What is Organizational Dynamics?

Organizational dynamics is another word for organizational behavior, a cross-discipline field that deals with how people behave in an organized group setting, such as a place of business. The man who coined the term and fostered the study of this discipline, Chester Barnard, was one of the first to see that people act differently in an organized group setting than they do in other situations, such as private gatherings at home. The study of organizational behavior focuses entirely on the behavior of individuals within their assigned roles in an organization.

How Organizational Dynamics Began

In the early days of research into organizational behavior, psychologists began encouraging organizations to pay attention to the emotional needs of their members. This shift in thinking started in the early 1930s, and it eventually produced the emphasis on teamwork, employee motivation and goal orientation that exists today in business environments. By the end of the 1930s, research into organizational behavior yielded many useful new concepts, including the field of operations research, which is the use of math and statistics in optimizing business operations. This idea became more important throughout the twentieth century, and in the 1970s, organizational behavior began to use math and statistics more often, creating the new fields of contingency theory, informal organization and bounded rationality.

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This relatively new discipline is an attempt to make the study of employee behavior within an organization more scientific. Researchers try to create a work environment in which employees have the proper motivation so that their behavior is as efficient for the company as possible. The emotional needs of employees can end up costing businesses as much money as inaccurate market data or incorrect business forecasts, if the employees aren’t as productive as they could be. Some of the tactics organizational behavior scientists use include changing how employees are compensated, reorganizing how group members work with one another and finding new ways to evaluate employee performance.

What Is the Purpose of Organizational Behavior?

While this field uses many concepts from psychology, it also encompasses ideas from sociology, business management, mathematics and statistics. It’s an interdisciplinary subject that draws from organizational theory as well as the study of human resources. Researchers in this field break it down into three levels, which include the micro, meso and macro levels. The micro level focuses on individual influence within a group, while the macro level focuses on the group as a whole. The meso level studies how influential groups within groups form, as well as group networks and culture. A fourth level of study, the field level, focuses on the interactions between all individuals within an organization.

Organizational research is a science, and while it deals with immeasurable factors such as human behavior, it also relies on quantitative analysis, including computer modeling. Organizational computer models can simulate the interactions between workers, as well as a wide range of other uncertain variables, by using probability theory. Researchers studying organizational behavior must have a firm grasp of statistical modeling and some knowledge of computer programming to set up mathematical models of an organization.

Successful businesses don’t take unnecessary risks on factors that can be controlled, and scientists who know how to use statistical models can remove a lot of uncertainty from an organization. The study of organizational dynamics is as important to businesses as the similar fields of operations research and human resources.