appear special which gave them more incentive to be efficient workers. The aforementioned research studies, which clearly indicated a linkage between relationship development and the dynamics of work groups (organisational culture) were significant catalysts for improved performance or depleted efficiency. These and other studies opened the doors for examining leadership philosophies instead of the rigorous control management ideology that existed prior to the consistent conclusions learned from the aforesaid studies. When managers in the organisation showed a marked interest in listening to worker concerns and needs, employees maintained a more positive sentiment about the organisation which was an influence in their future productivity. The Human Relations School also identified the phenomenon of groups in the organisation, recognising that culture and in-group status (cliques) influenced the level to which productivity increased or decreased and how workers interacted and complied with managerial direction. It was the first time that researchers and business practitioners realised that social systems drove performance in the organisation, which changed direction of management and leadership ideology to better focus on the dynamics of the inter-professional relationships within an organisational context. The Human Relations School radically changed pre-existing sentiment about mechanistic and science-oriented management and built the foundations for contemporary human resources philosophy. (2) Is the way a job is designed important for employee motivation? According to theory, it is absolutely important for ensuring proper employee motivation and building incentives for productivity. According to Herzberg, a later organisational theorist, workers are more motivated when they are given challenging job duties rather than assigning them repetitive and mundane tasks. Herzberg laid the foundation for today’s view of job design in areas of cross-competency training in which individuals are given opportunities to work in other areas of the business, thus improving their skills competency and knowledge, which builds a sense of value and belongingness that is critical to gaining productive work outputs. It was during this period where Abraham Maslow theorised a set of universal human needs, two of which include a need for social belonging and self-esteem, both of which can be accomplished with job design when facilitating peer/management interactions and providing employees with opportunities to expand their role within the organisational structure. It was through job design that theorists began to realise that workers could be motivated effectively by altering the dynamics of the job responsibilities (e.g. making them more complex and challenging as well as diverse). It was in the mid 20th Century that organisational leaders began to understand that job rotation and job enlargement could be significant motivational factors. For instance, Walker and Guest’s 1952 study involving repetitive work on an assembly line found that this redundancy in job design was the leading cause of unsatisfied and unmotivated workers. Herzberg in 1959 was able to further support the findings of the 1952 study in which Herzberg provided evidence that job enrichment, essentially promoting a new type of horizontal empowerment in the workplace, created more productive outputs and better sentiment about the organisation from the workers. A new type of organisational ideology was developed through the pioneering work of Herzberg and Walker and Guest (as well as many other mid 20th Century theorists) that began to examine task significance, task identity and feedback for job performance as being critical psychological constructs that would either enhance or deplete productive performance. Research during this period recognised that the perceived meaningfulness of work and the level of responsibility granted to employees in their job roles were powerful motivators. Job design theory not only changed how organisational managers look at how to develop challenging and meaningful job roles, but supported earlier work of those in the Human Relations School that the psycho-social aspects of the job environment were predictors of performance and maintaining a positive attitude about work. It was through job enrichment, task autonomy and building task significance that organisations discovered they could reduce turnover, absenteeism, and even lack of job performance. Today, job design is closely correlated with the mission and vision of the organisation that provides task significance (e.g. illustrating a job role’s importance in corporate social responsibility) that gives employees not only a sense of belonging and value, but provides employees with a sense of importance in their tasks that changes enthusiasm for their role as contributors to meeting mission goals. (3) To what extent has the socio-technical-systems approach influenced our thinking on the design and organization of the modern workplace. This domain of thought teaches that there is a strong correlative inter-dependence between social systems in the organisation and technical structures (e.g. technology and tangible characteristics of job design and processes). There was a great deal of British influence in changing thinking about the organisation from a scientific/quantitative view of a mechanistic organisation to that which must recognise the importance of aligning social systems and social ideologies with the tangible structure and processes of the organisation to gain productive outputs. The socio-technical viewpoint asserted that autonomous work groups would eventually, in absence of a leader, build its own leadership, structure and social norms that would drive social cohesion and team performance outcomes. This changed the sentiment about the nature of management (which post-WWII was moving more toward a leadership-centric model) that began breaking down the control mechanisms that once drove performance during the Industrial Revolution. Coch and French (1948) is a prime example that measured worker participation within a social and group context to determine what was causing change resistance with garment workers, despite the implementation of many different incentive schemes. The findings of this particular study identified that the extent to which workers were engaged in group function dictated the level of performance achieved by members of the social group. The volume of autonomy provided in the group and perceived responsibility determined the overall effectiveness of worker productivity. This not only changed how business management looked at collectivist influence within a peer reference group dynamic to gain