History of Organizational Behavior
History of Organizational Behavior
History of Organizational Behavior
Though the origin to the study of Organisational Behaviour can trace its roots
back to Max Weber and earlier organisational studies, it is generally considered
to have begun as an academic discipline with the advent of scientific
management in the 1890's, with Taylorism representing the peak of the
movement. Thus, it was Fredrick Winslow Taylor who introduced the
systematic use of goal setting and rewards to motivate employees that could be
considered as the starting of the academic discipline of Organisational
Behaviour.
In 1920's Elton Mayo an Australian born Harvard Professor and his colleagues
conducted productivity studies at Western Electric's Hawthorne Plant. With this
epoch making study the focus of organisational studies shifted to analysis of
how human factors and psychology affected organisations. This shift of focus in
the study of organisations was called the Hawthorne Effect. The Human
Relations Movement focused on teams, motivation, and the actualisation of
goals of individuals within organisations. Studies conducted by prominent
scholars like Chester Barnard, Henri Fayol, Mary Parker Follett, Frederick
Herzberg, Abraham Mas low, David Mc Cellan and Victor Vroom contributed to
the growth of Organisational Behaviour as a discipline.
In the 1960's and 1970's, the field was strongly influenced by social psychology
and the emphasis in academic study was quantitative research. An explosion of
the orising, bounded rationality, informal organisation, contingency theory,
resource dependence, institution theory and population ecology theories have
contributed to the study of organisational behaviour.
Famous industrialist like William C Durant, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and
John D Rock feller were men of brilliant managerial qualities. They possessed
the managerial qualities necessary for the initial stages if industrialization.
However, when the industrial revolution began to mature and become
stabilized, this approach was no longer appropriate.
2. Scientific Management: The great industrialist was primarily
concerned with overall managerial organisation in order for their companies to
survive and prosper. The scientific management movement around the turn of
the century took an arrower, operations perspective. Yet, the two approaches
were certainly not contradictory. The managers in both cases applied the
scientific method to their problems and they thought that effective
management at all levels was the key to organisational success.
Fredrick W Taylor(1856 - 1915) is the recognized father of scientific
management.
Taylor started scientific management in his time-and-motion studies at the
Midvale Steel Company in the early 1900's. As an industrial engineer, he was
concerned within efficiencies in manual labour jobs and believed that by
scientifically studying the specific motions that made up the total job, a more
rational, objective and effective method of performing the job could be
determined. In his early years as a foreman in the steel industry, he saw
different workers doing the same job in different ways. It was his opinion that
each man could not be doing his job in the optimal way, and he set out to find
the "one best way" to perform the job efficiently. His argument proved to be
correct and in some instances "taylorism" resulted in productivity increases of
400 percent. In almost all cases, his methods improved productivity over
existing levels.
Taylor had actually shop and engineering experience and therefore was
intimately involved with tools, products and various machining and
manufacturing operations. His well- known metal -cutting experiments
demonstrated the scientific management approach. Over a period of
twenty-six years, Taylor tested every conceivable variation in speed, feed,d
epth of cut, and kind of cutting tool. The outcome of this experimentation was
high speed steel, considered one of the most significant contributions to the
development of large-scale production.
On the basis of these and other ideas, Frank was able to reduce the motions
involved in brick laying from 18 ½ to 4. Using his approach, workers increased
the number of bricks laid per day from 1000 to 2700 with no increase in
physical exertion.
Frank married Lillian Moller, who began working with him on projects while
she completed her doctorate in psychology. The two continued their studies
aimed at eliminating unnecessary motions and expanded their interests to
exploring ways of reducing task fatigue. Part of their work involved the is
olation of 17 basic motions, each called atherblig ("Gilbreth" spelled backward,
with the "t" and "h" reversed). Therbligs included such motions as select,
position, and hold - motions that were used to study tasks in a number of
industries. The Gilbreths used the therblig concept to study tasks in a number
of industries. The Gilbreths used the therblig concept to study jobs and also
pioneered the use of motion picture technology in studying jobs.
The scientific managers like Taylor, Frank and Lillian Gilberth and Henry
Gantt were not the first or only group that recognized the importance of the
operating functions. Ahundred years earlier, Adam Smith had carefully
pointed out the advantages of division of labour and in 1832, Charles
Babbage, a British mathematician with some asto unding managerial insights,
discussed transference of skill in his book Economy of Machinery and
Manufacture.
3. The Human Relations Movement: The second major step on the way
to current organisational behaviour theory was the Human Relations
Movement that began in the 1930's and continued in various forms until the
1950's. The practice of management, which places heavy emphasis on
employee cooperation and morale, might be classified as human relations.
