History of OB

• Organization-
• Collection of people, work together to achieve
individual goals
organizational goals

• Organizational Behaviour-
• Multidisciplinary field as influenced by different discipline like Sociology,
Psychology, Economics, Anthropology etc.
Towards an OB discipline
Definitions
• OB is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals , groups and structures have on behaviour within
organizations for the purpose of applying such knowledge towards improving an organization’s effectiveness.

• OB can be defined as the systematic study of the actions and reactions of individuals, groups and sub-systems.

• OB is the study and understanding of individual and group behaviour, patterns of structure in order to help improve
organizational performance and effectiveness.

• OB is one of the most complex and perhaps least understood academic elements of modern general management, but since
it concerns the behaviour of people within organizations it is also one of the most centralits concern with individual and
group patterns of behaviour makes it an essential element in dealing with the complex behavioural issues thrown up in the
modern business world.

• OB is an inter-disciplinary behaviour science studying phenomena and dynamics(processes) of organizations and their
various units.
What is organizational behavior?
 Industrial revolution
• Origin of Organizational Behavior can trace its roots back to Max Weber and earlier organizational studies.

• The Industrial Revolution is the period from approximately 1760 when new technologies resulted in the

adoption of new manufacturing techniques, including increased mechanization.

• Large number of individuals have been required to work together in manager-subordinate relationships.

• Many of large organizations that did exist, were military ones in which the authority of the leader was

supreme and practically unquestioned, since membership was not voluntary.

• William C Durant, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and John D Rock Feller were famous industrialist of that

time, have brilliant managerial qualities.

• They processed the managerial qualities necessary for the initial stages if industrialization.

• The industrial revolution led to significant social and cultural change, including new forms of organization.

• Analyzing these new organizational forms, sociologist Max Weber described bureaucracy as an ideal type of

organization that rested on rational-legal principles and maximized technical efficiency.

 Scientific Management Movement

• In the 1890’s; with the arrival of scientific management and Taylorism, Organizational Behavior Studies was

forming it as an academic discipline.

• Fredrick W Taylor(1856 - 1915) is the recognized father of scientific management.

• Principle:-

• Train & develop employee

• Detailed supervision & instructing of worker’s work

• Divide work equally between managers and workers

• Goal setting and reward to motivate employees

• Introduced time study

• Drawbacks:-

• Considered as dehumanizing

• Failed to say about feedback

• Failure of scientific management gave birth to the human relations movement which is characterized by a

heavy emphasis on employee cooperation and morale.

Human relations movements
• According to Fred Luthans three events cumulatively ushered in the era of human relations movement.

• They are

• the great depression

• the Hawthorne experiments

• rise of trade unionism.

 The great depression:
• The economy was operating in the high gear just before the thundering financial crash occurred in 1929. The
production and organizational specialists had achieved great results prior to the crash.

• After the crash the management began to realize that production could no longer be the only major
responsibility of management. Marketing, finance and more importantly personnel were also required in order
for a business to survive and grow.

• The depression’s after math of unemployment, discontent and insecurity brought to the surface the human
problems that managers were now forced to recognize and cope with.

• Personnel departments were either created or given more importance and most managers now began to
develop a new awakened view of the human aspects of their jobs.

• Thus human relations took an added significance, as an indirect, and in some cases direct.
 The Hawthorne experiments

• 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 Hawthorne experiments conducted in four phases

• Part I - Illumination Experiments

• Part II - Relay Assembly Test Room Study

• Part III - Mass Interviewing Programme

• Part IV - Bank Wiring Observation Room Experiment

 Part I - Illumination Experiments (1924-27)

• These experiments were performed to find out the effect of different levels of illumination (lighting) on

productivity of labour.

• The brightness of the light was increased and decreased to find out the effect on the productivity of the test

group.

• Surprisingly, the productivity increased even when the level of illumination was decreased.

• It was concluded that factors other than light were also important.
Part II - Relay Assembly Test Room Study (1927-1929)

• Under these test two small groups of six female telephone relay assemblers were selected. Each group was

kept in separate rooms.

• From time to time, changes were made in working hours, rest periods, lunch breaks, etc.

• They were allowed to choose their own rest periods and to give suggestions.

• Output increased in both the control rooms. It was concluded that social relationship among workers,

participation in decision-making, etc. had a greater effect on productivity than working conditions.
Part III - Mass Interviewing Programme (1928-1930)

• 21,000 employees were interviewed over a period of three years to find out reasons for increased productivity.

It was concluded that productivity can be increased if workers are allowed to talk freely about matters that are

important to them.
Part IV - Bank Wiring Observation Room Experiment (1932)

• A group of 14 male workers in the bank wiring room were placed under observation for six months.

