1.6 Changes in Organizational Behavior Concepts

In addition to significant research that contributed to the development of organizational behavior — namely, scientific management, the Hawthorne studies, and early leadership studies — there have been a number of other influences as well. For instance, in the 1930s, Henry Fayol (pronounced fie-ole) designed for his fellow engineers a set of management principles that became widely accepted throughout Western Europe. Fayol argued that (1) the role of the manager is to plan, organize, direct, and control; (2) that each employee should report to only one supervisor ("unity of command"); and (3) functions should be specialized, so that experienced teams are responsible for human resources, research and development, marketing, and so forth. At the same time, in the United States, the social psychologist Kurt Lewin focused his attention on group dynamics, or the influence of the group upon individual behavior. Later, Richard Lazarus showed the need to understand how people perceived various situations and how these perceptions relate to the stress level of the individual.

Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, who were the some of the first to suggest that managers can be trained, provided a diagnostic test called the managerial grid. This grid positioned each leader along two axes, one axis addressing a concern for production or task completion and the other axis representing a concern with people. This task-relational continuum has become central to both leadership and team research and is also the basis for much of the research on organizational conflict.

Concepts in the hard sciences, such as chaos theory, have helped organizational behavior researchers to further study teams and organizations as complex adaptive systems. Other researchers have included learning as an approach to individual, team and organizational change. Other influences affecting the field of organizational behavior include positive approaches and multidisciplinary collaborations. As organizations continue to adapt to changes in technology, to the political and social environment, and to an evolving marketplace, we expect that there will be continual changes to theories and research in organizational behavior.