The Definition of Organizational Behavior
In our world today, more and more organizations, businesses and other related institutions keep developing with others becoming global brands spread across the world. There are several learning dynamics that contribute to either the growth or collapse of any given organization. Technical skills are important in the successful management and operation of these organizations however, managers cannot simply base their operations and decisions based on these skills alone. The today’s continuously changing competitive workplace dynamics requires employees to have good organizational behavior and people skills (Bauer and Erdogan, n.d.). What is organizational behavior? And how is it related to individual personality? According to Kondalkar2007, “organizational behavior is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and organizational structure have on employee and management behavior within an organization, for the purpose of applying such knowledge towards the improvement of the organizational efficiency.”
Personality according to Kondalkar, revolves around individualized ideas, emotions and responses towards certain external phenomenon. It is imperative to note that in most organizations the managers usually initiate action through other employees in order to get things done as required by the organization. Managers achieve this through continuously coordinated social network of employees who work on a continuous basis to help achieve the set organizational goals.Employee behavior and personality is significant in achieving the set goals and objectives in every organization. Managers understand this necessity and therefore are significantly influenced by personality systems when promoting, hiring or firing employees. This paper therefore discusses why personality and organizational behavior is so important to managers when matching employees or people to jobs. This discussion will involve evaluation and analysis of various relevant material sources and theories of organizational behavior.
As a manager, it is critical that you understand employee behavior and make them understand yours as well in order to develop a sustainable healthy and productive working environment. An employee’s personality will significantly determine or affect the extent of the interpersonal relationship all the employees will share with each other as well as with the higher management. Luthans, 2011 explains that it is the employee personality that helps managers predict the overall employee workplace behavior and their ability to contribute towards achievement of the set organizational goals and objectives.
Recruitment of new employees usually arises from the need to fill particular positions within an organization. The position to be filled usually has predetermined requirements and expectations that must be fulfilled. There are also targets that are expected to be met by the new incoming employee therefore, establishing the nature of a person’s personality is critical during interviews and employment or employee promotion assessment. The nature of a person simply refers to their fundamental qualities and characteristics including overall perception, values and ethical behavior. These are of management significance and greatly influence howwell an employee will work, adapt relate and work with other employees, obey instructions and maintain workplace decorum. According to Ivanko, “managers on a daily basis interact with diverse number of people including colleagues, peers and other employee both within and outside the organization.” This implies that when hiring, managers must understand every potential employee’s attitudinal process, individual differences dynamics and political behavior so as to handle such interactions more affectively. Robbins in support explains that a workplace with employees having good interpersonal skills is likely to be more successful. This is because, good interpersonal skills and breed the right employee relations which in turn makes the workplace more pleasant hence significantly boosting employee productivity which in turn converts into superior financial performance by the organization.
Why Personality and Organizational Behavior is Important to Managers
According to behaviorist theories(Graham, 1987), it is important to deal with the observable behaviors and characteristics instead of trying to precondition the elusive human mind. In the same way, managers when hiring or promoting employees to fill particular vacancies, must critically evaluate the respective individual personalities and characteristics in order to ascertain how well they will fit within the within the organization or the expected roles and requirements of the position. Hiring or promoting someone with the wrong personality to fill particular sensitive positions within an organization can be extremely costly. For example, an adequately skilled finance officer but with a crooked personality can result in serious financial irregularities which may set the organization back due to improper financial management and practices. A manager who hires a public relations officer with an already tainted public personality would cause serious public relations nightmare should the organization encounter situations that needs public relations intervention to clear up misunderstandings and accusations. These are but two simple illustrations that draws out the importance of personality and why most managers are so concerned with this when hiring or promoting employees. Financial management position for example, requires an individual with an established record of ethics, transparency and accountability while a public relations officer should be strong but polite, friendly kind and well-meaning since he or she is a direct reflection of the organization. These factors (transparency, accountability as well as organizational work place ethics) are largely dependent and determined by personality.