• A worker's pay depended on the performance of the group as a whole.

• The researchers thought that the efficient workers would put pressure on the less efficient workers to complete

the work. However, it was found that the group established its own standards of output, and social pressure

was used to achieve the standards of output

Conclusions of Hawthorne Studies / Experiments

• The conclusions derived from the Hawthorne Studies were as follows :-

• The social and psychological factors are responsible for workers' productivity and job satisfaction. Only good

physical working conditions are not enough to increase productivity.

• The informal relations among workers influence the workers' behaviour and performance more than the

formal relations in the organisation.

• Employees will perform better if they are allowed to participate in decision-making affecting their interests.
• Employees will also work more efficiently, when they believe that the management is interested in their welfare.

• When employees are treated with respect and dignity, their performance will improve.

• Financial incentives alone cannot increase the performance. Social and Psychological needs must also be satisfied in

order to increase productivity.

• Good communication between the superiors and subordinates can improve the relations and the productivity of the

subordinates.

• Special attention and freedom to express their views will improve the performance of the workers.
 Drawbacks
• Lacks Validity : The Hawthorne experiments were conducted under controlled situations. These findings will not
work in real setting. The workers under observation knew about the experiments. Therefore, they may have
improved their performance only for the experiments.

• More Importance to Human Aspects : The Hawthorne experiments gives too much importance to human aspects.
Human aspects alone cannot improve production. Production also depends on technological and other factors.

• More Emphasis on Group Decision-making : The Hawthorne experiments placed too much emphasis on group
decision-making. In real situation, individual decision-making cannot be totally neglected especially when quick
decisions are required and there is no time to consult others.

• Over Importance to Freedom of Workers : The Hawthorne experiments gives a lot of importance to freedom of
the workers. It does not give importance to the constructive role of the supervisors. In reality too much of freedom to
the workers can lower down their performance or productivity.
 The rise of trade unionism:
• Another important factor contributing to the rise of human relation’s role of management was the organized

labour movement. Although labour unions were in existence in America as early as 1792, it was not until the

passage of Wagner Act in 1935 that the organized labour movement made an impact on management.

• In India, though workers’ unions existed since the later half of the 19th century, they operated under terrible

legal constraints. It was only in 1926 with the passage of Trade Union Act 1926 that the managers began

realizing that the trade unions had come to stay in spite of the wishes of the managers or for that matter

management. The only go to avoid any probable friction with the trade union was to understand the human

relations role of the management.

 ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR IN THE INDIAN SETTING

• Organizational behaviour appeared in the Indian setting around the 1960s.

• At that time, the country had hardly any systematic empirical research of its own. Business activities were extremely
limited and the country had just started industrialization in a big way by importing Western capital and technology.

• Along with Western technology came Western systems and practices of management, textbooks, and scholars.

• A number of institutions were established in the early 1960s to teach and research on management.

• For example, the four major universities in

• Delhi,

• Bombay, Started business and

• Kolkata, and management courses
• Chennai
 The Indian Institutes of Management Ahmedabad and Kolkata

The Small Industries Extension

Hyderabad
Training Institute

National Labour Institute New Delhi, 1974

• These institutions attracted Western scholars such as Douglas McGregor, Warren Bennis, Howard
Baumgartel, Rolf Linton, Fred Emery, Paul Herbst, and others who offered courses, imparted
training, and indoctrinated their younger Indian counterparts into their theories and approaches.

• Many Indians from these institutions went to the USA for further studies.
The Fulbright programme enabled a large number of Indian and American scholars to visit each other. The
students who got doctoral degrees in the US brought with them the theories of their professors and replicated
them freely.

Thus, research on organizational behaviour increased exponentially since the 1960s.

• The reviews of literature (Ganesh 1990; Khandwalla 1988; Padaki 1988; Sharma 1973; Sinha 1972; Sinha

1981, among others) identified three phases in the evolving nature of organizational behaviour in India:

• 1. Replication of Western theories and concepts.

• 2. Disenchantment with them.

• 3. Integration of Western and Indian contents and processes of organizational behaviour.

 Replications

• Initially, the Indian studies replicated almost all Western theories, concepts, and methods showing
their universal validity.

• The failure of replications were attributed to:

• inaccurate translation of research instruments,

• lack of rigour in research design, or

• faulty sampling.

• Indian scholars neither had their own theories or conceptual framework to provide a more realistic
perspective, nor had they overcome the colonial mindset to challenge the well-established
Western theories and concepts.
• However, as the number of such inconsistent findings kept increasing, Indian culture was brought
in for explanation, although differently by Western and Indian scholars.

