FREE ESSAY ON HUMAN BEHAVIOUR IN BUSINESS

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR IN BUSINESS

Human Behaviour in Business
Managers studying skills and techniques of determining human resources can apply them to
individuals in business. By learning human behaviour, managers can acquire the skills and
techniques necessary to properly allocate human resources. As a manager, first of all you
must learn about how people learn personality dimensions. Then you can determine people's
behaviour types, and apply them to different employee positions. Crucial to the grand
scheme of things is that managers must learn that implementing particular behaviour
sciences requires a good deal of patience, effort, and time. Suggestions for managers to
be successful in management include examining the needs of jobs, and matching them to the
principals of human behaviour.
HUMAN BEHAVIOUR: HOW PEOPLE LEARN
Understanding the basics of human behaviours are critical to the improvement of
businesses and organizations. Most human behaviour is learned as we grow up, in a long
process that begins when we are born. Many behaviours are learned from our parents,
siblings, and close friends when we are younger. As we grow older, some of these
behaviours can change as our peer groups influence us more than our family. As we mature,
some of us drop bad habits, or pick them up, as the case may go. That being said, we can
now see how people learn behaviours and can proceed with how we can learn and apply these
behaviours.
Nowadays there are many behavioural tools provided to managers, each having different
purposes. Managers have to use these principals by combing them through their own
personality, style, and environment. Applying these principals, offered by behavioural
scientists requires a good deal of effort, patience, and time. The better managers know
enough not to apply multiple techniques simultaneously, and when to use the ones they
deem important. Managers must also realize that with the abundance of new theories that
have been developed, many of them are either based on illogical assumptions, or they are
irrelevant when trying to actually apply them.
DETERMINING PEOPLE'S BEHAVIOUR TYPE
One way of determining people's personalities, is the Myers Briggs Type indicator. The
Myers Briggs is a test that gives the subject a series of questions on how they would
react to a certain situation. From the 100 questions posed, experts have developed a way
to classify these people into 16 personality types. These people are either extroverted
or introverted, sensing or intuitive, thinking or feeling, perceiving or judging. What
this does is enables managers to match these people with jobs by determining what
individuals enjoy doing and what positions are best suited for them.
Chris Argyris is a former professor at Yale University, and is known as the father of
organizational learning. He looked at human behaviours that blocked learning in
organizations. He believed that behaviour of organizations could create defensive
routines that can prevent information from getting to the top. Thus, he believed in the
actions of employees to learn hoe to overcome these defensive routines. If we can do
this, then we have a better chance to improve an organization from feedback of all
employees. Determining people's behaviour is essential to choosing where employees fit
into jobs. In order to determine what behaviour type a person is will look at several
different personality traits. These are most valuable to managers as they analyze
people's control over their destinies, their need to achieve, self-esteem, their ability
to self-monitor, risk-taking and personality type.
Analyzing a person's locus of control can decide if people are internals or externals.
Locus of control is the idea of having control over your own destiny. An internal person
believes that they hold their own key to the future, while an external is someone who
feels their life is mostly controlled by fate. On the whole, internals are better in
business, however, this can differ by job. Internals are more willing to work harder to
achieve their goals, while externals would be more apt to accept things the way they
are.
An individual's need to achieve (nAch) is easily understood. People that have high need
to achieve continually strive to do things better. These people would perform better in
situations that challenge their ability. So high nAch people would do better in sales and
professional sports than low nAch.
Another area of behaviour that is important to business is self-esteem. People with high
self-esteem will take more risks and choose those odd jobs that nobody else wants. Those
with low self-esteem usually need someone to give them feedback on the job they are doing
before they can continue with confidence.
A person's ability to self-monitor is an important personality trait for business as
well. Self-monitoring is the ability to adjust behaviour according to situational,
external factors. Those with a high ability to self-monitor can act in accordance to the
situations easily and consistently.
Risk-taking is another factor important to managers. It is the ability to take risks, and
those with high-risk are more suited to jobs like stock market brokers.
Personality types, A or B, can also help managers decide who is better at senior
executive positions, or at salesperson positions. Type A is the kind of person who tries
to achieve as much as possible in the least amount of time. Type A's are fast workers,
but they can emphasize quantity over quality. Type B people, on the other hand are quite
the opposite. They usually wiser decision-makers, and they are more creative than those
who are just quick decision-makers.
ACKNOWLEDGING PEOPLE'S NEEDS AND CURRENT POSITION
In order to learn how to apply different behavioural principals, managers must have an
idea of people's needs in business, and where their current positions are. By analyzing
these needs, managers can make assumptions of where their people want to go in business.
Then they can apply different techniques of behaviour principals and decide what jobs
best fit these people. Those types of people whose personalities fit top management
positions, and who feel the need to achieve can then be closely taught to succeed in
business. On the contrary, those people who are externals and don't feel a need to
achieve, would not be focussed on as much, or at all.
