Application of scientific approach in management

Organizational behavior is the study of the interaction people within the group. The organizational behavior theories are applied in the organization to create more efficient business. The idea behind study of organizational behavior is to apply the scientific approach to the management of the workers. Applying the scientific approach to the organization makes the organization meet its objectives and the missions (Greenberg, 2013).

Perception is the process of recognizing and interpreting the sensory information it is human response to the sensory information. Human beings take sensory information from their environment. Perception allows individuals to make the information useful for themselves. Perception consists of signals in the nervous system, which is the result of physical and chemical stimulation of the sense organs. For example, vision involves light hitting the retina, the odor molecules mediate smell, and hearing includes pressure waves. Perception is not just the reception of these sensory signals, it is made by learning, memory, expectation, experience and attention.

Perception has a very significant role to play in the lives of individuals, perception shapes the thought process, personality and attitude of an individual. Individuals can have similar perception about a particular thing based on their learning and experience, the well know example can be taken for understanding perception, the example of Glass of water. In a social experiment a partially a glass of partially filled water was taken and asked to the individuals who participated in the experiment, that what is their perception of the glass. Some participants said that the glass is half-empty, some said that the glass is half filled while there were some who said that the glass was full, partially by air and partially by water. This example tells that the perception differs from individual to individual. Perception is a very important part of organizational behavior, it is how humans see to their working environment and how they respond to it (Nahavandi et al., 2013).

Learning is an act of gaining and reinforcing of knowledge, skills and values, which influences the information of the individuals. Learning is a journey, the ideas that individuals get from the learning process keeps on changing, while some stay for lifetime but still the chances of modification in the learning outcomes is always there. Learning affects the behavior of the individuals, both in organization and in their personal lives (Nahavandi et al., 2013).

Learning can be the result of education, personal development, experience, and training. Learning can be goal oriented and motivation helps a lot in the learning process. Human beings continues to learn new things in their whole lives, the process does not stop. In an organization based on their learning individuals perform their tasks assigned to them, and not just that learning also affects individual behavior, an individual with a bad experience in life, like loss of loved ones might be introvert, gloomy and sad most of the times, which will also affect his/her performance (Arends, 2014).

Perception: Definition and role in organizational behavior

Motivation has been taken from the word motive, which means needs, desires, wants and drives within the human beings. Motivation is the driving force that leads to actions for attaining certain goals. The psychological factors that lead to motivating employees at work place are desire for money, success, recognition, job satisfaction, teamwork and many more.

Motivation is one of the most important functions of the managers at workplace, it is duty of the managers to keep motivating their employees for better performance and achieving the team and organizational goals. The management needs to create willingness among the employees towards work. The motivation process consists of three phases, a need has to be felt, a stimulus that arouses the needs, accomplishment of goals and satisfaction. According to Abraham Maslow, human behavior is influenced by their goals and needs, motivation is caused by goal oriented behavior of individuals (Sukardi & Usman, 2014).

In an organization, motivation is very important because of its advantages, some of the advantages of motivation are given below:

Motivation indulges the employees into actions that lead to attainment of goals and objectives of the organization. Motivation improves the efficiency of the workers, the level of efficiency of an employee is not determined by his or her qualifications, but the gap between their ability and desire to work needs to be filled for the improvement of their efficiency. When efficiency is improved there is an increase in productivity, the cost in operations is reduced because of reduction in errors due to improvement. Motivation helps in achieving goals, the achievement of the goals take place only when certain factors are considered and these are, the optimal utilization of the resources, when there is a work environment of cooperation, the workers are focused to their goals and their actions are also directed towards achieving organization or team goals. When there is coordination and cooperation goals can be achieved through motivation of the employees (Greenberg, 2013).

Motivation builds healthy and cooperative relation among the employees. It is the most important factor required for the employees to be satisfied with their jobs. Motivation is often used to boost the morale of the employees, in an organization there are different types of individuals with different drives based on those needs and drives the managers motivate their employees. Employees can be satisfied through   monetary and non-monetary incentives, giving promotion opportunities to the employees. Motivation helps in stabilizing the workforce. Motivation also helps in achieving personal goals, often the personal and organizational goals are related, for example working efficiently will meet the organizational goals and also help in achieving personal needs for recognition and appreciation or promotion or incentives. Motivated employee will always have job satisfaction, money is not the only motivation factor for the employees and the managers need to motivate each employee based on their need then only there will be efficiency in work performance and the organization will successfully achieve its goals through the collective efforts of the employees and the management (Nahavandi et al., 2013).

