Multidisciplinary Nature Of OB Commerce Essay

Organizational behavior is the study of the behavior of the people in an organization. It is the study of the interaction between the people at workplace and also the organization itself. “Organizational behavior could be described as the study of how individuals and organizations act and how do these organizations and individuals apply knowledge. Further explaining organization behavior uses system approach and studies these characteristics by assuming the person/organization as the whole person or whole organization. The core of organization behavior is to build better relationships by achieving organization objectives, individual objectives and social objectives” (Hiriyappa, 2009).

Multidisciplinary Nature of OB:

Organizational behavior is consisting of multidisciplinary nature which is (Robbins, 2010):

Psychology: the study of the individuals working in the organization under the stated rules and regulation of the organization. It also help to study the individual’s learning, personality, emotions, perception, leadership effectiveness, decision making power, job satisfaction, attitude measurements and job stress.

Sociology: the study of small group’s behaviors in the organization. Like the people who are working together on a project so that the group behavior can be analyzed. It also helps to study the behavioral changes, attitude changes, and ways of communication, group processes and group decision making powers of the individuals in a group.

Anthropology: at the organizational level, it is the study of the cooperate culture of the organization. It also helps to find out the comparative values, comparative attitudes, cross- culture analysis and organizational environmental power.

Economics: this study depends upon the rational decision making of the organization.

Political science: it depends upon the study of coalitions and alliances, power and conflict of an organization in the surrounded environment.

Organizational Behavior: Major Goals

By going through all these steps an organization achieves the major goals like:

It helps to understand and control the behavior of the workers in an organization.

It helps to study the behavior in the workplace, interaction between the people and the organization, and the organization itself.

It helps to study the habits of the workers against their given tasks, explains how the workers do the tasks and how can managers’ overview their performances.

It determines the ethics of an organization to accomplish the desired the goals of an organization.

It helps to study the cooperate culture of the organization.

It basically focuses on the study of beliefs and customs of an organization.

Opportunities of OB:

Because of understanding OB it has become the most important component of the organizations. Such as (Robbins, 2010):

A large group of people of different races, cultures and ethnic groups work together.

At workplace more women are seen.

The typical type of employee is old fashion now.

Workers who are flexible and capable of work against the global competition are now seen in an organization.

Globalization and OB

As the world has become the global village so the job of the managers is getting changed. An outstanding research among the entire scientist taken by Tomlinson 1999, who examined globalization affects on culture and how culture affects on globalization. “According to him, culture is the way we interpret our experience and guide our actions, while globalization is a major driving force in modern conditions, which “enforces” the change”, by  (Marković, 2012).

Responding to Globalization:

Organizational Behavior (OB) is responding to the globalization very rapidly because it’s the need of the hour to along the changes in the environment. Because of globalization the duties of the managers are getting changed so that they can compete in the market and provide the goods and services on time and according to the desires of the customers. OB is responding to the globalization in following ways (Robbins, 2010):

Increase in International assignments

Working with people from different cultures

Overlooking outsourcing labor to countries with cheap labor

Management of a diverse workforce

Changing demographics

Improving the quality and productivity

Improving customers services

Helping the employees to balance the work- life conflicts

Improving ethical Behavior of workers

Improving people skill

Stimulating innovation and change

Globalization and Individual Performance

As learned from the case study, in the new era of globalization, individual performance is the key issue whose primary objective is to present a strategic framework for human resource management as a response to the growing interaction of individual performance and globalization in business. It is that if the human resource managers want to manage the workers for competitive edge in this era of globalization than they have to introduce and implement such strategic HRM policies and practices. To asses an individual’s performance in an organization performance appraisal is the tool used by the managers.

Performance appraisal plays a very important role in continuous development of an organization. In today’s competitive environment benchmarking and developing continuously to face the fierce competition organizations must indulge in performance monitoring.

To monitor the performance of employees of an organization the organization must conduct performance appraisals on continuous basis. The process of performance appraisal could be understood with the help of following figure-1. In simple words “Performance Appraisal is the process that involves following:

(1) Creating SOP’s standards of operation

(2) Analyzing and assessing the employees performance based on those SOP’s

(3) Sharing feedback of the performance analysis with respective employees to remove problems and enabling the employee for continuous development (Gary Dessler, 2011).

PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL

Figure – Performance Appraisal

Importance of Performance Appraisal:

There are a few reasons that define the importance of performance appraisal and why it is necessary. Those are:

Mostly in the organization base pay and promotional decisions are made on the bases of the performance of the employees which is assessed by performance appraisal.

It helps to covert the employer’s strategic goals into employee’s specific goals

It helps the employers to develop the plan, eliminate the deficiencies at employee’s level and reinforce the employees to do the right things.

It also helps the employees to find their strengths and weakness and serve as a useful career planning process.

