GROUP BEHAVIOUR IN ORGANISATIONS

Group Behaviour in Organisations

Group Behaviour in Organisations

Introduction

Organisations' social system comprises on complex sets of human relationships interacting in many ways with each other and to the outside world. Besides belonging to the social and cultural settings into which people are born, in organisations we voluntarily join groups based on shared work practices, habits, beliefs, interests or knowledge levels. Memberships in these groups influences employee work traits, behaviors toward seniors, quality of work habits and how people think of themselves and others. Consciously or subconsciously, these groups impose expectations and rules on its members. Arrangement for informal/formal coaching of these groups on organisational goals in the light of changing customer needs is very essential, so to extract positive and aligned work behavior.

Over the time, these closely bonded or fragmented social systems establish an organisation's culture, which reflects conventional behavior of a company that encompasses beliefs, customs, knowledge, standardization efforts, conflict management and other general work practices. This culture widely influences human behavior, even though it seldom enters into their conscious thought. People depend on established cultural systems as they give them stability, security, understanding, and the ability to respond to any given situation. This is why people fear change to their routine practices. They fear that the existing work system will become unstable, their security will be lost, they will not understand the new process, and they will not know how to respond to the new situations. A set of organisational practices, operations, culture, environment and their interaction with products/services exhibit its management system. This behavioral management system study will help organisations address their low productivity, motivation and product quality variation problems in a much better way.

Human attitude & Behavior

Employee and group attitude is key elements for measuring the success or failure of an organisation. Attitudes reflect a person's likes/dislike toward another person, object, events, and activities in his/her environment. Rapid industrial/technological changes have made it vital to study and know about employee attitudes toward work, its supervision, pay, benefits, promotion, or anything that might trigger positive or negative reaction of employee. Gradual changes to attitude very likely affect and build a person's work behavior that is being discussed in this study.

Fig 1: A Model of Human Attitudes

Figure 1 emphasize how individual feelings, believes build up into group work behavior which presently paves the way for culture.

Like product variation, behavioral variations exist in the shape of conflict which is always there in organisations. This often arises between people or groups on competition for gaining resources, authority, power, attention and status. The competition is not just for resources but for ideas too—one person or group wants to have the ideas or behavior of another group suppressed, punished, or declared illegal. Organisations generally attempt to engineer social change to their management systems by means of establishing and revising policies, laws, incentives, or coercion to prevent conflicts.

Work behavior analysis

Behavioral analysis is a science concerned with the behavior of people at workplace. Variations in behavior, changes in the frequency or form ...