Personnel Management and Organizational Behavior

Essay by millionhiepUniversity, Master'sA+, November 2008

download word file, 7 pages 4.0

AbstractOrganizational behavior deals with the behavior of people within an organization and the implications of their behavior to the performance of the organization. Various scientific studies indicated a general agreement that organizational behavior is mainly built from four dominant behavioral disciplines which are psychology, social psychology, sociology and anthropology. Psychology is the science which measures the behavior of each individual in an organization. In the other hand, social psychology investigates the influence from one person to another as well as the behavior of a group of people within an organization. Sociology studies people in relation to their social environment or culture whereas anthropology emphasis on the study of human beings and their activities. The contributions of these disciplines will eventually form up the organizational behavior which will affect the organization's performance. In the in the following parts, we shall discuss in details the degree of contribution from each discipline to organizational behavior.

PsychologyRobbins and Judge (2007) defined "psychology is the science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other animals. Hence psychology is the scientific study of human behavior. Psychologists concern themselves with studying and attempting to understand individual behavior" (p.12).

This includes the study of the factors relevant to working conditions that could impede efficient work performance which include learning, motivation, personality, emotions, perception, training, leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction, individual decision making, performance appraisal, attitude measurement, employee selection techniques, work desire and work stress. Organizational behavior (OB) studies three determinants of behavior in organizations: individual, group and structure. Psychology's contributions have been mainly at the individual or micro level of analysis, while the other disciplines focus on macro concepts such as group processes and organization. In this context, we will review researches from psychologists to understand the contribution level of psychology...