Organizational Behavior Within the Modern

Organizational Behavior

Within the modern business organization, there are many facets of behavior that are worthy of examining in order to improve effectiveness, employee satisfaction, and the like. This paper discusses several of those key areas.

Resistance to Change in Terms of Organizational Sources

Change is a common denominator in the growth and improvement of all organizations (Mills, 2003). Along with that change, invariably, comes varying degrees of resistance. Because of this, the organizational managers are faced with challenges to overcome the resistance (Weick & Quinn, 1999). Therefore, managers need to take positive action, such as the transformation of firms into learning organizations.

What Managers Can Do to Make Their Firms Learning Organizations

As was mentioned earlier, effective managers may need to make their firms learning organizations, and this has been proven by statistics which show that learning organizations are profitable organizations (Gilley, 2000). There are many ways that managers can achieve this; however, one of the most successful has proven to be to provide incentive to workers to learn new skills and tasks (Greenberg, 2003). When incentives are tied to learning, the gains can be massive. Of course, determining what should be learned also needs to be done by a process such as Action Research.

The Action Research Process

As the study of organizational behavior evolved from a sort of science into a practical area where hands-on actions proved to be effective, the concept of Action Research took root (Cunningham, 1993). This process consists of five defined steps, identified and explained as follows (Tomal, 1999):

Initial diagnosis: The process must begin with some sort of an assessment of organizational effectiveness; of course, this would most likely be defined by the particular problems or business units being evaluated.

Data collection: In this stage, various activities can take place, including studying of records on hand, discussions with staff members and management, outside research, and the like.

Analysis and feedback: Next, findings are presented to the stakeholders in the process, such as management, the action team, etc. This will allow for collaboration, additional suggestions for the action plans to come, corrections and so forth.

Action planning: At this point, a plan can be developed to remedy the situation being studied; the plans become something that delivers results.

Implementation: The adopted Action Plan is put in place.

Follow up: Lastly, the implementation, as well as the Action Plan itself, is reviewed in order to see if positive results have occurred. If not, the process may need to be repeated or modified.

It is important to note that the way that the Action Research Process is enacted will vary by organization, the expected outcomes, the stakeholders involved, etc. (Cunningham, 1999).