In the early part of the twentieth century, French industrialist Henri Fayol (author of the theory of Fayolism) wrote that all managers perform five functions: planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling. Today, we have condensed these management functions to four: planning, organizing, leading and controlling. The individuals performing these functions are called managers. While performing these functions, the managers must learnthree managerial skills: conceptual skills, technical skills, and interpersonal/human skills.
The mental ability to analyse and diagnose complex situations is called conceptual skill. The ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise is known as a technical skill, whereas, the ability to work with, understand and motivate other people both individually and in groupsis said to be an interpersonal skill. This article shall expound some more about human skills and the contemporary challenges in the modern management era.
Until the late 1980s, business schoolcurricula emphasized the technical aspects of management, focusing on economics, accounting, finance and quantitative techniques. The course work in human behaviour and people skills received relatively less attention. Over the last four decades, however, business schools and organizations have come to realize the significant role of human skills in determining the managers’ and organizations’ effectiveness.
One common thread runs through the functions, skills and various approaches to management that each of these recognizes the paramount importance of managing people whether it is called the leading function, interpersonal role, human/people skill or human resource management (HRM). It is clear that managers develop their people skills to be effective and successful. They ought to set goals to move from average to successful to effective managers. For that purpose, the management experts and leaders came up with the concept of organizational behaviour (OB).
Organizational Behaviour is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups and structureshave on behaviour within organization, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving organizational effectiveness. It studies three determinants of behaviour: individuals, groups and structure. Concisely, OB is the study of what people do in an organization and how their behaviour affects the organisational performance. It is specifically concerned with the employment related situations such as jobs, work, absenteeism, employment turnover, productivity, human performance, motivation, leader behaviour and power.
Each of us is a student of behaviour. Unfortunately, the casual or common sense approach to reading others can often lead to erroneous predictions. However, one can improve his/her predictive ability by supplementing intuition with a more systematic approach. Hence, Organizational Behaviour is an applied behaviouralscience built on contributions from a number of behaviouraldisciplines mainly: psychology, social psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Psychology’s contributions have been mainly at the individual or micro level of analysis, while the other disciplines have contributed to the understanding of macro concepts such as group processes and organizations.
After the industrial revolution, like every sector, the field of management sciences has evolved with various new thoughts and concepts including organizational behaviour. Keeping in view the increasing trends of evolution and revolution in the world of OB, there have been various challenges before managers to manage workplace diversity, improve people skills, enhance employee well-being at work, create a positive work environment and improve ethical behaviour. A typical employee in the 1960s and 1970s showed up at a specified workplace Monday through Friday and worked for clearly defined 8-9 hours. That’s no longer true in 21st century.
According to a recent study, one in four employees show signs of burnout, and two in three report high stress levels and fatigue. Organizations that do not help their people achieve work-life balance will find it increasingly difficult to attract and retain the most capable and motivated employees. Therefore, in the existing trend of complex, huge and networked organizational structures, the organizations of every region of the world are required to hire sound OB experts to continuously investigate individual and collective behaviours, to analyse and rightly point out and evaluate risk factors so as to timely address those to ensure maximum productivity effectiveness of the organizations. Sometimes they do this by creating pleasing physical environments with attractive workstations, workplace perks or highly subsidised informal activities to boost up and keep the moral of workers high.
The managers and their organizations are also responding to contemporary OB challenges like unethical behaviour in a number of ways. They are writing and distributing codes of ethics to guide employees through dilemmas. They are offering seminars, workshops, training programs to improve ethical behaviour among employees. In today’s multi-functional and multi-structured organizational designs and the era of globalization, managers must create an ethically healthy climate for workers, where they can do their work productively with minimal ambiguity about right versus wrong behaviours. The companies that promote a strong ethical mission, encourage employees to behave with integrity and provide strong leadership can influence employee decisions to behave ethically.
Contrary to this, those organizations who ignore the OB disciplines often halt to grow, move downwards or totally collapse. Unfortunately, I see a majority of the public sector as well few private organizations in Pakistan on this path.
