For decades analysts have been trying to find the perfect formula for workplace satisfaction. Dr R K Powar explains how organisational behaviour can bring together essential cogs in the workplace to improve levels of productivity.

All businesses from the smallest enterprise to the largest of corporations consist of people designed to fulfil human objectives, and organisational behaviour seeks to understand how best to do this. Therefore, organisational behaviour can be described as the study of how individuals, groups and structure affect and are affected by behaviour within organisations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge towards improving an organisation’s effectiveness.

Management as a discipline, along with other disciplines, has been around for centuries. However, serious interest in the study of management did not emerge until the turn of the twentieth century, making organisational behaviour a relatively new subject. Also, the initial players interested in studying organisations were economists, who generally looked at management practices as efficient and effective, focusing on economic policies and industrial structures, rather than the internal structure of organisations.

A brief history

The Scientific Management Approach: this was developed by F W Taylor, who worked on the assumption that human beings are largely motivated by money. Taylor advised that managers pay monetary incentives to efficient workers, making employees work harder and faster, reducing them to machines. As this approach did not take account of the human facet of labour, it was heavily criticised and today is considered inadequate.

The Bureaucratic Approach: while the scientific approach worked on the interaction between workers and the task, this theory focused on devising the best organisational structure for workers and managers. Max Weber, the theory’s most prominent advocate, proposed a ‘bureaucratic form’ of structure which he thought would work for all organisations.

The Hawthorne Studies: The above two approaches were heavily criticised as they failed to take into consideration that the human aspect was important in the workplace. Whilst the Hawthorne Studies have had their share of criticism, they had a dramatic input in the field of organisational behaviour, highlighting that workers are influenced by social factors and the behaviour of the individual is influenced by the group.

Over the years, the study and practice of behaviour in the workplace has developed from initial human resource theory to the system approach and on to organisational behaviour, which has grown through creating alliances with disciplines such as leadership and anthropology. Today organisational behaviour is highly influential in the business world with practitioners like Peter Drucker and Peter Senge, who turned academic research into business principles – please refer to the article on the concept of the Learning Organisation in the April 2010 edition of Pharmaceutical Field.

The importance to pharma

Organisational behaviour is important to help us learn about ourselves and how to deal with others. It needs to be noted that people are complex and, whilst they have a need to acquire, individuals are multi-faceted and work for several reasons, such as the need to grow and develop and bond with others.

The pharmaceutical industry, like all industries, is in a constant state of flux faced with business competiveness and the need for increased networking and globalisation – where there is a greater need for individuals to work with people from diverse backgrounds and cultural values. Consequently, the pharmaceutical industry needs to be increasingly concerned with organisational behaviour, as it needs all employees to perform well to sustain success and in a nutshell become more productive.

At a practical level, these are some of the advantages offered by organisational behaviour:

Having more self-insight and perceptual skills to bring about the desired outcomes: The various facets of organisational behaviour can be used by all of us to understand our own feelings and behaviours. Starting from the premise of understanding ourselves is important in helping us understand others. The concepts of organisational behaviour can be used to bring about the desired outcome behaviour in others by sometimes modifying our feelings and behaviours towards others.

The ability to do this would be beneficial in all walks of life, and especially in the pharmaceutical industry. For example:

• Manager to employee: Having a greater awareness/understanding and appreciation will help bosses modify their management style to lead their staff appropriately to attain goals and hence become more productive.
• Motivate self and others: Organisations that perform well have a culture that promotes ongoing growth, learning and development. At the core of organisational behaviour paradigms rests the notion of how to bring out the best in others, so developing a good understanding of the principles of organisational behaviour and putting them into practice can help with motivation.
• Managers and employees’ interaction with external customers and stakeholders: Having a good understanding of organisational behaviour can help managers develop a better understanding of processes. This in turn can help managers interact with the various individuals outside the organisation, such as suppliers, competitors and customers. Managers can gain a better understanding of the environment in which they are working by using organisational behaviour to help them appreciate how and why things happen, giving them the advantage of being ahead in today’s competitive environment.

The ability to analyse situations correctly: A good understanding of the concepts of organisational behaviour can help staff and managers analyse situations correctly. All too often misunderstandings arise when situations haven’t been correctly understood. This can prove useful in the following ways:

• Avoid/manage conflict: A small amount of conflict can prove useful sometimes. However, where possible, if it’s likely to be destructive it needs to be avoided in the first instance, or be managed appropriately. With the sheer size of most pharmaceutical companies, the number of employees and the numerous relationships with the various stakeholders the probability of conflict arising can be quite high. Therefore, being able to curb this is of significant importance for the human relations and media departments.
• Better observational skills: This can be extremely useful for sales teams that need to be able to pick up on the buying signals, deal with obstructions and work with the complex set of interrelationships and dynamics that exist within the NHS.
• Recruitment and retention of skilled staff: A great deal of time and expenditure is involved in recruiting the right staff and the majority of the techniques and methods to do this employ organisational behaviour concepts in the form of questionnaires, psychological profiling and role-playing exercises at interviews. People work for several reasons and a better grasp of organisational behaviour concepts could be applied to retain staff, instead of developing them and then allowing them to leave and take the skills and knowledge they have gained elsewhere.

