Organisational Behaviour

Organisational behaviour: significance and theories

Organisational behaviour matters because organisations are made of people, and performance is ultimately human performance. Technical plans, budgets and structures succeed or fail through the effort, judgement, cooperation and creativity of employees. Studying behaviour helps managers predict how people are likely to respond to a change, explain why a team is underperforming, and control outcomes by designing jobs, rewards, leadership and culture more wisely. It also helps employees themselves: understanding perception, motivation and group dynamics makes it easier to work with others, handle conflict constructively and develop a career. The field draws on psychology for individual behaviour, sociology for groups and structure, social psychology for interaction and attitudes, and anthropology for culture and values. No single discipline is sufficient, which is why organisational behaviour is deliberately interdisciplinary.

Early models of organisational behaviour can be compared by what they assume about people. The autocratic model assumes people must be directed and controlled, relies on authority, and produces dependence; it can secure compliance but rarely commitment. The custodial model assumes people need security, relies on economic resources and benefits, and produces dependence on the organisation for welfare; employees may stay without engaging deeply. The supportive model assumes people want to grow and contribute, relies on leadership that supports rather than coerces, and produces participation and involvement. The collegial model treats the organisation as a partnership, relies on teamwork, and produces self-discipline and responsibility. The systems model, the most contemporary, assumes people seek meaning and a supportive environment, and integrates the earlier models: it expects managers to be sensitive to the whole system, including employees, customers, community and environment. Examination questions often ask which model fits a described situation; the clue lies in the basis of managerial power and the employee response described, whether dependence, cooperation or self-discipline.

A second organising idea is the three-level model: individual, group and organisation system. Variables at the individual level include attitudes, personality, perception, learning and motivation. Group-level variables include group structure, communication, leadership, power and conflict. Organisation-level variables include structure, culture, human resource policies and change processes. Outcomes studied include productivity, absenteeism, turnover, citizenship behaviour, job satisfaction and, increasingly, well-being. The model warns against single-level explanations: low productivity in a team may reflect individual demotivation, a group norm that discourages effort, or an organisation system that rewards the wrong behaviour. Good diagnosis checks all three levels before intervening, and good interventions often work at more than one level at once, for example redesigning a job, retraining a team leader and changing the reward system together.

Individual behaviour

Individual behaviour begins with attitudes, which are evaluative statements about objects, people or events, with cognitive, affective and behavioural components. Job satisfaction is the positive feeling about one's job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics, while job involvement is identification with the job and organisational commitment is identification with the organisation and desire to remain a member. These attitudes predict important outcomes: satisfied and committed employees are less likely to leave and more likely to engage in citizenship behaviour, helpful actions beyond formal duties, though the link to performance is moderate rather than automatic. Cognitive dissonance, the discomfort felt when attitudes and behaviour conflict, explains why people change attitudes to justify behaviour, for example by valuing a job more after choosing it over an attractive alternative.

Personality is the relatively stable pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that distinguishes one person from another. The Big Five model organises traits into openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, now often described as emotional stability. Conscientiousness is the strongest consistent predictor of job performance across occupations, while extraversion predicts success in roles requiring interaction and persuasion. Other traits matter for specific questions: locus of control distinguishes those who believe they control outcomes from those who attribute outcomes to luck or powerful others; self-efficacy is belief in one's ability to succeed at a task and rises with mastery experience; Machiavellianism describes a pragmatic, manipulative orientation; risk propensity affects decision making under uncertainty. Person-job fit and person-organisation fit ask whether traits, values and abilities match the job and the culture; poor fit predicts dissatisfaction and turnover even when ability is high.

Motivation is the intensity, direction and persistence of effort toward a goal. Maslow's hierarchy orders needs from physiological and safety through social and esteem to self-actualisation, claiming lower needs dominate until satisfied, though evidence for a strict order is weak. Herzberg's two-factor theory separates hygiene factors such as pay, policy and working conditions, whose absence causes dissatisfaction but whose presence does not motivate, from motivators such as achievement, recognition, responsibility and growth, which genuinely motivate; the practical lesson is that fixing hygiene stops complaints without creating enthusiasm, while enriching work creates it. McClelland identifies needs for achievement, power and affiliation, with high achievers preferring moderate challenge, personal responsibility and feedback. Process theories explain how motivation works: expectancy theory says effort depends on expectancy that effort leads to performance, instrumentality that performance leads to outcomes, and valence, the value placed on those outcomes, so motivation fails if any link is zero; equity theory says people compare their input-outcome ratio with others and restore perceived fairness by changing effort, outcomes or comparisons; goal-setting theory shows specific, challenging goals with feedback outperform vague exhortations. Job design applies these ideas through job rotation, enlargement, enrichment and the job characteristics model, which links skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback to meaningfulness, responsibility and knowledge of results.

Group behaviour and interpersonal behaviour

A group is two or more people interacting, interdependent and working toward a common purpose, and groups pass through stages often described as forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. In forming, members learn purposes and test boundaries; in storming, conflict over leadership and roles emerges; in norming, cohesion and shared expectations develop; in performing, the group works effectively; in adjourning, for temporary groups, the task ends and members disengage. Roles are expected behaviour patterns, norms are shared standards of acceptable behaviour, and status is a socially defined position that affects influence. Cohesiveness, the degree to which members are attracted to the group and motivated to stay, raises satisfaction and can raise performance when group norms support high performance, but a highly cohesive group with low performance norms will enforce low effort just as effectively. Social loafing, the tendency to exert less effort in a group than alone, grows when individual contributions are hard to identify, and is reduced by making contributions visible, setting group goals and selecting members who value the task.

