1.6 International Organizational Behavior

Modern OB was much influenced by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 1890s. His 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management1 would have been on the office shelves of Henry Ford's managers. Taylor was an engineer who wanted to find a way of improving employee performance in a steel factory where he worked. He believed that he could find an ideal set of management principles that would improve the satisfaction and performance of all employees.

The years Taylor spent analyzing and observing worker behavior resulted in a procedure for organizational control called scientific managementThe management of a business, industry, or economy, according to principles of efficiency derived from experiments in methods of work and production, esp. from time-and-motion studies.. Taylor argued that each task should be simplified so that every employee would repeat the same minimum task as efficiently as possible. The best worker at a given task should be studied in terms of time taken and tools and techniques used, and this performance would be the benchmark against which other workers would be measured. Management would make all the planning, pacing, and maintenance decisions, and would pay employees based on their individual productivity.

He felt that his scientific management was the one best way of managing all employees; it would guarantee the optimal use of workers in virtually any working situation. Although it was later found that no single management style is highly effective in all situations, Taylor's scientific management made some important contributions to our understanding of OB. These include identifying some of the sources of motivation of workers, developing goal-setting programs, bringing in incentive pay systems, laying the groundwork for modern employee selection techniques, and providing properly designed tools.

Taylor was criticized as having too mechanistic an approach to management, and for assuming that employees are basically lazy and need to be watched continuously. A contemporary critic of Taylor, citing one of Taylor's success stories, asked if it was fair for employees to increase their output by 363 percent for a mere 61 percent increase in wages. Opposition to Taylor was a major cause of the rapid growth of unionism.

The interdisciplinary nature of OB surfaced early. In 1915, the U.S. physiologist Walter Cannon discovered the stress response, which he described as a physiological response to environmental stimuli. A generation later, organizational behaviorists would use Cannon's finding to identify the relationship between health and employee behavior.

During the 1920s, a Western Electric Co. telephone assembly plant in Hawthorne, Illinois, following Taylor's theory, conducted routine scientific management research on variables such as the effect of workplace lighting on productivity2. The illumination in one assembly room was unchanged; in another room, it was varied. Astonishingly, every time the lighting in either room was measured, productivity increased, at least initially. The puzzled management hired business school professor Elton Mayo3 to investigate. Again, Mayo soon concluded that no matter what changes were made, the employees' productivity rose. This finding was the start for a series of four massive studies by Mayo over the next dozen years. One study on assemblers whose work environment was not being changed showed that they were all restricting their output to some unwritten standard. Mayo gradually switched his attention from the physical work environment to the attitudes, morale, and social relations of the employees, that is, to the human relations of the workplace. To investigate the nature of these human relations, detailed 90-minute interviews were conducted with over 20 000 employees. These interviews disclosed the importance of the informal social structure: employees were forming groups that established their own norms of behavior (including productivity) and pressured members to produce neither more nor less than these norms. These findings came to be known as the Hawthorne effectThe remarkably energizing effect of the simple act of showing interest or paying attention.. The main Hawthorne effect is the remarkably energizing effect of the simple act of showing interest or paying attention. Ever since, researchers have been careful to consider the Hawthorne effect as a possible explanation of research participants' behavior. (The more formal name for this effect is demand characteristicsNo matter how neutral or non-leading the questions were designed to be, the respondent is prone to interpret (from the wording, from the effect of previous questions, from the title of the document, etc.) what the “right” or “best” or “expected” answer is., meaning that the researcher can, even without meaning to, "demand" that the research participant behave in a certain way.) The other Hawthorne effect has to do with how the social influence of an informal group can determine employee behavior, including productivity. Mayo's finding that working conditions, satisfaction, and relationships with other workers all influence employee behavior gave rise to the human relationsRelations with or between people, particularly the treatment of people in a professional context. approach to the management of people, which held that there is no one best way of managing employees. The first motivation theories were developed toward the end of the 1930s. These theories are based on the assumption that behavior is largely determined by immediate needs . Indeed, they show how the various physical, psychological, and social needs of a person will predict behavior. The 1950s saw the development of motivational theory based on the work of Frederick Herzberg4, which drew attention to the difference between needs that are satisfied by the external environment (extrinsic needs) and those that are satisfied by the inner upper-level needs (intrinsic needs).

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. Canadians looked to William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was then serving his third term as prime minister. Not surprisingly, this is a time when researchers began to look at the issue of leadership. The main early contributors were Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White5, who examined democratic and autocratic styles of leadership. Later, J.R.P. French and B. Raven6 studied the concepts of leadership and power. The two main names in leadership research are R.M. Stogdill7, who analyzed leadership behavior and suggested that an individual's personality characteristics determined whether he or she was a follower or a leader, and Fred Fiedler8, who showed that different types of leaders are needed for different situations.

During the 1950s and 1960s, industrial psychologists began to examine the impact of satisfaction on the design of work and on employee behavior. Studies of group dynamics and interactions were also conducted. J.S. Adams's equity theory9 and Victor Vroom's expectancy theory10 dominated the work motivation research during this period. More details are presented in Chapter 3.