better labourer performance, but justified earlier work from Herzberg in the 1950s that strongly asserted that social interaction and the quality of engagement with teams and groups would dictate motivation and willingness to comply with change and job role expectations. In contemporary organisational theory, the socio-technical viewpoint set the groundwork for structuring the business to be more team-centric and developing human resources policies that facilitate inter-group relationship management. Alfred Marrow was one instrumental figure in the social-technical movement who believed that making consistent changes to social groupings would reduce long-term productivity. Again, this laid the foundation for understanding organisational culture and the impact of shared values, shared beliefs, and other important social norms associated with inter-professional socialisation and their relationship to attitude, motivation and overall job performance. Processes, therefore, such as operational strategy, is then able to be aligned in a way that promotes facilitation of inter-group membership under a team-centric model that would ultimately lead to better effective work outcomes. The aforementioned recurring changes to social groupings, despite any statistically-supported or scientific-centred changes to processes and systems, continued to change the social norm within the group that often conflicted with inherent values and attitudes of those forced to work in changing groups. Research on socio-technical system theory indicated that resistance to change, therefore providing the business with more efficiency, was directly related to the level to which employees were able to productively socialise. This philosophy essentially served as the contemporary model by which human resources and operational strategy are now aligned with emphasis on organisational vision and creating a harmonious and cohesive organisational culture to ensure values are shared throughout the business. (4) “In the end the various theories of organization boil down to two underlying perspectives on structure - mechanistic and organic”. Discuss. This statement has much truth to it. The mechanistic structure is one that is highly centralized, in which decision-making is determined vertically at the highest tiers of authority. The mechanistic structure assumes that operations and externalities are static, in which the organisational structure is able to operate in a scientific fashion where labourers are considered mechanical and where processes and production output can be standardised to achieve efficiency and recurring productivity that can be charted and predicted quantitatively. Channels of communication in this type of organisation are vertical and rules are usually established that emphasise a need for compliance and loyalty in order to achieve productivity. The organic structure is the opposite of the mechanistic structure, in which there is a flatter hierarchy of control and decision-making is decentralised due to the need for internal adaptability in processes, structure and operations. The organic organisation understands the need for contributory engagement with tacit knowledge holders that are able to assist in knowledge management that goes far beyond simply a technical definition found in the mechanistic organisation and, instead, recognises a need for social interaction and horizontal decision-making. An organic structure generally operates best in an environment where change is constant, the external market is dynamic and competitive, and the business maintains multiple, non-homogenous systems that require specialised expertise in a variety of diverse job roles (e.g. engineering, marketing and research and development). These are the two most effective organisational structures in industries where there are heterogeneous internal and market-based considerations (the organic structure) and where conditions are stagnant and predictable in which systems can operate effectively without consistent changes to processes, systems and job roles (mechanistic). One can consider an oligopolistic industry, one that is dominated by only a few suppliers, where competitive rivalry is a major influence in gaining market share and building sales revenues. This environment requires an organic structure, especially when marketing promotions must be aligned with new product development and engineering as a means of being a first-to-market leader with a new innovation launch. A mechanistic structure in this industry would be impossible, as inter-professional interaction, prototype testing, and recurring production line changes are necessary to properly position the organisation against competition. Thus, certain industries provide the opportunities to select either a mechanistic or organic organisational structure to improve competitive advantage, build human capital and knowledge management, or align processes to changing or stagnant market conditions. In contemporary business, organisations can only select one or the other if they want to be relevant and competitive in whatever industry the business operates within. The industry will either have well-defined and foreseeable business conditions within a long-term context, thus only the mechanistic structure or the organic structure are viable structural options and there does not appear to be any other relevant structure available to business managers to meet productivity and competitive, strategic expectations. 4. To what extent has the Human Relations School influenced the management of modern work organizations? One must first recognise that the role of manager is to plan, lead, control and evaluate as part of managerial function, according to modern organisational theory. The element of leadership in this model was influenced by the Human Relations School and the pioneering work of early 20th Century theorists and business practitioners in which many experiments and studies were conducted on how to improve motivation and productivity/performance. The Taylorist view of economic man was losing its relevance, especially in industries that discovered they could no longer standardise such factors as production in order to respond to changing market conditions that were being driven by competitive factors and industrial growth. McGregor was an instrumental figure in creating a theory of motivation, known as Theory Y, which suggested there should be more managerial emphasis on the leadership function, such as using what is known today as transformational leadership in which people are inspired, valued, and actively involved in decision-making with more emphasis on autonomous function and social belonging. The Human Relations School became the underpinning