• Western scholars still maintained that their theories and concepts were valid, and either blamed the
Indian culture for Indians behaving differently or justified culture-specific organizational
behaviour.
 Lambert (1963), for example, conducted a study of five factories in Pune.

• He reported that the

I. prevailing social system within the factories and

II. the practices followed by the employees were contrary to those that prevailed in the industrially-developed societies in the West and,

III. therefore, were not conducive for the effective functioning of Indian industrial organizations.

Myrdal (1968) supported this view.

• Myers (1960) interviewed a number of government officials, labour leaders, and managers to conclude that, many top Indian
managements are relatively authoritarian in their relationships with lower management, and with labour (Myers 1960: 166).

• Lewis (1962) observed that Indian culture, like other traditional cultures, is authoritarian. They all suggested the need to change
employees’ authoritarian behaviour to suit their organizational behaviour.

• On the other hand, Meade (1967) replicated Lippitt and White’s study (1943) to show that because Indian culture is authoritarian,
Indian subordinates need authoritarian leaders to work more effectively.
 Disenchantment (dissatisfaction)

• Some Indian scholars controverted that

 Indians were authoritarian or

 Indian culture is not conducive to work.

• Indians indeed have sharply defined

 do and don’ts,

 strong hierarchical orientation,

 status consciousness,

 strong need for power, and so on,

• but the evidence was not conclusive that they also possess the underlying of authoritarians (Sinha 1980).

• Some reported that Indians are more autocratic than authoritarian, and therefore, they prefer autocratic leaders.
• Still others found that authoritarian leaders were neither preferred nor effective. Similarly, contrary to earlier
findings, participative leaders were perceived to be weak, because they abdicated the responsibility to take
decisions.

• Participation to Indian subordinates means ‘being consulted’ (De 1984).

• It was also shown that Indians prefer nurturing superiors (Kakar 1971) and work effectively under such
superiors (Sinha 1980).
• Similarly, Maslow’s need hierarchy was not found to hold true in Indian organizations.

• Although there were some variations, money, security, and status remained the most salient needs
across levels and industries (see Sinha 1981 for a review). Job importance did not predict job
satisfaction.

• The two-factor theory was shown to be an artifact of the method employed by Herzberg.

• The hygiene and motivators were bi-directional, affecting both satisfaction as well as
dissatisfaction.

• The T-group methodology, because it is person-based, was not found to be effective in the
collectivist culture of India; it was the system-wide interventions that worked more effectively
(Singh 2001).
• One way to understand the role of a culture is to see how people handle their conflicts that arise out of
violating a well-established norm. Look at how Indian workers and managers resolve them (Singh and Sinha
1992):

• Imagine that a worker abuses a manager who then lodges a complaint to top management.

• The worker comes to the manager’s house or office the next day and brings a coworker or a union leader who
apologizes on behalf of the worker . . . . The manager is persuaded to pardon the worker . . . who then runs
some personal errands for the manager in order to restore, symbolically, the manager’s authority . . . Similarly,
suppose that a manager abuses a worker, who complains to the union, which then takes up the matter. A
higher-level manager brings the manager, the worker, and the union leader together. The manager dwells at
length on how he or she cares for the worker . . . and that the manager’s action to reprimand the worker was
for the sake of the worker or the organization. The manager might even say that he or she was sorry and was
misunderstood . . . In sum, third party mediation, good intentions, mutual face saving, as well as
accommodation, mark the way conflicts are resolved.
 Integration
• Gradually, as a result of the dialectics between replication and disenchantment, an amalgamative
approach emerged that attempted to integrate Western and Indian contents and processes of
organizational behaviour.

• There were at least five strands within this approach.

 First, the colonial mindset had worn out in a few cases to the extent that there were efforts to retrieve some of the
ancient Indian concepts of a religio-spiritual nature.

 Second, some of them were processed through Western methods.

 Third, the relevance of Western constructs was examined in the Indian cultural context.

 Fourth, attempts were made to synthesize Western and Indian cultural components into a composite perspective on
organizational behaviour.
 Fifth, indigenous concepts were examined with universally applicable processes.
Enabling and Debilitating Contexts
• Enabling and debilitating contexts affect human behaviour all over the world.
• However, Indians react to them much more sharply.

Enabling contexts induce Indians to pursue what they think to be ideal; but the debilitating ones trigger the
impulse to run for security, protection, and short-term utilitarian options.

Thus, Indians separate precepts from practices like very few people in the world do. Free from serious
constraints, Indians are likely to strive for perfection in whatever they do (for example, classical music,
dance, and crafts), pursue non-material goals in life (for example, yogic exercises and meditation to attain
peace of mind), remain highly pro-social and strikingly altruistic even with strangers, tolerate differences without
out-casting the deviants, and manifest a high level of cognitive complexity by making fine differentiations and
integrations in whatever they tend to conceptualize.
• However, a serious threat or uncertainty tends to make them recoil back into what earlier was described as the
poverty syndrome. Striving for perfection drifts into fantasying perfection, setting unrealistically ideal goals,
and moralizing (Kumar 2004).

