Today, major changes are taking place in management philosophy and practice. Some managers refer to these changes as a new era, others as a revolution. Whatever the label, people in the organizations are currently being challenged as never before to examine their basic assumptions about the nature and meaning of work as well as their day-to-day management styles and work habits. The 1990s are an exciting time to be a manager or a student of management, and nowhere can these challenges and changes be appreciated more than in the field of organizational behavior.
Organizational behavior is the study of human behavior in organizations. By organizations, we mean all enterprises-business firms, government agencies, schools, hospitals, and even families and the clubs to which people belong. As a matter of fact, the increased attention to OB in nonbusiness areas is one of today’s most exciting changes in organizational life.
Why organizational behavior so important to understanding the current management revolution? The answer lies in the nature of the changes occurring in the modern organizations. During the past one hundred years, managers have emphasized every aspect of business form finding the most efficient means for producing goods and delivering services to manipulating paper profits in order to increase the attractiveness of the enterprise to stockholders or taxpayers. Only recently have managers begun to understand and appreciate of its human resources. Human resources, in fact, may be the most important resource available to modern managers.
The heart of the change lies in a new approach to managing that is sweeping through organizations in every economic sector. Best selling books, such as In Search of Excellence, A Passion for Excellence, The Renewal Factor, Thriving on Chaos, and When Giants Learn to Dance, have emphasized that managers can no longer treat employees as mere factors of production. Instead, managers increasingly are aware that managing human resources effectively means understanding and accommodating the total person-individual needs, goals, values and belief systems. Managers are focusing their attention on the people they manage and on how they manage them. Such topics as efficiency and quality continue to be important in the workplace. Increasingly, however, human beings, not computers and machinery, are being seen as the key to organizational performance.
Such phrases as organizational health, qualities of work life, participative management, and work redesign have become common from the factory to floor the corporate boardroom. Important decisions once made by executives and middle managers are being made with increasing frequency at lower levels of the enterprise, and such leading corporations as Ford, Kodak, Chrysler, General Motors, Firestone, Motorola, and Westinghouse have indicated publicly that this basic change in philosophy has become the corporate policy of the 1990s.
Although the field of organizational behavior has been around for at least the past twenty-five years, as we moved towards new millennium, there are still significant human-oriented problems facing organizations. In the past decade, managers were preoccupied with restructuring their organizations to improve productivity and meet the competitive challenges in the international marketplace. Although the resulting “lean and mean” organizations offered some at least short run benefits in terms of lowered costs and improved productivity, they won’t be able to meet the challenge that lie ahead. Specifically they:
1. Won’t be fast enough to match the product development time of foreign competitors or to spot and opportunity in fractionating consumer markets.
2. Won’t be keen enough to deliver the higher levels of service customers will increasingly demand or to achieve leaps in productivity beyond the easy gains everybody got from screwing down on costs.
3. Won’t be smart or sensitive enough to manage a polyglot work force or to satisfy its best employees, baby bloomers facing a sort of collective mid-life crisis.
The challenges in the years ahead are just example of the need for new thinking and new approaches to management. We have made too many mistakes, if not out and out blunders, in the past.
JOB SATISFACTION
One of the most pressing problem facing organizations today is how to motivate employees to work more productively and to increase their feelings of satisfaction, involvement, and commitment. All around us we see examples of shoddy and imperfect work in products such as automobiles with faulty parts on in caring fewer mistakes made in government offices. Manufactures, retails stores, and service industries echo the complaint. Too many employees don’t seem to care about doing a good job.
Job satisfaction refers to the positive and negative feelings and attitudes we hold about our jobs. It depends on many work related factors, ranging from where we have to park to the sense of fulfillment we get from our daily tasks. Personal factors can also influence job satisfaction. These factors include age, health, length of job experience, emotional stability, social status, leisure activities, and family and other social relationships. Our motivation and aspirations and how well these are satisfied by our work also affect our attitudes toward our jobs.
In other words it‘s an emotional response to a job situation. It is typically influenced by how well outcomes meet or exceed personal expectations.
For some employees, job satisfaction is a stable, enduring characteristic, independent of the features of the job. Changes in job status pay, working conditions, and goals have little effect on the job satisfaction of these people. Their personal tendency toward happiness (satisfaction) or unhappiness (dissatisfaction) varies little over time and circumstances.
History of Job Satisfaction
Frederick W. Taylor? (1916), one of the pioneers, believed that workers motivation was due largely to their interest in money. He also proposed that the most satisfying situation was one in which a worker could make the most money with the least effort. Both productivity and satisfaction would result, if workers were given fair wages and work that could be done quickly without excess fatigue.
The Hawthorne researchers thought it might be the worker‘s attitudes about their work that caused their reactions. Workers were interviewed and encouraged to talk about what was important and satisfying to them and what they liked and disliked about their jobs. Most people have mixed reactions to their jobs, and many talked more about social then economic conditions. The researcher conclusion was that money actually was not very important. Most of us, they said, want the satisfaction that comes from social recognition.
During 1930s, several large-scale surveys on job satisfaction were done. The surveys were exploratory; their purpose was to deliver variables that were associated with job satisfaction.
In recent years, job satisfaction is defined as job attitude along with other attitudinal concepts, such as morale, job involvement, and organizational commitment and today it is a blend of many inter related concepts.
Meet Amarendra Bhushan, A leading Strategic Human Resource Consultent, MBA from American university of athens, greece, also editing The European journal of NRI finance magazine TRIBUNE). As one of the leading article writer, and corporate hotel professional. Advisor to various organizations and hotels. He is an elected member of south Indian hotel and restaurant federation. Now staying at city of Athens Greece. Amarendra bhushan Dhiraj Athens, Greece PH-0030-6947667507 abdhiraj@mail.gr
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