Organizational Behavior (OB) for business administration or security setting involves identifying unique behavioral queues and implications. The goal is to help the management emphasize behavior that reflects the company culture better and create an environment that reflects the same. For security personnel, the primary objectives include improving upon practical goals, such as the teamwork of its employees, organizational leadership, overall motivation, and organizational change and development.
OB and its scientific application can help with a widespread problem in understanding the conflict between managers and subordinates, especially new ones. There is a cultural difference that the new manager must deal with, not to mention how the new approach towards the managerial role also contributes to the conflict.
OB helps the management understand the reason behind a specific type of behavior with its scientific application. The process involves observing a situation, creating a hypothesis as a plan for dealing with a particular issue, theorizing it for practical application, and implementing the hypothesis with respect to the organizational objective. This helps the management identify causes and effects that may result in individualistic behavior, either by an individual or group. The management is also able to identify triggers that lead to collective within an organization to create a bespoke atmosphere and to influence business performance.
Ideally, there are five benefits that managers can draw from organizational behavior:
1. Understanding organizational impact due to subordinate behavior.
2. Improving subordinate morale and motivation.
3. Improve relationship within the organization.
4. Improve and predict subordinate behavior.
5. Improve use of human resources.
By combining organizational behavior with the scientific method, security guards are able to understand the relationship within organization, mitigate internal threats, and perform more efficiently.
Organizational behavior can be broadly as the interaction trends between individuals and groups of an organization. When combined with other management techniques can be crucial for handling organizational conflict. With the correct type of organizational behavior research, the management can identify the best ways to motivate employees and achieve collective goals.
While the study helps managers identify behavior and performance in the workplace, combined with the scientific method, security guards can identify potential risks to internal threats, ethical issues, performance hindrance, and reasons for mistrust within the organization. The “research” element within typically involves five essential skills:
1. Finding positive behaviors, also known as pro-social behaviors.
2. Creating a positive workplace culture (or a pro-social culture) improves collaboration towards a specific goal.
3. Motivation subordinates and peers towards the pro-social culture.
4. Finding negative behaviors, also known as antisocial behaviors
5. Assessing the root cause and stimuli of the antisocial behaviors and addressing before implementing organizational change.
These five skills don’t need to be implemented in a specific order. Considering the problem of manager-subordinate conflict, these five organizational behavior skills can help by:
1. Identifying the negative behavior triggers, i.e., the reason for conflict.
2. Assessing the stimuli that cause the conflict to flare up. Individuals may be instructed to either stay out of each other’s way or avoid certain triggers that lead to conflict. Managers should be trained to let go of their ego, while employees should be instructed to limit contact without influencing operations.
3. Finding pro-social behaviors that could either avoid conflict or resolve it. This may include finding activities that could either improve their relationship or promote an environment where the two don’t have to contact each other. However, the latter is not a sustainable solution.
4. Encouraging collaboration by motivating both parties to bring the issue out into the open. The source of conflict can also be eliminated by ensuring quicker completion of a given project if that is the root cause of conflict.
5. Motivating other employees and peers of all conflicting parties to promote an environment where they are encouraged to come to a solution as quickly possible.
OB research has proven to be one of the most effective forms of dealing with conflict or organizational downturns. Furthermore, the process has also been used quite extensively to manage change, be it downsizing, mergers, or expansion.
The scientific research method includes six key steps that can be integrated with OB practices.
1. Making an observation.
2. Asking questions and collecting information about the primary query.
3. Forming a hypothesis, i.e., how the conflict can be resolved.
4. Making a prediction based on the hypothesis, i.e., the potential solution that the OB hypothesis may bring about.
5. Create a method of testing the prediction. This is where OB result are implemented practically.
6. Repeat until there is no room for error and the new hypothesis is able to draw specific results.
When combining organizational behavior and scientific research, their hypotheses should always be taken with a grain of salt. There are always elements in any conflict, including the manager-employee conflict that security guards may be aware of. It is important that all elements are considered before concluding, i.e., repeating the OB process at least 2-3 times.
A very important consideration that security managers must keep in mind when using the OB research is that it needs to remain objective. Failure to do so might lead to an increase in employee turnover, as the situation may end up getting worse over time.
There are several ways security managers can use OB research to reduce conflicts. Some practical examples include:
• Talking to people who are looking to quit because of a said conflict
• Talking to those who are still present
• Consulting with direct managers
• Measuring job satisfaction via surveys
• Examine the point of turnover and what can be done to avoid it
• Re-examine company polices and culture considering the resignations
These examples are only limited to the first aspect of the scientific method that should ideally be involved with organizational behavior research for conflict resolution: once security managers are able to answer all these questions (and other like), it is important that the collected data is complied and turned into a hypothesis.
The hypothesis created should target the issue directly and be conclusive, i.e., if a third party goes through the hypothesis, they should see it working as solution to a given scenario. All these factors should come into play, and the solution should target the source primarily and the question above as a secondary goal.
Security managers resolve, intuition, and authority play important roles here: The hypothesis needs to be practically tested to see whether the research design is effective. Organizational behavior best practices suggest that the solution may be implemented either via social means or via authority.
Both methods have different results, and therefore, the decision of which method to choose should depend entirely on the organizational culture. For example, in the military, brute force through authoritativeness would work best, but the same cannot be said for every private company.
By creating a case study, security managers can easily go through the remaining steps and test out further ends of the OB research. Managers may or may not choose to tell the employee about the study, depending on the company culture. Once the result have been derived, the security manager should consult with other managers to make sure they didn’t miss anything and whether the data backs the manager’s hypothesis studies, and results.