change to how people are considered as human capital resources within the business, aligning their talents and competencies with processes in a way that builds effective inter-dependence so that managers can facilitate effective interpersonal relationships and take into consideration the psycho-social needs of workers to gain their loyalty and commitment. Herzberg was also instrumental in assisting with contemporary management ideologies, recognising intrinsic factors that must be recognised along with scientific management approaches in a way that is competent and aligned with human behavioural responses to organisational conditions and processes. Herzberg recognised that achievement, recognition, opportunities for promotional advancement, and personal growth within an organisational context were important motivators for labourers. However, concurrently, Herzberg realised that it would be necessary for managers (in a leading context) to assist in servicing these inherent needs by creating more effective relationships between management and labourers, creating salary incentives, and creating quality work conditions in order to appeal to these psychological needs. Employees, thanks to the work of researchers in the Human Relations School, could no longer be controlled under a Theory X management style of concentrated controls if the organisation wanted to remain competitive and profitable. This has created the foundations of the modern transactional leadership, a management-by-objectives ideology, where clear goals are iterated to labourers and promises of reward receipt for meeting these expectations. This work from early to mid-20th Century human relations theorists and researchers also assisted in overlapping the traditional line management role with a contemporary spin on human resources that made management a more multi-faceted role that was concerned with much more than simply statistical process management and forecasting. The Human Relations School provided an empirical basis for changing managerial duties and responsibilities that took into consideration social systems, creating an incentivised and interesting job design, and learning to foster inter-professional trust between subordinate and manager. 2. Critically analyse the implications of some well known motivation theories for the ways in which jobs can/should be redesigned. Frederick Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory is one excellent example of how to motivate workers through job design. Employees that were respondents in Herzberg’s study were asked to indicate the factors associated with their jobs that either inspired or de-motivated performance. It was discovered that the level of challenge of the job, its ability to provide ample recognition for performance, and the level of responsibility the job provided were predictors of motivation. Though these are intrinsic factors associated with psychological stance and personality, management must be actively involved in establishing the appropriate job design that can foster all of these inherent needs. This would include job enrichment, which provides employees with ample opportunities to utilise their multi-dimensional expertises and competencies in a singular job role. Management should be instrumental, under this theory, in establishing a job design that varies the range of available tasks, both mental and physical, to create the perception that the task is meaningful and can also be supported with encouragement and feedback from supervision. Combined with hygiene factors such as pay-for-performance incentives, employees are not only inspired to commit to the organisation and its strategic goals, but are motivated for better performance. One example under this model/theory is job variety, such as promoting job rotation to expose the individual to other divisions of the business to improve their human capital skill development and make the individual feel valued as a worthwhile contributor to the business model. V.I.E. theory is another theory that supports the importance of an effective job design. There are three key dimensions to V.I.E. theory, which are valence, instrumentality and expectancy. The job must be designed so that organisational expectations appear feasible and attainable by the worker. For instance, a job design that places significant emphasis on achieving deadlines can create stress or frustration if the individual does not believe that expectations for performance are equitable and practical. At the same time, the labourer is going to maintain beliefs about instrumentality, or the probability that they will receive some sort of remuneration or recognition for achieving goals associated with the job, influenced by their beliefs associated with personal value placed on achievement of said recognition or remuneration. V.I.E. theory is appropriate for determining the relevancy and importance of an effective job design as if expectations for performance are perceived as unrealistic and non-attainable, and the job does not have systems and processes in place for appropriate recognition and acceptable remuneration, absolute de-motivation is the likely outcome for the job role and could impact turnover. In critical view, V.I.E. theory is not widely approved by managers, due to its perceived complication in establishing appropriate job designs and feedback/recognition systems to make this viable in tangible practice, especially in dynamic organisations where change is constant. Job enrichment is not always practical in these types of organisations, especially where job roles require specialised expertise (tacit knowledge) that is not easily translatable to others without this knowledge without expensive and complicated training program development. Cost issues and labour intensiveness of job design as a parameter in V.I.E. theory are weaknesses of this model. 