Learning: Act of knowledge reinforcement and its impact on behavior

Conflict is disagreement arising within a group when the beliefs or actions of one or more group members are offensive and unacceptable, in an organization. There are different types of personalities with different views in an organization that often become the cause of conflict between the employees, the reason for conflict can be resource allocation, task divisions or conflicts with the management regarding higher pay, conflicts in workplace also occur due to the differences in the cultural differences. Conflicts are harmful for the organization it harms the team spirit and the affects the coordination and cooperation in the organization. Conflicts in viewpoints can be beneficial in the organization because it helps the organization get different innovative ideas and is good that individuals do not think alike, diversity in the though process of the individuals is also important (Nahavandi et al., 2013).

Cooperation is defined as known as the act of working together in harmony for achieving common goal. Cooperation plays a very important role in an organization, cooperation lets the employees of an organization to work in harmony. Cooperation has many benefits for an organization, lack of cooperation might lead the organization to failure, success of organization depends on the fact that all the employees and the employers work in harmony (Yarbrough & Yarbrough, 2014).

Effective communication, where the ideas are verbalized and the group members work together in harmony and understand each other. There is very less obstacles in the activities that the employees perform. Group members agree to each other’s view point and all the decisions are taken with all employees’ participation. Employees are motivated and willing to work towards achieving the goals of the organization. In a coordinated and cooperative organization leaders easily direct and influence the employees, because of the understanding the members of the organization have. There are very less conflicts and there is job satisfaction among the employees. Most importantly, the productivity is increased Cooperation is needed within a workplace to ensure that the organizational goals are achieved and the employees work in harmony without any obstacles, lack of cooperation with the various departments of the organization, it would be very difficult to allocate resources, assign the tasks among the employees (Yarbrough & Yarbrough, 2014).

Trust has very important role to play in an organization, lack of trust between the employees and the employers will always be a reason of conflict within an organization, which is very harmful for the organization because trust helps the organization to function in harmony, without any conflicts. Without trust there cannot be coordination and cooperation an organization and there will always be failure of delays in the tasks of the organization. Every organization should build trust among its employees, often it’s seen that employees do not trust their employers and they feel that they are not treated fairly in the organization. This is because of the management fails to gain of the trust of its employees, there is absence of job satisfaction, employees feels less motivated, all these factors affect the organization adversely and these factors are directly related to lack of trust within the organization (Yarbrough & Yarbrough, 2014).

Motivation and its impact on employees at the workplace

Deviance is referred to the process to diverging from set standards, it is very important for the organization to measure the performance, according to the management by objectives theories. There are certain standards set for the performance, deviances are the divergence from the set goals, the actual performance of the employees are compared to the set standards to check the deviations from the target the organization has set (Weiner, 2013). 

Leadership is the ability of an organization to lead, direct, influence and motivate its employees towards achieving organizational goals. Leadership is another very important function of the managers that is intended towards achieving the organizational goals. Effective leadership in an organization provides direction to the organization. Effective leaders have the ability to integrate to whole organization as one and to achieve increased productivity and have maximum profit levels (Nanjundeswaraswamy & Swamy, 2014).

According to the trait theory, effective leaders have some common traits, personality traits that are innate and help them to lead and influence the employees of the group members to work hard towards achieving the common purpose of the organization. Trait theories helps in identifying the traits an effective leaders need to have, these are, empathy, assertiveness, decision making skills, motivating, problem solving, communication and influencing skills, presence and absence of these trait within an individual determines whether they can be effective leaders or not and how effective they as a leader can be (Chemers, 2014).

Based on the behaviors of the employees, the leadership styles can be classified into

Autocratic leadership style -Autocratic leaders are those leaders who take decisions without taking any suggestions from their employees, or the team members, these type of leadership is practiced when there is less time or team agreement is not an important for the process of decision making process (Nanjundeswaraswamy & Swamy, 2014).

Democratic leadership styles- Democratic leadership style is one that in which there is employee participation in the decision making process, these type of leadership is used when there is a requirement for employment agreement and participation the decision making process. Democratic leadership is considered as very effective for the management, it brings harmony in the organization, there is less conflict, communication problem or any coordination related issues between the employees and the management, this management style is very important when there is requirement for agreement of matters (Nanjundeswaraswamy & Swamy, 2014).

