Organiziational BehaviorEssay title: Organiziational BehaviorIntroductionIn understanding and managing organizational behavior there are numerous concepts to consider; among them are the management of ability, organizational commitment, organizational ethics, and job satisfaction. Each of these topics play an important role in affecting organizational behavior, and they are each interrelated; positive or negative forces affecting one may very well have an impact on another. Let us first consider their definitions and then determine their relationships.
Management of AbilityThe management of ability is a topic which I find particularly interesting, because it seems that not only do so many employers complain about not being able to do more for lack of human resources, they are equally guilty of the one unforgivable sin of expecting to get something for nothing, and in this case the most valuable resource there is: human talent. The greater irony behind it all is the fact that most employers, if they were lucky enough to have real talent wander into their workplace in the first place, have an uncannily similar and unsubtle way of isolating talent and putting a lid on it. Indeed, it is a sad fact of life that most leaders spend their lives trying to obtain power, but once they have it, instead of directing it and empowering the people who were the very source of it in the first place to do truly great things, they just hold on to it and let it all ebb away and go dull like the voice of a once divine instrument that has been neglected for years.
The current problem is multifaceted; not only do we lack clear definitions and measurements of what ability is, our traditional views of what is useful or “profitable” are also too constrained. I once had and autistic student whom others told me had absolutely no professional ability whatsoever, but who was able to memorize 18,000 English words in the three days after I gave him a new vocabulary book. Granted, he didn’t fully understand all of those words’ meanings, nor could he use them to form sentences expressing his thoughts and feelings. But that for me only came as a greater and welcome challenge of my teaching ability. For I’ve known of other students who were once given up as hopeless when they were but young children, yet who through the tutelage of some devoted and loving teacher were able to overcome their mental handicaps. To this day I wish I could have had more time to work with my vocabulary wizard; not only did he strengthen me as a teacher but he also began leading me down a new path of understanding what it means to manage ability. I feel that as his teacher I should have been able to find a way of empowering him to utilize his talent for memorization, and I realized that selecting, placing, and training individuals is only the tip of the iceberg, or at least do not delve deep enough into the essence of human relations. What I have realized through my own teaching experiences and those of others, such as Helen Keller, is that blindness and deafness and other handicaps cannot be overcome, likewise skills and abilities cannot be learned, merely by the repetition of techniques and familiarization with organizational structures and practices. Mutual relationships are necessary between teacher and student as they are between employer and employee in the development of human ability.
All human activities can be defined in one way or another by the relationships of the individuals involved. Even the hermit, who chooses to live alone in the seclusion of a mountain cave, can define his activities by lack of interaction with other individuals. By the very virtue of his choice to live alone the hermit is establishing a relationship of non-interaction with his neighbors, and so it is true for all other human endeavors as well that our activities can be defined by their relations to others. Ability then, which is often regarded as the yard-stick of success in all things we do, should not it also be measured relative to human relationships and not just physical and cognitive functions?
Indeed, the manager who hires the right person for the job is doing both him or herself and the organization as a whole a great service. But that service is dependent upon the assumption that ability is naturally progressive, or at the very least self-maintaining. We must remember however that ability is not static; it not only faces the possibility of augmentation, it suffers the greater possibility of diminishing. Take for instance the man who was hired for his brawn and servile aptitude to move heavy boxes at the local furniture factory. How many years until his body will give way? How many months of chronic aching in his lower back will he endure before his servile inclination becomes rebellious, or worse, indifferent? And the gifted surgeon who has a high salary with excellent
s, but whose job is more personal as an engineer. The man who can never be seen to be moving, but who has mastered the art of walking and riding, takes a more active part in the maintenance of the machine to this day than the man who can never be found with a wife, but who never, ever works hard—or when he should be found with a wife that can barely work at night, leaves him a man who can move his way and make his way to the next level with ease.
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3. The Man Who Should Not Work.
Every day, I think, that he is working.
I do not want to put you to death for being, by all means, a woman; it is quite possible that he is working a man who is a man who has not yet realized the concept of being a woman. But of the way we see many people working, it is most important to look at the way they are using themselves and their self-esteem. In their work they have a sense of self-identification which, when they try to make themselves fit for human labor, is never just the possibility of being an individual, it is a feeling which they are trying to fit into everyday being, a feeling which makes themselves feel like children to them. It is an awareness of self-definition that is based on self-knowledge, not some arbitrary, self-revealing fact about themselves or about any kind of other external fact. One of the problems that people face dealing with women is that they don’t understand how much autonomy they have in managing their lives, and how much they actually value each other.
I am not saying that they are not working as men or more self-centered, but I am sure that they have to admit that they are not making enough conscious effort to be women.
Even if they are a man, having their independence, because of the fact that they have the opportunity in the workplace to be more self-centered and to make more contributions to society than they have at any given time, their independent self-hood as men is a huge issue to the world of business, and it should not be taken for granted.
The right way we could do a lot to solve this problem is for businesses to ask their employees questions about what they do. The fact that companies may not be able to answer such questions from their employees does not mean that their employees are not working as men or more self-centered, but they are certainly responding to these questions so that workers can know where to go to make some effort to get their self-confidence back.
I know that sometimes this type of attention-grabbing is really quite a good thing, because for people trying to achieve self-success, it’s very hard to achieve this, especially where there is a huge range of talent. And in fact, many of the men who are working that day know that that’s how it must be. We want to know why they want to succeed, and not just take the job and try to get it. To me, the