HCM 433 MANGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR.pdf

suggested by the economic security – working approach. Similarly trial and error is costly and it
offers no guarantee of success.
While the limitations of an informal, common sense approach to organization problems were
always apparent, they becaome even more painfully obvious during the 19 th and early 20 th
centuries at that time, rapid industrialization, major technological advances and sheer growth in
size both intensified long standing difficulties and created many new ones.
Faced with long standing chaotic conditions, thoughtful managers and scholars began a search for
toher perhaps more effective, means of dealing with them. Fortunately, one new approach was
soon suggested by the emergence of several fields, know collectively as the Behaviour Sciences.
These new disciplines (e.g. psychology, sociology, political science) attempted to add to
knowledge of human behaviour through the use of rigorous scientific methods and as they quickly
discovered, this tactic really worked. Within a few short decades, the behavioural sciences had
contributed important new insights into human and human society. This repid progress led to the
attempt (or idea) to apply the new knowledge (insights) and methods of these fields of behavioural
sciences) to the task of understanding organizations and solving their complex problems. As this
ides took shape, the field of O.B. itself was born.
Presently, O.B. is an active, vigorous field with two major goals;
1. Increased understanding of organisationas and bahviour within them
2. Application of this knowledge to the solution of many practical problems and the
enhancement of organizational effectiveness.
Along this line O.B. may be conveniently defined as the field that seeks enhanced knowledge of
behaviour in organizational settings through the scientific study of individual, group and
organizational processes, the goal of such knowledge being the enhancement of both
organizational effectiveness and individual wellbeing.
This is working definition because to fully understand why people act and think as they do in
organizational settings, we must know something about them as individuals (e.g their attitudes,
perceptions, motives) sometimes about the group to which they belong (e.g leaders policies,
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