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In the last blog we looked at the relation between the individual and his environment and how the behavior could be understood as part of this interaction. In this blog we begin our journey towards understanding the concept of “personality”

Personality could be understood as a relatively stable set of characteristics that influence an individual’s behavior. It is the individual difference that provides consistency to an individual’s behavior. The origin of Personality of an individual has been a much debated issue by a lot of intellects – some have attributed it to hereditary, others talk about an early childhood experience etc. 

Personality has also been understood to include attitudes, modes of thought, feelings, impulses, strivings, actions, responses to opportunity and stress and everyday modes of interacting with others – it is the repetitive nature of these that makes it part of the character of the individual and hence a part of his/her personality.

To understand better about Personality, numerous theories have been proposed by researchers. For the sake of discussion, over the next few blogs we would look at these 4 traits:

In the last blog, we began looking at individual differences as the basis of manager’s ability to manage. In today’s blog we continue understanding the Lewin’s Theory of individual differences.

Lewin expressed the idea of individual differences in an equation as follows:

B = f (P, E)

Where,

B = behavior

P = person

E = environment

This equation in some form is the essence of “interactional psychology” – this approach emphasizes that in order to understand human behavior, we must know something about the person and the situation. The 4 basic propositions of this approach are listed below:

To understand this better, over the next few blogs, we look at the various personality differences one by one.

In the last blog we looked at the challenges that managers face when managing a global organization. All the challenges of the managing the organization, is to understand the source of these challenges. We begin by exploring the concept of individual differences.

From common observation, we realize that all individuals are different from each other – the source of uniqueness could be from the individual’s skills, abilities, personalities, attitudes, values and ethics. The way the individuals differ is called individual differences. It is these differences that are the essence of the challenge of management – fundamentally, no two individuals are alike!

Managers always face the challenge of working with a multitude of individual characteristics, so it is quintessential for the manager to understand individual differences. – This would enable them to work better with others.

The diagram is an adaption from the Fig 3.1 (
variables that affect human behavior ) in the standard reference book on Organizational Behavior we detailed out at the begining of this series.

The variables that affect human behavior could be summarized in the above diagram. We would continue this discussion in the next blog.

In the last blog we looked at the mindset that would be necessary for one to be a practitioner in OB. In today’s blog we begin having a look at some of the challenges a manager would have to face in a globalized work setting.

Let’s begin with understanding the difference between “international” and “globalized” organization. International organization meant that a business would conduct its business across the national borders – a strict sense of organization’s nationality could be sensed in the usage of the word. In contrast, a globalized organization implies that the organization is free of national boundaries and it operates in a borderless world.

When organization move beyond their national boundaries some of the host of issues that hit hard for a manager in such a setting could be listed below

Over the next few blogs we look at some of these challenges that the managers would have to face in a globalized setting.

In the last blog we looked at formal and informal organizations. In the current blog, we temporarily take a detour to emphasize one of the critical pieces if one has to have a good grip of the subject of organizational behavior.

OB is a subject based on scientific knowledge and applied practice. Numerous concepts in this subject of study are abstract while some others are concrete and measureable. So one who intends to learn OB well would have to look at it as a 3 staged process.

Stage 1: Mastery of the Objective Knowledge

Stage 2: Skill Development

Stage 3: Application of Knowledge and Skills thus learnt

Objective Knowledge is the distilled finding through research and scientific activities. A mastery of this would help understand the basic foundation of the organizational behavior.

Skills development builds on the knowledge and the understanding of you so that one could practically pick up the subject from real life action. These are important for the successful functioning of the organization.

Application of Knowledge and Skills learnt enable application of the above two stages into real life – it is to be noted that, between the stage 1 and stage 3 there are multiple iterations and careful experimentation based on the learning gathered earlier.

An effective understanding of OB would lead to a very strong practical oriented mindset for the practitioner.

In the last blog, we looked at the open system’s view of an organization. In today’s blog we look at organization in a bit more details and attempt to understand its visible and not so visible aspects.

When we look at an organization, there is the visible part of the organization which includes the goals and objectives, policies, procedures, job descriptions, organizational structures, products and services etc; but when we dive in a bit deeper we find that there exists some underlying beliefs and assumptions, values, perceptions, feelings, norms, informal leadership etc which is not documented nor is easily visible for an outsider is not too acquainted with the business. The first is called the Formal organization and the second is called the informal organization.

Formal Organization indicates the official, legitimate, and most visible part of the organization system. Informal Organization indicates the unofficial and less visible part of the organizational system. We could represent these in the following manner:

The diagram has been adapted from the Fig 1.2 of the reference book used for the discussion

Note: The informal organization began gaining emphasis only after the Hawthorne Studies conducted in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the last blog, we looked at four internal components of the open systems framework. In today’s blog we build towards completing the various components of the open systems framework and represent it through a diagram.

It is clear that organiations operate in an external eviornment filled with suppliers, customers, regulators etc – these form part of the Task Environment in which the organization attempts to accomplish its “Task”. For any organization, there exists a combination of the human capital, material, finance and information that form the Inputs which would be processed using the internal compoents explained in the last blog to obtain the desired output in the form of either a product or a service. We could represent the whole of the discussion since yesterday in the following diagram.

The diagram is an adaption from the Fig 1.1 (Open Systems View of Organization) in the standard reference book on Organizational Behavior we detailed out at the begining of this series.

In the last blog, we looked at the interdisciplinary nature of the organization behavior. In today’s blog we continue exploring the subject of OB by providing it a systems perspective – and limit ourselves to the four major internal components of an organization. In the next blog we shall attempt to represent these in a pictorial fashion.

To have a strong understanding of OB, it is essential to understand the human behavior as well as the organizational context within which such a behavior takes place. We shall represent these through the systems view in the next blog. Early researchers in the field of OB identified the following 4 internal components of the framework that was developed to understand the human behavior.

In the next blog we shall structure these in a larger context of the open-system view of an organization.

In the last blog, we discussed about the spans of a job and the how to balance the various spans associated with a job. During these discussions we have had a lot of references to human behavior, and hence Organization Behavior would be the next logical step in this journey of Management Blogs. We have already begun the topic of organization behavior for discussion and have left it half way primarily due to the flow of topics. Beginning from this blog we would discuss Organization Behavior (OB) to sufficient depth – Our reference for the purpose of this discussion on OB would be “Organizational Behavior” – Foundations, realities and challenges, 5th edition by Debra Nelson and James Quick – Thomson Publication. In this blog we explore the interdisciplinary nature of OB. 

OB is a blended discipline growing from the contributions to various fields such as:

These interdisciplinary roots are increasingly being recognized in an independent discipline called OB – where the human nature and behavior is the subject matter of study. It is the understanding of this behavior is gained from the interdisciplinary nature of the study.