Limitations of organisational behaviour

• Having an understanding of organisational behaviour can help in situations of conflict but not eradicate them completely.
• Organisational behaviour is resistant to change due to human cognitive processes and defensive routines which can lead to ‘behavioural biases’, where the focus is on satisfying employees but overlooking the objectives of an organisation.
• The law of diminishing returns also applies to organisational behaviour: as this needs to be practised to an optimum point, when that point is exceeded there is a decline in returns. This highlights that organisational effectiveness is achieved when all variables work together.
• In some cases the knowledge and techniques of organisational behaviour could be used in a manipulative manner.

The future of organisational behaviour

Organisational behaviour has evolved over the years: initially from the need to create productive organisations, followed by a philosophical desire by many people to create more humanistic workplaces. Although organisational behaviour has certain limitations, hopefully by building a better working climate for people there are many advantages which should have longterm effects, not only in the quality of an individual’s life, but in improved harmony among people and among organisations.

The future success of organisational behaviour revolves around the related processes of theory development, research and managerial practice in areas such as communication between and among foreign business operations, cultural differences and motivation techniques in different countries, career development in the global economy, and the differences in leadership and decisionmaking practices in various countries.

The challenge faced by the pharmaceutical industry is to employ organisational behaviour to bring the various stakeholders and actors involved with different values together to create processes by which it can be efficient and effective in exceeding goals and objectives.

Dr R K Powar is the founder of R11OSY CONSULTANTS.

It would seem that there’s a job perfectly suited to match the personality of each of us. However, despite various tests and metrics introduced to discover what role best suits certain individuals, Ian McGarry reveals it’s not quite that simple.

The words ‘know thy self’ were reported to have been inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Attributed to the Greek philosopher Thales, this proclamation urged the ancient to develop a greater level of self reflection and insight. Despite our obvious similarities as humans we are temperamentally very dissimilar from each other.

Understanding why we are so different has, over the centuries, vexed the minds of philosophers, doctors and psychologists alike. One of the earliest attempts to account for behavioural differences dates back over two thousand years. Galen, a Roman physician, distinguished four temperaments; melancholic (sombre, unhappy), choleric (irritable and easily angered), phlegmatic (apathetic, sluggish) and sanguine (cheerful, optimistic) which he thought, incorrectly, provided an insight into how individuals should be treated medically. His theories still survive in various forms to this day, though thankfully not so much in medicine!

The temperamental differences that obsessed Galen are the basis of what we have come to term our ‘personalities’. Over time, there have been numerous attempts to theorise, define and measure these qualities. It is only in the last hundred years or so that we have developed the psychological and statistical tools to move beyond speculation and metaphysics into more scientifically quantifiable concepts.

What is personality?

Personality refers to those enduring characteristics and traits that enable a person to be recognised as a distinct individual. Although not the whole picture, psychologists generally agree that personality plays an important role in how people behave. Many would urge caution however in assuming that personality underscores all behaviour, and this is especially true concerning our ability to perform and achieve success.

Though we may broadly agree what personality means there are still plenty of differing approaches taken to both quantifying and measuring its specific facets. A cursory glance at all of the models available to psychologists and organisations reveals a plethora of different personality tests all claiming to highlight the most revealing components of who we are.

More often, psychologists and researchers rely on a five-factor model developed by Costa and McCrae. Often referred to as ‘the big five’, this is available as an assessment tool (NEO-PI-R). This evidence-based model maintains that all the various structures of personality can be represented across the following five dimensions:

In short, your personality can be successfully represented as a measure of the combination of, and the level at, which you score against each dimension. But, whilst interesting, does it actually tell us anything about our potential for success in life?

Personality at work

It may be easy to accept that certain personality types may fair better at jobs more than others. We even tend to stereotype some professions by personality attributes, for example, introverted accountants or extroverted sales people. Understanding personality in order to predict behaviour is an attractive idea for those interested in personality research. As you may imagine, ascertaining someone’s potential performance in a job is an extremely attractive proposition for employers who want to match the best people to their vacancies, or promote those they believe have the greatest potential for success.

There are numerous personality profile tools on the market and many of us will have some experience of these in our working lives. It would be rare to meet someone in the pharmaceutical industry for example who hadn’t undertaken a personality test at an assessment centre, as part of a job application, or a personal development program. The associated costs of employing the right people for a job can be potentially massive leading some firms to try a variety of measures, some unfounded – such as handwriting analysis – to sort the ‘wheat’ from the ‘cha­ ’.