3. What are the main characteristics of the socio-technical-systems model of work organization? Discuss with reference to well-known research studies. This model of work organisation dictates that there is an inter-linkage between the social environment and technical environment that must be recognised in order to establish appropriate job designs, gain employee motivation, and ensure productive outcomes associated with business processes. It is a break from Taylorism that attempted to view the entire organisation as a mechanized set of systems that could be coordinated using a scientific approach founded on statistical analyses of productivity and production. The socio-technical model recognised that team-based work units were instrumental in motivating productivity and the dynamics of the relationships and social norms within these team units would dictate attitude, willingness to conform to change strategies, and loyalty toward their particular jobs. An underpinning concept of this model is that the social environment interacts much like a living organism with the technical environment (the open systems theory) in a way that cannot be segregated when establishing operational systems and processes of work performance due to their inter-dependency. One study that validates the socio-technical systems model was conducted by Eric Trist et al. (1963) on the UK coal mining industry. It was discovered in this research that social systems and inter-personal relationship between miners was critical to enhancing motivation and productive outputs associated with their job tasks. These individuals in the study created their own self-selected, small-scale teams that facilitated cooperative working and also established a type of kinship between workers that motivated efficiency and performance. When job design was changed with the advancement of new technical processes designed to increase safety and technological efficiency, without emphasis on work team autonomy and improving their social interactions during the job, there was no increase in productivity or job satisfaction. This particular study reinforced that there is an absolute correlation between how labourers interact with peers and other reference groups within their job role and their interaction with the technical environment. Essentially, productive motivation does not exist within a proverbial vacuum without social engagement and technical engagement together. If the coal miners in the study had not developed these self-selected work teams that built group norms and positive affiliation, changes to technical systems would be ineffective, alone, in establishing a motivational incentive to meet productivity and efficiency goals in coal extraction processes. Additionally, the Coch and French experiment in 1948 determined that positive group involvement was vital to predicting how employees would productively engage with the technical environment. The model essentially instructs managers to never underestimate the impact of social cohesion as a predictor of the level to which employees will perceive job satisfaction and personal well-being that translates into more productive engagement with the technical subsystems within the organisational model. The model iterates the need for a type of joint optimisation that must be constructed between social engagement and the technical environment. Without alignment between social involvements in a holistic systems view, the meaningfulness of work perceived by subordinates will be depleted, thus impacting performance and productive outcomes of individual or group job roles. 4. Describe and evaluate the work of any one researcher who you consider to have made a particularly significant contribution to our understanding of organisations. Abraham Maslow is the most fundamental contributor to assisting in understanding organisations and human behaviour. Maslow, through research, began to understand a set of five universal principles that are inherent in nearly every individual within the workplace associated with their psychological fulfilment. The most fundamental need is security, which in an organisational context requires that managers and leaders reinforce that employees can sustain confidence that their jobs are guaranteed and that they have opportunities for promotional advancement if certain performance targets are met. It is only after establishing this security that the individual can begin to develop their next need, social belonging, that is absolutely critical to predicting effective and productive job performance. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs indicates that social belonging, the attainment of in-group membership and positive recognition from peers and superiors, will directly impact their performance and willingness to remain committed to the organisation. This is also supported by the socio-technical systems viewpoint that strongly reinforces the need for cohesive work groups and positive inter-professional or inter-personal relationship development between management and peers. Maslow stated that as each lower-priority need on the hierarchy is fulfilled completely, it no longer motivates as the individual begins to pursue other fulfilment. Social affiliation is therefore aligned with the next higher order tier of needs, self-esteem, which greatly improves one’s motivation and performance in their job roles. Through this understanding, managers are able to not only establish positive group interaction, but establish the type of feedback systems necessary to give employees adequate recognition for their talents and quality performance. For instance, contemporary human resources and organisational theory reinforces the importance of building a 360-degree feedback system, which involves inclusion of sentiment and experiences with peers and managers that evaluate the total performance of the worker. Through this, employees are given fair and balanced feedback about their role and contributions in the organisation, which can improve self-esteem when the feedback is honest and aligned with actual top performance and productivity, whilst also securing the social harmony absolutely necessary under the socio-technical systems view to enhance organisational efficiency. Maslow’s work indicating a need for security, affiliation and self-esteem as motivational factors provides many implications for today’s line managers and human resources practitioners in the modern organisation. The relevancy of psychology and sociological sentiment inherent to virtually all workers in an organisation cannot be dismissed and Maslow provided the groundwork for helping business managers and leaders to understand how to more effectively establish processes, team units, feedback methodologies, and incentive structures necessary to motivate workers. The three most important needs, security, affiliation and esteem, have revolutionized how HR practitioners approach how to develop a harmonious organisational culture that will, ultimately, translate into better organisational competitive advantage and build the competencies and willingness to be productive that is critical to give an organisation effective human capital. Maslow was extremely influential in setting the groundwork for understanding the dynamics of organisational behaviour by identifying the psycho-social recognitions necessary to create productive subordinate outputs. Without his foundational work, it is likely that the Taylorist approach, the scientific model, would supersede existing, contemporary, and effective HR models. Read More