• Fine-grained logical approach becomes argumentative, verbose, and unduly imposing over others.

• Collectivist orientation shrinks to immediate family members (Sinha and Verma 1987).

• Hierarchical orientation, instead of rising on the scale of merit, leads to inflated ego, status consciousness,
use of coercive power, and corrupt practices (Sinha 1995).

• Altruism is professed, but is not practised, and short-term narrowly conceived self-interests override one’s
sense of fair play resulting in individualistic anarchy (Kumar 2004).

• Ingratiation, manipulation, and competitiveness mark the social influence process (Pandey 1988).
 Context sensitivity

• Context sensitivity among Indians manifests itself in relation to three components of the environment.

• The high context sensitivity of Indians orients them to consider desha (place), kaal (time), and paatra

(person) as well as their enabling and debilitating potentials in order to think, feel, and behave differently.

• Context sensitivity mention by Sinha and Kanungo, “Thinking principle or a mindset that is cognitive in

nature and it determines the adaptive nature of an idea, behaviour and context.”
 Context sensitivity

• It is a process of balancing one’s behavioural responses in such a manner that one avoids extreme

responses in terms of behaviour and action by combining seemingly contradictory behaviour in a

complex way that would address both their short-term and long-term goals in a most effective manner.

• Indian generally perceive a situation and then respond to it as one episode in an ongoing flow of

interactive relationships between situations and responses (Sinha and Sinha, 1995).

• Behaviour = person * situation

 Place

• Organizational contexts, for example, are differentiated from other social contexts in terms of their structures,
systems, codes, routines, and the resultant cultures that employees accept and conform to even by suppressing
their needs and inclinations.

• Organizations are further differentiated in terms of size, ownership (for example, public, private, cooperative,
mixed, multinational), products and services, extent of being culturally embedded, market driven or
strategically oriented (Sinha 1999), among others.

• Employees think, feel, and behave differently in these organizations. Indians are much more task oriented in a
majority of private sector organizations than in most public sector organizations.
• Those who shift from the public sector to the private sector change their working style overnight.

• Managers in multinationals behave exactly like expatriates and profess to hold the values of the latter (Sinha
2004). They are punctual, hard working, egalitarian, and team-oriented while working in multinational
organizations.
 People

• In the predominantly collectivistic culture of India, people are even more important than the settings.

• People are differentiated into in-group (apane log) and out-group members (paraye log). The norms are
different for them. For in-group members, such as family members, friends, and relatives,

• Indians are cooperative, helpful, and self-sacrificing. Relationships are reciprocally emotional, personalized,
and harmonious. Power is ideally expressed in the sneh-shraddha (affection-deference) framework.

• The more powerful person shows his power by ‘giving’ away important resources to his dependent ones who
blossom in the reflected glory of their patron. On the contrary, power is used for exchanging goods and
services or is wielded in a coercive way with respect to out-group members.
All conceivable means are adopted to gain an edge in power differential. In such instances,
Indians are intensely competitive and jealous of other’s achievement if it makes him feel that he is
losing his edge.

• This is a kind of Lord Indra syndrome. In Indian mythology, Lord Indra, the king of all gods and
goddesses, is seen as a highly insecure person so far as the power differential is concerned.

• Any mortal’s sustained tapasya (asceticism and penance) makes Indra’s throne wobble.

• Indra is chronically worried about mortals who might usurp his power and authority. In the same
way, Indians are very jealous and apprehensive with respect to other’s power and achievements.
 Time Factor

• Time changes the salience of contextual demands in two ways.

• First, there are different significance and demands for different events and exigencies. Different norms are
given different priorities at different times.

• Dharma is that which holds (that is, maintains regularity) the otherwise fluid cosmos (sansar).

• It has four levels of applicability ranging from general to specific:

• sanatan (pan-situational),

• jati (caste) based,

• swa (that which depends on one’s temperament and station in life),

• and finally apat kaal dharma (that which is to be evoked in a crisis).

The first one is very general and refers to broad guidelines in normal conditions, but the behaviour is more
likely to be guided by the proximate dharmas, particularly during a crisis when all other norms are set aside for
those that are meant for fire fighting.

• Second, time changes the significance of people and places. People’s needs, expectations, resources, and the
degree of inter-dependence might change over time. So too does the relevance of a place over time. Such
changes evoke different feelings, thoughts, and actions.
The End