Organizational Behavior

The organizational structure of my university was based on the bureaucratic style. The hierarchical pyramid command structure placed my department in the mid-level range within the administrative wing of the university. Our department had a department manager and a head manager over him and fifteen employees under them. The department served students with financial aid issues so it was always a very hectic place to work as students constantly came in with questions about their aid and whether their applications were being processed correctly and so forth. Stress levels were sometimes very high within the department as everyone was working on a deadline at certain parts of the year. Other causes for stress included the fact that the organizational workplace culture was not the best in terms of maintaining a positive spirit where respect and job satisfaction were clear goals. Most of the time, it seemed the department head and head manager did not care whether their employees were alive or dead: we were expected to get our work done on time without errors. In terms of offering support for workers, there was not much from the leadership and workers had to try to support one another when things became overwhelming. This paper will describe the organizational behavior of this department and show how factors like theory, emotional intelligence, and the relationship between employee and organizational behavior (as represented by management) were manifested.

As Schyns and Schilling (2013) note, bad leaders and managers are individuals who do not take an interest in their employees or who do not engage with them on civil or sympathetic terms. They lack empathy, integrity or interest in their work. They bring negative stimuli to the workplace instead of positive stimuli. The effect of their influences is that workers become discouraged and resentful and can even sometimes go out of their way to sabotage the productivity of the organization. Schyns and Schilling (2013) thus show that managers and leaders must be engaged with their employees on a positive level in order to ensure the success of the organization.

In the financial aid department where, the general relationship between employee behavior and the behavior of the organization was like that represented by Schyns and Schillling (2013) in their study: the department manager was autocratic even though the organizational structure of the university was bureaucratic, and the head manager was disinterested in the workers. For this reason, there was a distinct lack of empathy coming from leadership in the department for the employees. Employee attitudes suffered as a result. Workers were often apathetic and uncommunicative. They expressed dissatisfaction with the job all the time and did little to try to make the workplace more organized and efficient. They did only what they had to when the department manager was around because he would insist on everyone doing things his way and would become irritated and upset when someone violated one of his rules. The head manager did not seem to care one way or the other how the department manager behaved and appeared to just be there as a symbol of authority. The employees made a show of working whenever the department manager was around, but as soon as he was gone, employees again began slacking at work and not getting any of their jobs accomplished. For this reason, the office was always backed up and behind schedule and it was only thanks to a few hard working and dedicated employees that paper work ever got filed on time. Had it not been for these employees, many students at the university would have suffered from financial aid not going through. As it often turned out, when these good employees were not present, such crises did occur, which would upset the department manage even more (the head manager would never say anything). The fact that the department manager had no real relationship with the workers, however, was what frustrated the process and made that workplace so stressful: the majority of the workers did not want to work because they did not like their manager and their bad attitude reflected his bad approach to leadership (McQuerrey, 2014). As McQuerrey (2014) points out, attitude, performance, interpersonal skills and corporate representation are all affected by the actions of those within the organization. When one person’s bad behavior (especially in such a prominent position as that of leadership) is evident, it reflects poorly on the organization as a whole and can bring down the mood, culture and productivity of the organization as a result. This is certainly what was happening in our department. Likewise, as Bakkeri and Schaufeli (2008) show, “positive organizational phenomena can make a unique contribution to explaining variance in organizational outcomes over and above negative ones” (p. 149). This means that when there are positive elements within a workplace, that workplace is more likely to have positive outcomes as opposed to negative ones where negative stimuli are more commonplace.

Capek (2007) states that employee experiences drive organizational behavior in numerous ways, and this was true in our department: the more negatively that workers experienced the bosses, the more likely they were to drive the organization intentionally into the ground. Capek (2007) also argues: “the nature of employee experiences has a profound impact on the organizational agility required to make improvements to the customer experience” and this was equally true in our department. Many times customers would complain about slowness in the office and this slowness was the result of workers failing to actually do their jobs, which they did not like. Employees felt unappreciated by the bosses and their feeling of isolation caused them to react negatively towards their work, which impacted the students who relied on the workers to get their paperwork filed.

Some workers tried hard, however, which can be explained by the fact that they adhered to personal ideals and principles that, while not expressed in positive terms by management, were deeply embedded in these workers’ own character and thus motivated them to succeed. As Capek (2007) notes, “the context for an individual’s experience starts with what they are trying to accomplish; what’s important to them.” For these workers who did excel and who did pick up a lot of slack from other workers, their individual experience was based on the fact that they were actually trying to accomplish a lot. These same workers rarely complained and never showed a bad spirit, even while others were. Instead, they seemed to accept the fact that no organization is perfect, that managers and leaders also have a lot of stress and may not be able to communicate effectively to everyone’s liking. They did not hold grudges against management for slights or resent the leaders for not showing enough appreciation. They accepted that they had a job to do and they were determined to do it. Thus, their experience in the workplace was not a bad one because they did not let negative stimuli enter into their consciousness.

