Cisco Management Accounting

A friend suggest that organizational behavior courses are useful only to people who will enter management careers. I don't agree with his opinion.

According to Moorhead and Griffin (2010,P3) Organizational behavior is the study of human behavior in organizational settings, of the interface between human behavior and the organization, and of the organization itself.(1) Organizational Behavior gives us a tool kit of knowledge that is relevant across an array of sectors, and insights that can help us to improve tour performance in all roles within a company, and to rethink company design for better functioning. Tools from Organizational Behavior can be used to help companies create positive and effective organizational cultures.

According to Moorhead and Griffin (2010,P5) The importance of Organization Behavior may now be clear, but we should nonetheless take a few moments to make it even more explicit. Most people are born and educated in organizations, acquire most of their material possessions from organizations, and die as members of organizations.(2) Organization Behavior courses have many topics, including leadership, cultural diversity, power and influence, team interactions, and organizational design. Those topics can help us easy enter management careers. Someone who are committed to serving as positive change agents within companies can use the Organization Behavior toolkit to help them achieve their goals. Because Organizational Behavior courses call upon students to scrutinize their own motivations and behavior, and their relationships to others and to systems as a whole, which are located in broader social and cultural systems. The tool kit of Organizational Behavior can help managers convert the lessons of organizational change into real organizational learning. These tools are essential as companies work to reshape themselves to be more equitable and effective producers of goods and services and better contributors to society.

An article from A Closer Look at Business Eduction(2009) "Organizational behavior" published On OB's benefits for an array of students: "'Interpersonal Conflict, Politics & Power in Organizations' tends to attract a varied group of students, many of whom are not specializing in Organizational Behavior. The students are generally quite open-minded, and they learn a lot from each other because as a group they've had such a range of experiences and come from so many different places. I also teach a core course for first-year MBA students, most of whom will not end up specializing in OB. I've had students tell me that they find the class useful because it gives them a different set of lenses through which to look at their work. It helps them cultivate interpersonal sensitivity, as well as skills like communication, negotiation and team-building, and to think conceptually about the best frameworks with which to design systems." (accessed April 2009) (3)

I think a number of important trends in the study of organizational behavior are the focus of research efforts. First, a variety of research studies have examined topics at the group level of analysis rather than exclusively at the individual level of analysis.Another research trend is an increasing focus on personality as a factor in individual- and group-level performance. This stems from the movement toward more organic organization designs, increased supervisory span of control, and more autonomous work designs. All of these factors serve to increase the role that personality plays as a determinant of outcomes such as stress, cooperative or deviant behavior, and performance, so organizational behavior courses not useful only to people who will enter management careers.

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