Raymond Mills states that the human relation approach was simply to "treat
people as human beings (instead of machines in the productive process),
acknowledge their needs to belong and to feel important by listening to and
heeding their complaints where possible and by involving them in certain
decisions concerning working conditions and other matters, then morale
would surely improve and workers would cooperate with management in
achieving good production".
The Human Relations Movement, popularized by Elton Mayo and his famous
Hawthorne studies conducted at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric
Company, in many ways it remained the foundation of much of our
management thinking today. Before the Hawthorne studies officially started,
Elton Mayo headed a research team, which was investigating the causes of
very high turnover in the mule-spinning department of a Philadelphia textile mill
in 1923 and 1924. After interviewing and consulting the workers, the team set
up a series of rest pauses, which resulted in greatly reduced turnover and more
positive worker attitudes and morale.
The light experiments were conducted on female workers, who were divided
into two groups. One group was placed in a test room where the intensity of
illumination was varied, and the other group worked in a control room with
supposedly constant conditions.
The most famous study involved five girls assembling electrical relays in the
Relay Assembly Test Room, a special room away from other workers where the
researchers could alter work conditions and evaluate the results. During the
experiment, the girls were often consulted and sometimes allowed to express
themselves about the changes that took place in the experiment. Apparently,
the researchers were concerned about possible negative reactions and
resistance from the workers who would be included in the experiment. To
lessen potential resistance, the researchers changed the usual supervisory
arrangement so that there would be no official supervisor; rather, the workers
would operate under the general direction of the experimenter. The workers
also were given special privileges such as being able to leave their work station
without permission, and they received considerable attention from the
experimenters and company officials.
The study was aimed at exploring the best combination of work and rest
periods, but a number of other factors were also varied, such as pay, length of
the workday, and provisions for free lunches. Generally, productivity increased
over the period of the study, regardless of how the factors under consideration
were manipulated.
The results in the relay room were practically identical with those in the
illumination experiment. Each test period yielded higher productivity than the
previous one had done.
Even when the girls were subjected to the original conditions of the experiment,
productivity increased. The conclusion was that the independent variables (rest
pauses and so forth) were not by themselves causing the change in the
dependent variable (output).
One outcome of the studies was the identification of a famous concept that
ultimately came to be known as the Hawthorne effect. The Hawthorne effect
refers to the possibility that individuals singled out for a study may improve their
performance simply because of the added attention they receive from the
researchers, rather than because of any specific factors being tested in the
study. More contemporary investigations now suggest that the Hawthorne
effect concept is too simplistic to explain what happened during the Hawthorne
studies and that the Hawthorne effect concept itself is defective. In the
Hawthorne situation, the workers likely viewed the altered supervision as an
important positive change in their work environment, even though that was not
what the researchers intended.
The final phase of the research programme was the bank wiring study, which
started in November 1931 and lasted until May 1932. Its primary purpose was
to make observational analysis of the informal work group. A group of male
workers in the study provided knowledge about informal social relations within
groups and about group norms that restrict output when such steps sum
advantageous to the group. It also included a massive inter viewing programme
(1928 - 1931) that was initially aimed at improving supervision but evolved into
a means of learning what workers had on their minds and allowing them to let of
steam.
The results in the bank wiring room were essentially opposite to those in the
relay room.The output was actually restricted by the bank wirers. By scientific
management analysis, a standard of 7312 terminal connections per day had
been arrived at. This represented 2½ equipments. The workers had a different
brand of rationality. They decided that 2 equipments was a "proper" days work.
The Human Relations Movement, like Scientific Management, is not without its
short comings. Because of the nature of its findings and the resulting lessons
for managers, it has been criticised as "cow Sociology" (so called because
happy cows presumably give more milk). This simplistic view of the relationship
between morale and productivity is something that existing research has not
been able to verify.
Yet, despite their short comings, the effects of these pioneering studies were
far-reaching. In strong contrast to the impersonality that characterized the
classical approach, the Hawthorne studies pointed to the impact that social
aspects of the job had on productivity, particularly the effect of personal
attention from supervisors and relationship among group members. As a result,
the focus of the field of management was drastically altered. A common
interpretation of the Human Relations Movement is that managers need only
treat their employees well to generate maximum productivity. This conclusion is
unfortunate for two reasons.
1. It is over simplified and therefore often inaccurate.
2. Those who do not agree with this conclusion might be labeled advocates
of poor treatment of employees - which, of course, is also false.
Quite possibly the positive but simplistic philosophy of human relations has
actually hindered needed research into organisational behaviour. This does not
necessarily mean that an understanding of human relations is not useful; it may
have a pay off in areas other than performance, such as absenteeism, turnover
etc. The influence of the human relations philosophy can be seen in many
management training programmes today.
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