Laissez faire- This type of leadership style allows the employees to take decisions the employees are not interfered. This type of leadership style can only be used when the team is very capable and efficient in taking the best decisions. Though this type of leadership cannot be used always because if the employees are not efficient enough to take the decisions and still this  leadership style is practiced than the organization would be at loss because of the poor decision making process (Cunningham, Salomone & Wielgus, 2015).

Advantages of motivation in organizational performance

Situational leaders- According to this leadership style there are some leaders that do not become leaders because of the power and authority they have but situational leaders are those leaders that emerge as a leader on particular situations.

Effective leadership is want organizations need to achieve the objective of the organization without which the organization would be direction less, based on the type of the organization and the type of activities the organization needs to select the leadership style (Saeed et al., 2014).   

It is the human tendency to hate change, they either refrain themselves from change or are hostile to the changes. Employees also find it difficult to adapt to the changes in the organization, in such case a proper organizational change framework is required for the change to take place in a better way. Organizational change management is the process of managing any new changes within the organization like, new businesses, change in the structure of the organization, adoption of new technologies and changes in the operational system. It is a systematic approach towards it helps the organization to learn new behavior and skills and adapt to the changes in the organization (Yarbrough & Yarbrough, 2014).

Change is a very complex process it cannot take place overnight so it needs proper planning and implementation adapting to the changes and management of the changes requires good strategies. Some of the strategies while imposing the change could be:

There has to be agreement on the common vision for the change, there should not be conflict of interests due to the vision of the change, the vision has to communicate to the employees in a very effective manner. The leadership style should be appropriate to execute the change (Wallensteen, 2015). The communication channel should be effective and very efficient so that it is communicated to the employees with properly so that later it does not become the reason for conflict within the organization (Wallensteen, 2015). A proper plan is needed to be made, how the change will be implemented and control should be effective enough to measure the performance the success of the change (Chemers, 2014).

In case of adoption of new changes, the organization needs to provide proper training and development to the employees so that they can learn about the new changes and adapt to the change in the desired manner, like changing the working system from manual to computerized (Pinder, 2014).

Types of conflicts and their effects on organizational harmony

Proper strategies are needed to be made so that employees can be educated how their daily activities are going to change and how it will be affected by the change (Greenberg, 2013). Employees should be motivated by monetary and non-monetary incentives, to encourage individuals to adapt to the changes in the organization and they do not find it difficult to adjust to the changes of the organization. Change is not much liked by the employees in such case the role of management plays a very important role in the change management process, managers are required to be prepared to impose the change process properly, the team needs to be unified and motivated that the accept the change and adapt to it. All managers should make sure that all the employees know the answer of the question, what is changing in the organization, why the change is taking place, how it is going to affect the areas of each employee, and how the change is going to affect each and every individual (Benn, Dunphy & Griffiths, 2014).

Conclusion

The study of Organizational behavior is very important for the achieving the goals and objectives of the organization, it teaches the employees of the organization to behave in a manner that aims at achieving the increased productivity through working in harmony with other team members.  The management needs to study what motivates the employees, based on the needs of the employees the management motivates the employees, satisfied employees will bring efficiency in the organization. This study will help the management to bring job satisfaction among the employees.

References

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Benn, S., Dunphy, D., & Griffiths, A. (2014). Organizational change for corporate sustainability. Routledge.

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Chemers, M. (2014). An integrative theory of leadership. Psychology Press.

Cunningham, J., Salomone, J., & Wielgus, N. (2015). Project management leadership style: A team member perspective. International Journal of Global Business, 8(2), 27.

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Nahavandi, A., Denhardt, R. B., Denhardt, J. V., & Aristigueta, M. P. (2013). Organizational behavior. Sage Publications.

Nanjundeswaraswamy, T. S., & Swamy, D. R. (2014). Leadership styles. Advances in management, 7(2), 57.

Pinder, C. C. (2014). Work motivation in organizational behavior. Psychology Press.

Saeed, T., Almas, S., Anis-ul-Haq, M., & Niazi, G. S. K. (2014). Leadership styles: relationship with conflict management styles. International Journal of Conflict Management, 25(3), 214-225.

Sukardi, S., & Usman, M. (2014). The influence of leadership function, motivation and organizational commitment to job satisfaction to civil servants religion minister Kerinci Regency. Jurnal Riset Manajemen Bisnis dan Publik, 2(3).

Wallensteen, P. (2015). Understanding conflict resolution. Sage.

Weiner, B. (2013). Human motivation. Psychology Press.

Yarbrough, B. V., & Yarbrough, R. M. (2014). Cooperation and governance in international trade: The strategic organizational approach. Princeton University Press.