MAKING DUE WITH WHAT YOU HAVE: EVOLVING PEOPLE'S BEHAVIOUR
In today's fast-changing world, people are constantly being asked to change along with
it. From hi-tech software companies, to the way our groceries are rung in at the
supermarket, technology is making new advances everyday. One of the implications of this
is that people are being made to hone their skills now on a regular basis. These people
need to be able to keep up, and not be intimidated if they want to keep their job. The
example of the supermarket also makes it clear that no one is exempt from it. If your
employees are intimidated by computers, you have 2 choices. You can either help them
through their fear of machines, or they will have to be let go to make room for someone
else who can fill their role.
This example may seem very simple, but it illustrates the point very clearly. Managers
for the most part do not want to have to rehire a new staff every time they are required
to upgrade their companies computer systems. This being said, if management can not get
through to the workers on why and how to implement these changes, then rehiring staff
will be their only option.
Management has make sure that their staff is open to new ideas so that the company will
be able to keep up with the world, and not fall behind while training staff on new system
requirements.
EMPLOYEE POSITIONS: 6 TYPES
Matching personalities with jobs may be one of the most effective ways to allocate human
resources. If a person is properly suited to their position in relation to their
personality, the chances of having a satisfied employee are greatly increased.
As seen in J. L. Holland's personality-job fit model, different personalities fit better
into different job positions. Holland developed 6 different types of personalities that
characterize 160 different occupational titles. These personalities were then arranged in
order of congruency.
These personalities, and their characteristics are as follows:
Realistic: prefers physical activities that require skill, strength, and coordination.
Personality characteristics include being shy, genuine, persistent, stable, conforming,
and practical.
Investigative: prefers activities involving thinking, organizing, and understanding.
Personality characteristics include being analytical, originality, curiosity and
independence.
Social: prefers activities that involve helping and developing others. Personality
characteristics include sociability, friendly, cooperation and understanding.
Conventional: prefers rule-regulated, orderly, unambiguous activities. Personality
characteristics include conforming, efficiency, practicality, unimaginative, and
inflexibility.
Enterprising: prefers verbal activities where there are opportunities to influence others
and attain power. Personality characteristics include self-confidence, ambition, energy
and domination.
Artistic: prefers ambiguous and unsystematic activities that allow creative expression.
Personality characteristics include imagination, disorder, idealism, irrationalism and
impracticality.
These personality types are then situated in a hexagonal diagram that states that the
closer 2 fields are in the diagram, the closer they are in compatibility. This also means
that 2 types located diagonally from one another are most incongruent.
PUTTING PEOPLE IN THE RIGHT POSITIONS: HIRING TECHNIQUES
Different people excel at different jobs than others do. That is a well-documented fact.
So, in order in order to put the right person for the job in that job, we need to
understand what kind of person is needed to fill a particular role. Does this mean that
doing a personality profile at the time of interview will 
ensure the proper matchmaking?
Not exactly. But what it does is it greatly reduces the chances of putting for example a
realistic type of person into a social type of job. Furthermore, doing this greatly
reduces the risk of job dissatisfaction. Reducing job dissatisfaction or inversely
increasing job satisfaction directly improves, but not cures job stability. This in turn,
generally speaking of course, increases productivity, which is usually the bottom line to
management.
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
The world today is smaller than it has ever been. Travel is now measured by hours, not
days. But there is till a very distinct boundary when we talk about cultures. However,
whether we are talking North-South, or East-West, cultural differences exist everywhere.
One of the main schools of thought is the Western, or American way of managing. But there
are many different, and very affective theories out there that American style managers
don't put into practice. Should they? Here are some statistics that may answer this
question. In the 70's, the West had a growth rate of about 3%, while in South China, in
the same period, they had a growth rate of 10%. That's over 3 times as much as the West.
Was the increase the result of a new fad style of management? Actually, it couldn't be
farther from the truth. Chinese management takes its basis form as far back as the days
of Confucius (550-479B.C.) This fact alone stands out as a difference between East and
West. The West is always on the look-out for new and exciting techniques, while history
is the driving force behind China's success.
Terms such as job-stability, company loyalty, and human relations and trust are slowly
making their way back into Western business vocabulary again. But these terms are staples
in the Chinese and Eastern way of managing, and have been for centuries.
There is even a whole section of Chinese management dedicated to the thoughts of
Confucius that deal with morality. Not exactly the highest priority in the West's
dog-eat-dog world of competitive business.
So is cross-cultural business an impossible goal? Far from it. But what managers must
keep in mind is simply that different cultures value different things more than others
do. The subtle difference between America and Canada pail in comparison to the
differences between America and Japan or China. The secret is for managers to be aware of
these differences and act accordingly. What may be an accepted form of action or response
in the West may be a great insult to someone from the East. Cultural differences must be
accounted for in order to minimize tensions.
As you can see, the incentives to managers to learn human behaviour and apply it to their
employees are overwhelmingly positive. If managers can match job candidates to their
appropriate position in the company, a harmony is reached that would not otherwise be
found without the use of behavioural techniques. Once a manager has learned about human
behaviour, they can then apply what they know to job placement and the allocation of
human resources, and help the company to boost productivity, which in turn will help
increase profits, and make the job site an all around better place to work.
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