The concept and significance of organisational behaviour

Definetion: According to Stephen P. Robbins, "Organisational behaviour (OB) is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization's effectiveness."

According to Aldag and Brief, " OB is a branch of social sciences that seeks to build theories that can be applied to predicting , understanding and controlling behaviour in a work organisation."

Organisational behaviour is the multidisciplinary approach which is an integration of different field of studies like psychology, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and political science.

OB studies human behaviour at individual level, group level and organisational level.

Basically, organisations are made up of peoples, therefore managers in the organisation must know how they behave in an organisation to make organisation productive.

Determinants of behaviour in an organisation are:

1. Individuals
2. Groups and
3. Structure

Elements of Organisational Behaviour

1. People: People make up the internal social system of the organisation. They consists of individuals and groups. Groups may be formal or informal.

2. Structure: Structures define the formal relationship between people in an organisation.

3. Technology: Technology consist of physical objects, activities and process, knowledge, etc through which people accomplish their tasks to achieve organisational objectives.

4. Environment: All organizations operate within an external environment. It is part of a larger system that contains thousand of other elements.This includes the suppliers, customers, competitors, governments’ agencies, employees, unions, political parties, and economic, political, cultural, technological and social factors in which the organization embedded.

Significance of Organisational Behaviour

OB is concerned with understanding, applying and controlling of behavioural and structural knowledge of an organisation for organisation's effectiveness. Management function includes Planning, organising, leading and controlling where people are involved in different roles (interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles) and different capacities. Therefore, for an organisation to succeed it is very important for it to understand its organisation's culture, people by way of understanding their perception, attitudes, motivation, personality, key personality characteristics relevant to workplace, learning, job satisfaction, etc through theories of motivation, learning, and reinforcement. And mould their dissatifaction to satisfaction, motivate them to achieve desired results, provide them appropriate work culture, growth opportunities, punish their inappropriate behaviour, and infusing learning environment and leadership.