For most of us, our career success will be largely a function of our skills in understanding and influencing human behavior. This is because most of what you will be doing is shaping the behavior of others. As you can see in the chart below, a typical manager spends little of his or her time in what we think of as traditional management. Most of the time is spent in working with and through people.
Thus your people skills will probably be the most critical you can develop. You will have to be a skillful psychologist. This is true whether or not you are a manager; even as a subordinate, you will only be successful if you have skills at interpersonal influence, motivation, and communication with your superiors, peers, and yourself. But since most of you will eventually be in management it is important to note that is one of the few fields where you will be judged less on what you do and more on what others do as a result of your interpersonal skills.
Activity Average Successful Effective Mgr. Mgr Mgr. traditional management (decision making, planning, controlling 32% 13 19 communication (exchanging routine information, processing paper work 29 28 44 human res. mgt.: motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, training 20 11 26 networking: socializing, politicking, interacting with outsiders 19 48 11 Source: Based on F. Luthins, R. M. Hodgetts, and S. A. Rosenkrantz, Real Managers (Cambridge, MA.: Ballinger Publishing, 1988)Look at a list of the ten most frequently cited skills of effective managers:
For example, below are some "theories." If you hold these any of these, it will have a major impact on your behavior. Each of us holds literally dozens of these kinds of "theories." Most of them are implicit, meaning that we aren't totally aware of them ourselves, but they influence our behavior nontheless.
Presumably these implicit theories are adequate or at least they have been. Yet, for most of us, confronting the problems of complex organizations in the future will require a more systematic approach to understanding human behavior. This isn't true for all of us. Some of us are artists in our interpersonal skills; behavioral theories may be of little additional help. But for most of us, our intuitive skills may be inadequate. Furthermore, when confronted with difficult and new interpersonal situations, we have a tendency to draw from our repretoire those responses that seemed to work in the past.
How accurate are the generalizations or theories that you hold? Some are probably quite sophisticated and effective and useful in explaining and predicting behavior of others. However we also carry within us a number of "theories" that frequently fail to explain why people do what they do.
Sometimes understanding general notions about motivation is enough, but there will be many times that these general concepts won't work and you will have to develop some insights into the unique ways in which each person operates from his or her own frame of reference. To understand someone whose behavior is puzzling, surprising, or contrary to your expectations requires a way of seeing the world as he/she does. From within, an individual's behavior makes sense, is understandable and reasonable, even when not clear to us on the outside. We will discuss the various components of a personal system that seem to be most useful in understanding a person's behavior.
E. E. Lawler writes:
Behavior generally is predictable if we know how the person perceived the situation and what is important to him or her. While people's behavior may not appear to be rational to an outsider, there is reason to believe it usually is intended to be rational and it is seen as rational by them. An observer often sees behavior as nonrational because the observer does not have access to the same information or does not perceive the environment in the same way.
Many psychologists argue that we should stick to observables and leave alone the "black box," that is, what goes on inside the person. To them inference is, at best, crude speculation far removed from real measurable data. They claim that it does the human being an injustice to fill up the black box with vague concepts, insisting that it is enough to study overt behavior and to make our predictions from that.
There is a great deal of validity to the position of such behaviorists, and managers cannot afford to overlook it. The best predictor of future behavior is previous behavior. When you hire somebody for a job, the key questions you ask pertain to prior performance. When you decide to promote someone, you are usually making a prediction that his/her future behavior is likely to be consistent with past behavior.
It is possible for managers to hire, fire, promote, and make job changes quite effectively using only performance data (observable behavior) as their criteria. Whether or not they ever understand the behavior; that is, can explain why it occurs, is another matter entirely, one which requires developing some ways of explaining what goes on inside that so-called black box.
You don't have to be an expert on all the intricacies of human behavior, since individuals are so complex anyway. In fact, despite the thousands of studies of human behavior, our overall scientific knowledge of human behavior is primitive compared to our knowledge of other sciences such as biology and physics. In truth, it is doubtful that we know any more about human behavior than Socrates or Shakespeare.
Nevertheless, there are some general models, frameworks, and concepts that many people have found useful. We hope to provide a way to appreciate some of the inner workings of a person (including yourself) and some tools for organizing your picture of an individual so that you can understand and explain and more effectively predict behavior, not just classify it. While it is not easy to make useful inferences about things that cannot be directly observed, people tend to do it anyway. It is not hard to interpret the motives of, or label, people in categories based upon quick observations; motives are attributed to others based on their behavior. Using some of the following concepts you will improve your ability to make such judgments or, perhaps more important, slow down the process of coming to conclusions that tend to filter future inputs and lock in false definitions.
It is not easy to see how the world looks to someone else; few of us have been very well trained in such empathic skills. Fortunately, there are some ways of getting clues about how people see themselves and how that affects their behavior.
The field of organizational behavior is concerned with the study of what people do in an organization and how that behavior affects the performance of the orgnaization.
In the pages that follow we will take a careful look at the personal system as an important modifier of human needs. We begin by providing an overall scheme showing where the personal system fit into the total sequence of events that determine the behavior of an individual. Without going into detail just yet, we can say that the general sequence is that shown in the Figure.
While the personal system is only one factor in this sequence, it is the most complex one and carries the key to understanding individual behavior. It is that critical link to understanding a person's expectancies regarding his/her actions in a given situation; the expectancies are then the immediate preludes to actions.
The physical sciences have developed a number of universal laws that apply in a wide number of situations. Chemists, biologists, physicists have all evolved a number of such laws such as gravity.
Human behavior is more complex. Their diversity has limited our ability to develop simple, accurate, and sweeping generalizations. In organizational behavior, most of our generalizations are stated in a form of contingency. For example, we know that money motivates people under some conditions, but not all. Similarly, change is more effective if people affected participate in the change process-but not always.
Unfortunately, there are few absolute laws about human behavior at work. The field of organizational behavior reflects the complexity of human nature.