For workers who did allow negative stimuli to impact their decision making, the outcomes and experiences were always negative. They never accomplished the goals expected of them, shirked their responsibilities, communicated poorly, and treated students applying for aid with little respect. Some of these workers were not only impacted by the negative spirit inside the workplace but also by external factors, such as their own debts and lack of enough income, family issues and educational challenges that they were facing. In short, they were stressed by a variety of factors, too, and their stress mingled with the stress felt by the department’s manager, which aggravated the whole situation all the more. Capek (2007) shows that external factors can be just as impactful within an organization as internal factors, and our department once again showed that this was true as well.

Maslow’s (1943) theory of the hierarchy of needs did seem to predominate in the organization. Shanks and Buchbinder (2012) point out that there are five basic levels of needs that people must have met before they can grow and develop to deliver positive outcomes in their own lives. The first level of needs is physiological needs, which refers to people having enough food, water, physical satisfaction, and so on. Most of the workers had these needs met in the department, but some were also stressed by external factors such as bills that were due as a result of them trying to fulfill these most basic needs—and that external pressure undoubtedly played a part in how they conducted themselves negatively at work. The second level of needs, according to Maslow’s theory, is to have shelter, a safe home, a job, health, and other basic necessities. This level was somewhat connected with the first level for many of the employees because a lot of them were just trying to make ends meet and were really living paycheck to paycheck, week to week. So there was a lot of frustration building already. However, the third level was where a lot of workers really took umbrage from management: this level is the belonging needs: the need for social interaction, friendship, affection, communication and support. Management never displayed this type of support and workers, not having this need met, became indifferent to their work. Those good workers who did do their jobs did not seem to mind or notice a lack of social interaction from management—perhaps because they had good social connectivity both outside the organization and within it as well. The fourth and fifth levels of Maslow’s hierarchy were never realized by many in the department. They include esteem needs (such as praise and recognition—rarely given by management) and self-actualization needs (the personal desire to grow and achieve—only a few workers had reached this level and they had done so in their own lives before coming to the organization it seemed). For these reasons, Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs applies perfectly to our department and helps to explain why there was so much trouble getting jobs accomplished: workers simply were not having their needs met and managers were not showing much interest in the employees’ needs, especially in the need for social support. As Shanks and Buchbinder (2012) note, understanding this theory can be helpful because “once each level has been met, the theory is that an individual will be motivated by and strive to progress to satisfy the next higher level of need” (p. 43). Our workers were never meet their needs levels and so lacked the motivation to push forward and achieve higher aims and organizational objectives important to the department.

In our organization, teams were formed informally and only if two or more workers desired to collaborate on a particular job. The manager sometimes formed teams formally by selecting persons arbitrarily and at random, putting them together to work on something without even considering whether those individuals got along or were capable of accomplishing the work. The manager often expected everyone to be more competent than he or she sometimes actually was. The tasks that generally result in the need for teams to be formed are collaborative work, creative work, and larger projects that cannot be accomplished quickly or effectively with only one person working on it. In cases such as this, the teams in our department that were most effective were those that were formed informally when two or more workers who could trust each other and respect each other came together to help one another achieve an identified aim.

The levels of emotional intelligence (EI) that existed in the organization were minimal and almost non-existent from management. However, from some of the workers who did well in the department, there was more EI on display. It was definitely lacking from managers, who demonstrated no empathy, interest or regard for workers, their feelings, or their needs. With some individual employees, on the other hand, there was a lot of EI shown. They would take the time to ask other workers how they were and they would ask how their lives were going and offer supportive comments and empathetic gestures throughout these little conversations. They showed a desire to invest in their peers’ lives and for that reason they were very well respected and appreciated by everyone in the department. They were always aware, too, of whenever a person would be saying something without even using words: for instance, they could read body language and tell that somewhat was upset or annoyed, and they would help to ease the situation by using empathetic tones of voice to solicit information from the distressed person. By displaying sympathy in their own tones and body language, the distressed person would begin to feel relaxed because they knew they were being heard and appreciated. So these few individuals in the department demonstrated very strong EI skills, which helped in many situations to reverse negative stimuli in the workplace. If only management had demonstrated these same skills, the workplace culture undoubtedly would have improved greatly.

Organizational behaviors impact productivity and quality for that reason: managers set the tone and culture of a workplace by their own interactions, interest in others, and appreciation for their workers. If they do not demonstrate good leadership through the use of EI skills and positive leadership qualities like communication, vision, inspirational messaging and so on, they will not motivate workers to want to contribute to the process of achieving organizational goals. Organizational behaviors should motivate workers to want to succeed and be part of the overall aim of the workplace. When those behaviors do not compel workers to want to succeed, they impact productivity and quality. Workers do not feel incentivized to be productive and the quality of their work goes down. This was very evident in our department as workers would often feel that the organizational behavior emanating from the bosses was poor and that their own work did not matter as a result.