Explain briefly why study behaviour in organizations?
Although organizations are extremely complex entities that are not easily understood without conscious effort, this in itself is no reason why they should be studied. Nevertheless, there are two important reasons why an understanding of organizations and the behaviour of people in them is, or should be of concern to us all.
First, it takes but a moment thought to realise that, in one form or another, organizations are the dominant institution in the modern world. The nature of society is shaped (some would assert badly shaped) by them and in return they are shaped by the world in which they exist. Some things in life can only be accomplished if people come together to apply collective physical and mental effort, and in many cases this enables task to be completed in a more effective way. Although organizations exist in many forms for the last 400 years they have tended to become larger, more complex and more specialized in what they do. These days have long gone when a family could itself do all that needed to be done to remain self-sufficient and most people today would be incapable of performing all these activates because they been over taken by organizations. Thus we all occupy specialist niches in a huge jigsaw of roles that makes up a modern society, in which organizations have become the institutions that shape the conditions under which we live. In addition, they have huge amount of power. Their decisions about where to locate and the activities in which they engage have a huge impact on individuals, communities and even nations states. They wield immense power with governments and in certain cases there is more than a suspicion that they control government decisions. Therefore, the life of everyone in modern society is affected by the existence and behaviour of organizations, and all this alone is sufficient reason to try to understand them better.
