Organiziational Behavior

Introduction

In 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 Ability

The 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 benefits and enticing perks, how long will she last amidst a bureaucracy of acrimonious individuals bent against innovation? From these perspectives we can see that the management of ability actually has little to do with ability itself and more to do with the other factors affecting organizational behavior.

Organizational Commitment

Because human talent and ability are not set variables, we cannot assume that by merely attracting talent and getting ability through the door we will be profiting on our human resources. If you look at it from this perspective you will have a better view of the irony behind the overzealousness of attracting talent in the workplace: Talent is in demand. There is a lot of talent in the world, and individuals and organizations are willing to pay a lot of money for it; take professional sports for instance. However, if all organizations spent all of their time and resources in the pursuit of attracting talent, what we would end up with would not be a body of different organizations pooling their creative talents together to actualize common goals, instead we would end up with retirement homes for the talented to grow old and feeble in, and the human resources themselves would lose their value, becoming akin to little more than old stamp collections that people would occasionally take out and look at and say, “Oh yeah, remember, that was a good one: He was talented!” Can you imagine a professional baseball team that only did recruiting but no playing?

In this instance I think professional sports teams have the balance right, and I think it is a wonder that more businesses have not used those management models in their own experimentations with organizational structure. There seems to be a good balance in all of the recruiting, training, and performance processes. In particular what seems to set sports teams apart from business