Methods of Performance Appraisal:

There are few methods which are used in the organizations to appraise the employees. According to (Misra, 2009) the Evaluation Techniques are as follows:

Ranking Method: in this one person is ranked against the given task in a group.

Paired Comparison Method: in this method each person is compared with all other employees.

Forced Distribution Method: in this method the rater appraise each person according to the predefined distribution scale.

Group appraisal: in this method a group of appraises evaluate the performance of the employees.

Management by Objective (MBO): In this method, appraise set the specific measurable goals with each employees and then periodically examine the progress of employees against the set objectives.

Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale: is a tool which could be specially used to determine a numerical rating scale which could explain good or bad behavior.

Performance Problem:

A performance problem can be defined as the gap between the achieved goals and the desired goals of an employee. In other words it occurs when the employee is failing to achieve the desired goals of the job.

Challenges of Performance Management:

In the present day, where globalization has its major effects on the organizations, performance management system is facing real challenges. Such as:

Lack of cultural excellence that motivates the employees

Less motivation may cause the effect on the overall achievement of the desired goals of the organization.

Latest technology and training of latest techniques should be given to the employees at all levels.

Clear career path for talented employees should be given.

The talented workers should be given with the opportunities of doing new challenges

The managers should empower the subordinates so that flow of information and power of making decision at any level should be promoted.

Performance Management System in Smaller Organizations:

As learned from the case study, it is assessed that the performance appraisal system is helpful in smaller organizations because it is easy for the managers to follow the appraisal system as they know each employee personally. But it is important for the manager to not to adopt a lengthy procedure to do it. It is important that the manager should be well trained and does all the steps according to the defined rules and regulations. On the contrary the manager, who is not trained and less motivated towards doing appraisal, will destroy the whole process and the benefits of this procedure.

Performance Appraisal: Problem and Solution

Performance appraisal should be done in the objective manner, without any pressure and without any error. According to (Gary Dessler, 2011) there are certain problems which affect the appraisal method and there solutions. Such as:

Unclear objective standards:

To improve the reliability and validity of the appraisal system it is important the objectives of the required goals should be clear to the employees so that the required result could be achieved. As the recent changes in the appraisal system involve more parties like subordinates, peers and customers feedback so the system should be accurate and the objectives should be clear to the employees. The only solution to this problem is that, objectives to both the appraiser and the employee should be clear.

Halo Effects:

Performance appraisal has a shortfall which must be brought into notice while rating subordinates supervisors may tend to bias their decisions based on the rating of one trait to the other, (Gary Dessler, 2011). In other words the employer, on the bases of favoritism, may rate employee higher scores. As learned from the case study that the appraiser, if thinks that the employee is good in one important aspect, will give him or her higher marks in every field ignoring the bad aspects of him or her.

Horn’s Effect:

On the contrary, horn’s effect is when the appraiser rates the employee bad scores on the basis of one serious fault of him or her, ignoring the good aspects of the employee. This may cause to select the bad employee over the good ones. The solution to both Horn’s and halo effect is this, that the appraiser should be told to rate the employee on a single trait before going on to the next step.

Leniency:

This problem occur when the supervisor consistently rate an employee high or low scores. This leniency should be avoided so that the consistent high or low scores would not destroy the overall reputation of the employee. The solution for this is that the supervisors should tell the appraisers that the consistent rating is banned or allowed up to a certain level.

Biasness:

It happens when the appraiser biases while doing the ratings this could be on the basis of age, race and sex, which cause affect on the ratings of the employee. This should be avoided because this will also cause the selection of the bad employees over the good ones.

Recommendations:

As this is the globalization era, the appraisal process should be used as a scientific method approach. It is observed that the managers in today’s world view performance evaluation as a minor portion in their performance management program. Such negligence will force the organization to lose competitive edge consequently stopping continuous development of the firm’s employees. Therefore the report shows the importance of performance appraisal in the success of an organization and achieving specialty of labor. The following steps should be followed in this regard:

Organizational alignment: this is necessary to ensure that the workforce is completely aligned with the strategic goals of the organization. Organization alignment is what keeps the organization on track to achieving its goals, therefore requires a careful and regular analysis and feedback to make the required changes.

Communication expectations: the communication between the employer and employees should be very clear and concise so that the flow of information among them is without any hurdle. Communication plays a vital role in multinational and national organizations, removing cross cultural or cross border communication glitches is very vital.

Employee input: employee input is very necessary in the appraisal process. Employee should give the total input so that the desired objectives can be achieved. Employee input helps in resolving issues hence motivating employees to work and become specialized in their fields consequently helping the organization to achieve economies of scale.

Set SMART goals: the goals should be Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant and Time bound (SMART). This is the key of getting the desired objectives. Unrealistic goals is been a problem of most of the failures in the industry, setting targets for employees which are unrealistic and hard or may be impossible to achieve will also de-motivate the workforce.