The History of Organizational Behavior

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OB topics have clearly been of interest to many people for a long time. Let’s briefly review some history to better understand the origins of the scientific study of OB.

Formal study of OB began in the 1890s, following the industrial relations movement spawned by Adam Smith’s introduction of the division of labor. In the 1890s, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and Frederick Winslow Taylor identified the positive effects of precise instructions, goal setting, and rewards on motivation. Their ideas became known as scientific management, and are often considered the beginning of the formal study of OB.

This interest was spawned by the discovery of the Hawthorne effect in the 1920s and 1930s. The Hawthorne effect occurs when people improve some aspect of their behavior or performance simply because they know they are being assessed.

George Elton Mayo, founder of the human relations movement initiated by the Hawthorne studies, explained this finding by saying that the workers tried harder because of the sympathy and interest of the observers. Mayo stated that the reason workers are more strongly motivated by informal things is that individuals have a deep psychological need to believe that their organization cares about them. Essentially, workers are more motivated when they believe their organization is open, concerned, and willing to listen.

Rather than viewing workers as interchangeable parts in mechanical organizations as the scientific management movement had done, the human relations movement viewed organizations as cooperative systems and treated workers’ orientations, values, and feelings as important parts of organizational dynamics and performance. The human relations movement stressed that the human dimensions of work, including group relations, can supersede organizational norms and even an individual’s self-interests.

Harvard social work professor and management consultant Mary Parker Follett was known as a “prophet of management” because her ideas were ahead of her time. Follett discovered a variety of phenomena, including creativity exercises such as brainstorming, the “groupthink” effect in meetings (in which faulty decisions are made because group members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus by neglecting to critically analyze and test ideas), and what later became known as “management by objectives” and “total quality management.”

W. Edwards Deming is known as the “guru of quality management.” Deming taught Japanese industrialists statistical process control and quality concepts. His classic 1986 book describes how to do high-quality, productive, and satisfying work. Deming’s plan-do-check-act cycle of continuous improvement promoted the adoption of fourteen principles to make any organization efficient and capable of solving almost any problem.

This brief history helps to set the stage for an understanding of organizational behavior.