Organisational behaviour is the study of knowledge about how people, individual and groups work in an organisation. Its covers broad range of processes in which it deals with human activities in business. Organisations need to adapt theories depends on the nature of the business as it's very important because it can be a benchmark to small businesses. Brooks(2006) defined organisational as;
"Organisational behaviour is the study of human activities in an organisation with a focus on individual and group processes and actions. It involves an exploration of organisational and managerial processes in dynamic context of an organisation and is primary concerned with human implications of such activity"
In this assignment we will discuss only two behaviours which are leadership and culture, as both of the behaviours are strongly interlinked and these two are very important in an organisation as well. Besides that, we will also discuss why mangers should be aware of the two concepts.
Managers can be defined as people who work in an organisation responsible for monitoring and planning to how to tackle people in the business. They are important because they are the person who runs the business along with the directors. There should be at least one manager for each department who manages the workers. To have a good management, the managers should be well trained and disciplined. Manager should be good leader and responsible to his work. Managers play an important role in running the business so they should know which type of leadership is needed in order to make sure the business is on-going. Managers should try not to settle in a wrong type of behaviours because it can affect the business badly.
In this assignment we are also going to discuss how the most famous airline British Airways manages their company. British Airways have a very good reputation and good quality in the field. They had loads of problems but they always managed to handle them. However the recent recession had very big impact on British Airways. Every big organisation does not want to make redundancy because they can make loss for them but British Airways had faced many problems had to make redundancy which was big impact and one the issue that made British Airways loss was cutting off salaries of their staff. So here we will discuss how they managed their company with the type of behaviour.
In an organisation, leadership is a key element because good leadership can increase efficiency and performance of the co-workers. According to Brooks (2006) he defined leadership as how an entity has the power to control the group and it's not applied on the hierarchical position. Everyone can be a leader in the team. Leadership can occur in either formal or informal was, usually informal leadership can be found on every level of organisation. Vecchio(2003) pg stated, informal leader have less value in their group because they can give support to co-workers in an number of different ways. Moreover, there are many pros and cons of informal leader in a group. The main benefit they have is they know how to work with the co-workers because the string social skills they have. However it may lead to influence their peer to be less productive in order to get more rewards than their co-workers, this usually happens when co-workers are not happy with each other. Therefore there are good and bad values of informal leader. There are many different types of leaderships; two of the most important are autocratic and democratic. Autocratic are more straight than democratic. For example, in the army they want to train the soldiers discipline so they use autocratic style. There will be a level of difference between top and low level of the business. As for the democratic the subordinates have freedom to speak so its more flexible than autocratic.
There are few ideas argued from Taylor, Drucker and Mintsburg. Each of them has their own opinion about leadership. Taylor idea was focused on management work task. This is stated in Brooks (2006) whom he emphasised on application of efficiency and consistency can lead to standardisation, mostly his theories are more to improve productivity, on the other hand, Mintzburg(1973) identified ten roles that managers should fulfil handling their task basically his principle was based on observation of the manager. This is because he had seen that some managers have failed to be a manager.
Leadership plays a very important role in many ways, for example, of the manager has high-quality leadership to control his people the environment of the work will be excellent and co0workers will be high motivated. Happy workers can lead to efficiency as work will be done in time. Therefore that is why good leadership leads to better performance of the coordinates. Managers need to adapt correct type of leadership in order to achieve their goals. For example some people cannot work in a strict environment so the mangers should not adapt autocratic leadership on that platform.
In my opinion, British Airways adopt democratic type of leadership as their workers have freedom to speak. British Airways needs a really concrete type of leadership because in 2009 they faced a very bad downfall because of the global recession. Due to this, Willie Walsh the CEO needs to review their strategy as to improve it. One of it, he introduced high leadership system which changes to reward strategy. Aim of the new strategy is to support and achieve their goals efficiently. In 2008 British Airways redesigned their business, because British Airways have good business structure because in every department e will be a leader who controls it. This have also improved their communication skills as it's easy for an individual to be referred to a concerned department.
There are many type of people working in an organisation. In order to satisfy the business and subordinates the management needs to identify the type of organisational culture they have to adapt. Organisational culture can be defined in many ways one them is;"Culture by definition is elusive, intangible, implicit and taken for granted. But every organisation develops core sets of assumptions, understandings, and implicit rules that govern day to day behaviour in the work place. Until newcomers learn the rules, they are not accepted as full-fledged members of the organisation."
( RobbinsonnS. (2003): Essential of Organisational Behaviour)
He also stated that culture have several types of functions. It could be how they the management team defined the role, commitment of workers towards their jobs and also social stability.
Most of the psychologist would agree that much of what they do is concerned with the observing and assessing behaviour in order to judge whether someone is suitable for the job or not. As Andrew Carnegie a famous American entrepreneur on commented: "as I grow older I pay less attention what men say…! Just watch what they do"
Primary and recencyaffects the tendency for the information presented early or late in sequence to dominate our memory and judgement. For example a manager can probably remember name and face of the first and last applicant, a manager can also view and raise a concern if one the team member is working properly despite of fact that he worked for years in a group. Clearly these assessments provide a strong support in order hire an employee, punish co-worker for poor piece of work or promote someone. Some selections are assessed and are discriminated but they should be fair in selection or in promotion of an employee. Unfair discrimination exits when assessments decision is made on the basis of information that is not relevant to performance of the job, for example, a person race or gender or may be an employer doesn't like a guy from before.
The factors that lead to unfair discrimination have been explored most extensively for women and children of different ethnic group. For example, Virginia Schein (eg 1975) coined the phrase "think-manager -think male" when she and her colleague found identified commonly held biases that led assessors (male and female) perceive indicating of good managers in general with more stereotypically male than female characteristics. Whereas managers in general and males seen 'assertive' and women were likely to more 'accommodating'. (Arnold, John; Silvestre, Joanne; Patterson, Fiona; Robertson, Ivan; Cooper, Cary; Burnes, Bernard,(2005) WORK PSYCOLOGY).
For example, in a leather shoe company there was vacancy for manager posted in a newspaper. After the interviews the Hindu religion male was rejected because of the managers had impression that Hindus doesn't touch leather as part of their religion, the perfect example that how management was having a stereotypical image of the Hindu religion (Phattak, 1995).
In British Airways, the work culture has been changing for quite some times due to certain problems that they are facing. One of it will be the great depression that they facing, depression was the big impact in 2009 on their business. Changes made by British Airways in that circumstance there will be changes on the perceptions of the subordinates, which can change employee's motivation. Recently it was published in a newspaper that British Airways are buying senior pilots than younger pilots.
Recently Morrison Ltd managing Director has been changed who brought a very high change in the business. As before him the company shares were too low in the market but after his sign up the company have seen a major improvement in business. As he is a well trained to cater problems of the company whether they are racial, lack of motivation or any other problem. The major problem British Airways and Morrison Ltd had was their employees being stressed out. Stress is also a very major problem in many business and managers have to struggle a lot in order to keep the working environment on-going. There are many types of stress, internal stress, environmental stress, and work fatigue. Work fatigue builds up by time and can take hard toll on one body. Perceived rise in stress linked to various factors: "the nature of work has changed- it has moved from a calmer situation, where there were more people to do the job and shared tasks, towards fewer people doing many things, often for less rewards". ( kinsman and jones (2005). But stress can also be positive. You need a certain stress to perform a task. So management needs to provide some assistance where an individual can find solution for his/her stress to make the employees satisfied and committed to their work efficiently.