Personality to a great extent determines ethics and ethical behavior in an organization and this mostly involves issues to do with employee morals and choices relating right and wrong workplace practice and behavior. According to Bakker and Schaufeli, a person’s behavior is mostly situation or environmental dependent and largely involves interaction of an individual‘s personal characters and the respective characteristics of the situation faced. In relationship to the social learning theory (Gibson, 2012), the ability of an individual to learn and adopt new skills rules, instructions as well as other organizational based changes is significantly dependent on their preexisting personalities and their abilities to learn by observing others. Max Webber’s bureaucracy theory explains that public employees must act as if their superior’s interests are their own and therefore must remain obedient to instructions as assigned. It is improbable that an individual lacking the right working personality would continuously bend to the organizations will and remain productive since this requires personal dedication and additional people personality skills to sustain. Managers expect total and absolute employee commitment in obeying and adhering to the established organizational code of conduct and established practice procedures and stipulations.
It is the managers who are expected to identify problems, formulate alternative workable solutions that can help solve these identified problems, evaluate proposed solutions and choose the best one. To do all these, the managers rely significantly on the employees’ contributions and help since he or she cannot oversee all organizational practices at a go. Therefore when choosing employees, the managers are expected to select the personalities that ere best suited for every particular position and as established earlier, there are positions that would require more skill oriented persons while others are more personality dependent and therefore the managers are obligated to critically analyze and evaluate the suitability of every employee considering their past practice , ethical and personal history as well as their respective career and educational background. There is therefore the need to acquire, develop and apply management and respective organizational behavior skills and knowledge gained about particular potential employees and the probable effect their respective personalities and behavior will have in the role they are expected to play or the position they are filling.
Even though organizational behavior and individual personality are significant elements in the evaluation and determination of employee suitability to work effectively in any given organization, it is imperative to recount that there are certain aspects of organizational dynamics that are neglected when employee stability criteria is based on personality. Personality diversity too has important implications for organizational and management practice. Managers still need to adjust their philosophies from personality based evaluations which are sort of standardized methods for treating everyone alike; to a more flexible method of acceptance which generally recognizes the various personality differences and their significance. The managers should respond to those differences in ways that will foster good employee interpersonal relationships, employee retention and spur greater organizational productivity while eliminating discrimination based on personality variations (Luthans, 2011)
Kondalkar argues that managers must recognize that hiring or promoting employees base on personality limits the organization from engaging and getting diversified opinions, ideas, skills and perspectives. This phenomenon of personality discrimination has some uncomforted shortcomings for instance, an individual or employee’s personality may not be entire determined by them or rather within their control. In support Kondalkar reiterates that personality to a great extent is influenced by a diverse set of elements including; social, cultural, political and economic factors. These are mostly external factors whose occurrences and effects on a person are beyond his or her control. Finally, based on the current models of personality evaluation methods and organizational behavior expectations, managements of respective organizations are increasingly finding themselves faced with ethical dilemmas and situations in which the defining boundaries between right and wrong employee behavior is blurry in relation to the current organizational workplace conduct and workplace expectations. This is significant because the workforce is increasingly becoming diversified owing to the recent advancements in technology and unprecedented changes in market and environmental dynamics. There is therefore a need for further research and analysis of how this continued change and diversity affects organizational behavior.
Reference List
Bakker, A. and Schaufeli, W. (2008). Positive organizational behavior: engaged employees in flourishing organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29(2), pp.147-154.
Bauer, T. and Erdogan, B. (n.d.).An Introduction to Organizational Behavior.1st ed. Unnamed Publisher Inc., pp.1-775.
Gibson, J. (2012). Organizations. 1st ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Graham, G. (1987). The Essential Behaviorist.PsycCRITIQUES, 32(5).
Ivanko, S. (2013).Organizational Behavior.pp.1-279.
Kondalkar, V. (2007).Organizational behaviour. 1st ed. New Delhi: New Age International (P) Ltd., Publishers.
Luthans, F. (2011).Organizational behavior. 1st ed. Boston [u.a.]: McGraw-Hill.
Robbins, S. (n.d.). ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR. 9th ed. San Diego State University: Prentice Hall International, Inc., pp.1-21.
Robbins, S. and Judge, T. (2017).Organizational behavior. 1st ed. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
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