Teams differ from groups in that they combine complementary skills, share mutual accountability and pursue a common purpose through collective work products. Effective teams balance task roles such as initiator and evaluator with maintenance roles such as encourager and harmoniser, and they need clear purpose, complementary skills, commitment, mutual accountability and leadership that shifts with the situation. Leadership theories help explain when teams succeed. Trait theories sought universal leader qualities with limited success; behavioural theories distinguished task-oriented and people-oriented styles and found both matter, with the best balance depending on situation; Fiedler's contingency model argues that task-oriented leaders do best in very favourable or very unfavourable situations and relationship-oriented leaders in moderately favourable ones; path-goal theory says leaders should clarify paths to goals, remove obstacles and provide rewards, choosing directive, supportive, participative or achievement-oriented styles as the task and followers require; transformational leaders inspire change through vision, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration, while transactional leaders exchange rewards for performance. The examination distinction is often between transactional exchange and transformational inspiration.

Culture, diversity, emotions and justice

Organisational culture is a system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes one organisation from another. It appears in artefacts such as stories, rituals, symbols and language, in espoused values stated in mission and policy, and in basic assumptions taken for granted and rarely questioned. A strong culture, where core values are widely shared and deeply held, produces consistency and commitment, but it can also resist change and suppress dissent. Subcultures form within departments or locations, and countercultures may challenge dominant values. Managers create culture through what they attend to, reward, model and tolerate, and they change it only by changing those signals consistently over time, not by announcing new values while rewarding old behaviour. Culture also varies across nations along dimensions such as individualism versus collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity versus femininity, and managers who ignore these differences misread behaviour: silence in a meeting may mean respect in one culture and disagreement in another.

Workforce diversity means differences among employees in age, gender, ethnicity, education, experience, ability and background. Managing diversity is not merely complying with equal opportunity law, though that is essential; it is recognising that diverse teams bring wider perspectives and creativity, but also more scope for misunderstanding and conflict. The benefits of diversity appear when differences are managed through inclusive leadership, fair procedures, training that builds awareness rather than blame, mentoring, and work design that lets varied strengths contribute. Surface-level diversity, visible differences, matters most early in a group's life, while deep-level diversity, differences in values and attitudes, matters more over time. Stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination are distinct: stereotyping is a belief, prejudice is an attitude, and discrimination is behaviour, and managers must act on behaviour while addressing beliefs and attitudes through education and fair systems.

Emotions are intense, short-lived feelings directed at someone or something, while moods are longer, less intense and less clearly targeted. Emotional labour is the effort of displaying organisationally desired emotions, for example friendliness in service work, and sustained surface acting, faking the display without feeling it, is linked to stress and burnout, while deep acting, trying to genuinely feel the required emotion, is less costly. Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, understand and manage one's own and others' emotions, and it predicts leadership and teamwork because it supports empathy, self-regulation and constructive handling of conflict, though it does not replace ability or knowledge. Organisational justice concerns fairness: distributive justice is fairness of outcomes, procedural justice is fairness of the processes that allocate them, and interactional justice is fairness of interpersonal treatment and explanations. People accept unfavourable outcomes more readily when procedures are consistent, unbiased, accurate and open to voice, and when they are treated with dignity and given honest reasons. Perceived injustice, by contrast, predicts withdrawal, retaliation and turnover even when pay itself is competitive, which is why fairness is a performance issue, not only a moral one.

Human resource management foundations

Human resource management is the set of policies and practices for attracting, developing, motivating and retaining people so that organisational goals are achieved. Its foundations lie in human resource planning, which forecasts demand for labour from business plans and supply from internal and external sources, identifying surpluses to manage through redeployment or attrition and shortages to fill through recruitment or training. Job analysis is the foundation of almost everything else: it systematically studies a job to produce a job description, what the job involves, and a job specification, what the person needs in knowledge, skills and abilities. Without sound job analysis, selection criteria are guesses, training lacks targets, appraisal lacks standards, and pay lacks a defensible basis. Recruitment then attracts a pool of candidates through internal sources such as promotion and transfer and external sources such as advertisements, agencies, campuses and referrals, while selection screens that pool through applications, tests, interviews and reference checks to choose the candidate whose ability and fit best match the job.

Training and development build capability: training improves current job performance, development prepares for future roles, and both should follow a needs assessment, clear objectives, appropriate methods from on-the-job coaching to classroom and e-learning, and evaluation of whether learning transferred to work. Performance appraisal evaluates employee performance against standards and feeds decisions on pay, promotion, training and, where necessary, separation; its credibility depends on clear criteria, trained raters, regular feedback and protection against biases such as halo, leniency, central tendency and recency. Compensation then rewards contribution through base pay, incentives, benefits and non-financial recognition, and it must balance internal equity, fairness within the organisation, external competitiveness, fairness against the market, and individual equity, fairness for personal contribution. These foundations connect directly to organisational behaviour: selection shapes personality and ability mix, training shapes learning and self-efficacy, appraisal shapes equity perceptions, and compensation shapes expectancy and instrumentality. A human resource system that contradicts the behaviour it claims to want — for example, praising teamwork while paying only for individual output — will lose to the reward system every time. The next unit examines these policies as a strategic system, including career planning, talent management and industrial relations.

Motivation theories at a glance

Levels of organisational behaviour