1.4 Early Research that Shaped Organizational Behavior

In the next two sections, we will discuss key theories and research that helped shape the field of organizational behavior as it is today. By applying these theories to your studies, you can better understand how motivation, leadership, and employee behavior can help individuals and teams achieve organizational goals. We will start our discussion by first describing scientific management—an early management theory first proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 1890s.

Scientific Management

The theory of scientific management argues that a task given to an employee should be optimized for maximum efficiency. In other words, under scientific management, a number of workers are observed performing a specific task within the organization. Once the most efficient employee is identified, the actions and techniques of that employee are then implemented company wide. Scientific management assumes that by imitating the most productive employees, organizations can increase productivity and efficiency. As the new company standards are implemented, the newly identified standard becomes the benchmark against which all other workers are measured. Management then uses this new standard as they plan and make decisions. Furthermore, under scientific management, this new standard is the basis upon which pay and individual productivity are measured. Taylor felt that scientific management would guarantee the optimal use of workers in any organizational environment.

Although it was later found that no single management style is highly effective in all situations, scientific management provided important contributions to our current understanding of organizational behavior. For example, scientific management spurred additional research into the sources of motivation, the development of goal-setting programs, the construction of incentive pay systems, and the groundwork for modern employee selection techniques, as well as a number of other dominant themes in organizational behavior.

Leadership Research

During the early 1940s, the world stage was highly dominated by a small number of political and ideological leaders such as Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that early leadership studies assumed that leaders had inherent characteristics (or traits) that made them great leaders. Since this time, a wide variety of personal characteristics have been evaluated with the hope of discovering which traits can be associated with successful leadership. For example, throughout the last century, a number of researchers have evaluated personal characteristics such as intelligence, physical appearance, social status, social skills, and personality to identify positive leadership traits.

Some of the earliest leadership scholars included Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White, who examined democratic and autocratic styles of leadership, as well as John French and Bertram Raven, who studied the relationship between leadership and power. Because leadership is such an important factor in determining the success of an organization, leadership research is one of the most defining aspects of OB research.

Job Satisfaction, Health, and Employee Behavior

Research in other fields has contributed significantly to organizational behavior discoveries. In 1915, for example, the U.S. physiologist Walter Cannon discovered the stress response, described as a physiological response to environmental stimuli. A generation later, organizational behaviorists would use Cannon's findings to identify the relationship between health and employee behavior. Employee health is important to OB practitioners because maximizing the health of employees can positively improve behavior and work satisfaction, creating a competitive advantage for the firm.