Introduction

Organizational behavior is the study of the way people interact within an organization. The aim of organizational behavior is to facilitate efficiency within the organization. The better understood the interaction of workers within a group, the more likely it will be for the group to achieve its outcomes, as management will adopt strategies designed to support the group. Since patterns of behavior can impact and affect any organization, especially a healthcare organization. The provision of quality care relies upon health care providers working together to provide continuity of care, safe care and effective care—and if the organizational behavior of the healthcare facility is subpar, the patients and care providers themselves will suffer as a result. Leadership plays a substantial role in overseeing organizational behavior and, as Schyns and Schilling (2013) have shown, the less effective an organization’s leaders are, the less likely the organizational behavior of the workplace is to be productive, functional, and oriented towards achieving the organization’s vision and aims. This paper will discuss the applicability of organizational behavior to healthcare organizations and show why it is essential to focus on organizational behavior in order to maximize the potential of healthcare organizations.

Why Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior may be said to be a reflection of an organization’s structure, policies, culture and leadership. The relationship between organizational behavior and organizational culture, however, is two-way: the latter is influenced by the former but also can reinforce or undermine what the workplace leaders are aiming to achieve. The goal for leadership when focusing on organizational behavior is to ensure that behavior aligns with the organization’s aims, vision, and objectives.

Communication, collaboration, and support are variables that will determine the extent to which organizational behavior is effective or ineffective—or, worse, detrimental. In a healthcare organization, identifying how nurses communicate with one another to guarantee that patient safety is a number one priority is one example of how organizational behavior might be monitored. If it is found that there are large gaps in nurse communication lines, management will find...
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Knowing what the ultimate goal is (patient satisfaction, worker satisfaction), leaders can adjust or revise approaches among nurses so that inefficiencies are reduced and obstacles are cleared. As Bhargava (2012) has shown, behavior can be impacted both negatively and positively from any number of variables within the workplace—from workers feeling overworked to feeling unmotivated to feeling isolated, cut off or out of the loop. Finding the problems in the workplace and fixing them so that workers can feel more satisfied will, ultimately, lead to patients feeling more satisfied with their level of quality care. This is why organizational behavior is so important and so applicable to healthcare.

Ways to Approach Organizational Behavior

Personality, theories (models), leadership, and structure are all areas by which organizational behavior can be approached in order to understand how it can be improved or supported to facilitate an organization’s aims. Personality allows managers to focus on worker personalities, traits, patters of behavior and the manner in which they interact with others to determine where communication, for instance, is happening most and where it is happening least. Since communication is so vital in healthcare, it is an important measure in the case of organizational behavior. Theories and models can help management to define the parameters by which they will evaluate employee behavior and workplace conditions. The theory of Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of Needs, for example, presents an order of needs that humans must have met before they can become self-actualized. Using a theoretical framework such as this will give leaders a way to focus attention, in this case, on ensuring that worker needs are being met so that organizational behavior can be optimized and both worker and patient satisfaction achieved. Leadership can be an important approach to the issue of organizational behavior as well, since leaders are the ones tasked with inspiring, motivating, and communicating the vision of the organization to the workers. Their role in transforming, serving, and guiding workers is well established in the literature (Den, Deanne & Belschak, 2012). Likewise, the…