If used wisely, robust personality profiles may contribute to an overall view of a candidate where other assessment methods have also been implemented. Personality measures are unlikely, however, to provide a definitive picture or an accurate prediction of a person’s potential performance.

Personality and performance

Whilst personality traits are useful ways of describing external behaviour, they are problematic if we are referring to stable internal causes of behaviour. Suggesting that a person is angry about something because they have low levels of agreeableness – an angry personality – is similar to proclaiming the sea is wet because it has the quality of wetness.

You may have experienced this misuse of personality concepts yourself if you have met someone excusing their own behaviour on the grounds they are a particular ‘social style’. Unfortunately, whilst this may seem a reasonable justification on the surface, it is a bit nonsensical. In a similar fashion to the example above, it is akin to proclaiming that their radiator is hot because it has the quality of heat.

With the exception of the trait ‘conscientiousness’, there seems to be no universal personality factors that can be used to predict with any accuracy measures of a person’s success at work.

In order to successfully link a personality trait to work performance we have to understand what performance actually means; this in its self is a difficult undertaking. While we can accurately say good performance in sales is about selling more products, it is much harder to delineate the component factors of good sales ability.

A list of sales competences may fail to take into account a host of additional factors that contribute to performance, for example:

• Differing sales context
• Differing demographic cultures
• Personal issues
• Motivational factors
• Company culture

These can be just some of the significant variables influencing performance outcomes. Perhaps in the future ‘job performance’ will be better understood, enabling a clearer link to emerge with personality traits. But until then, assessing personality as a criterion for any prospective job performance will be more an art than a science.

A clear understanding

Despite the above caveats, learning about the diversity of personality types can be very useful for the development of teams and cross-functional groups. Learning to understand interpersonal di­fferences encourages people to widen their appraisals of other’s behaviour and what it may mean. This may potentially expand a group’s behavioural norms. For example, a manager I worked with described her team as an “up for it, go getting team…except Dave, who is quiet and thoughtful …but that’s ok, we realise he prefers to reflect and someone needs to….!”

Without this level of insight it is an easy step for a group unaware of their own dynamics to ostracise and exclude people whose personality style is even slightly at odds with the group norm. To avoid communication breakdown people need to be flexible to other’s ‘styles’.

This can ensure that people like ‘Dave’ have the necessary psychological space to contribute and grow in teams that may be composed of more extroverts. As well as helping us understand other’s diverse approaches to life, personality tools help us understand our own behaviour. “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us. To see oursel’s as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, And foolish notion,” Robert Burns.

As individuals we are often blind to certain aspects of our own style and the impact it can have on others. Using personality metrics to understand our own personality can be revealing and very helpful as we seek to follow the still relevant advice ‘know thy self’. Gauging the a­ffect you have on others from a different position can, as the poet Robbie Burns suggests in his oft quoted poem, save us from many a blunder.

Useful personality metrics

Whilst the amount of personality tests and systems available are far too numerous to cover in this article, most fall into one of two categories:

• Normative tests: These involve measuring your relative score on separate traits and contrasting these against group norms, such as either the general population or specific group, for example NEO-PI-R.
• Ipsative tests: These prompt you to make choices between di­fferent options on a questionnaire. They are mutually exclusive so that choosing one option prevents you choosing an alternative. When calculated a profile will emerge that places you into a predefined specific category and various social style systems which confer labels and types to people. When people complain or rejoice at being ‘pigeon holed’ it is often the Ipsative type test they have experienced.

Which tests work?

Well, that depends on what you want to do with the results. There are a lot to choose from. Profiles available through the British Psychological Society (BPS) registered psychometricians are likely to be evidence-based and robust enough to confer some useful insight. As mentioned earlier, there is a growing consensus amongst researchers that the big five as represented by the NEO-PI-R test capture real functional di­fferences in personality in a relatively straight forward way.

Additionally, some new developments in the realms of ‘emotional intelligence’, although controversial with some psychologists, can provide a di­fferent take on behaviour and these can prove useful, especially when considering team dynamics and interpersonal skills training. Emotional Behaviours at Work (EBW) is one example of this type of test.

In the end

It seems common sense that certain personality types are good at certain jobs. While there may be some broad truth to the idea that certain temperaments gravitate towards certain job types, in the main, personality tests are not currently reliable indicators of individual career performance or success. There are too many possible variables at play, both in the types of personality assessment used and the how we might define performance in any given context. Personality tests can be an excellent way to develop insight into your own behavioural tendencies and those of others. Thus helping foster better/more tolerant relationships and strengthen teamwork. So, if getting on with others is important to you and your work, knowing who you are does matter.

Ian McGarry is an international business psychologist. He can be contacted directly at mcgarry.ian92@gmail.com