Human Behavior is multifaceted and every individual is distinct from another, the challenge of an effective organization is in correctly matching the task, the manager and the subordinate. Under ideal situation, a manager would first analyze the task, then ascertain the required skills and assemble a team that complement each other skills; thereby creating an effective & conflict free team. In reality, a manager has to use the current resources for a given task, and must have the sense to understand the differences in individual Behaviors and use them suitably to increase the synergy.
People are the main component of any organization that has to be managed. Every individual has a personal goal to be achieved. Organizations must identify the need spectrum of individuals and take suitable steps for its fulfillment to enable them to perform effectively so that they complete their allotted task in time. Relationship between the workers, with subordinates and superiors should be established based on full understanding and complete faith based on mutual trust so that it is easy to communicate and understand each other’s views. Work teams and Groups play a vital role in the organization. Individual may have to keep his personal interest aside if it conflicts with team or group goals. It is the team goals, accomplishment of which contributes towards achieving organizational goals.
In order to understand individual Behavior and personalities, it is important to understand the basics of human cognition. Cognition is the thought process in humans that describes how the information we constantly acquire is transformed, stored and used as knowledge in future decision making. It includes a wide range of mental processes like visual imagery, language, problem solving, decision making etc. The brain receives the stimuli from the external environment through the sense, which is immediately registered in our sensory memory, which is large but keeps the information for few seconds only. The observation process tries to match the information in the sensory memory with the previous knowledge and creates a perception of the stimuli, thereby abstracting useful information from the sensory memory. This abstracted information then passes to the short-term memory or the working memory, which also caches the related knowledge from the long-term memory. The short-term memory has slightly longer latency than the sensory memory, it is needed only till the reaction of the stimuli. The long term memory has enormous capacity and is the primary knowledge base.
The stimuli demands some action (even the decision to ignore the stimuli is an action), the perceived stimuli combined with a set of related and abstracted experiences forms the initial input to the mind’s analytical process. This input is also influenced by the emotional and rational factors which in turn depend upon individual’s values and beliefs. The other two important parameters are the desired outcome and the required response time to the stimuli. At the centre of the analytical mind is a myriad of cognitive processes that operate sequentially or in parallel, in complex permutations in order to satisfy these primary constraints. The consequence of this entire cognitive activity is a response to the environmental stimuli, which is the observed as the Behavior of the individual. Person’s thought process is an internal activity while the Behavior can be observed. Finally, the resulting Behavior is feed backed into the memory; it modifies the existing perceptual knowledge, seeds a new one or the stimuli and its response is simply ignored.
Dimensions of cognitive psychology
The cognition can be characterized by considering the process itself and its robustness. At a higher level of abstraction, the thinking can be characterized as rational or emotional, while its robustness is determined by it stability.
Rational Vs Emotional Thinking: Rational thinking is a response based on process of logical reasoning; it involves some form of mathematical or statistical knowledge where the process has implicit proof of its validity. Attribution is one of the rational processes that involve determining the reason or cause of an observed Behavior.
Emotional thinking is a response based on how a person feels about the object in question. Neurologically, emotions follow a short cut pathway to limbic response, bypassing the other cognitive thought processes. It can be considered as most primitive response when dealing with incomplete and uncertain sensory data. However, emotions have considerable influence on decision making and other cognitive processes even with existence of alternate rational reasons. Emotions do bootstrap into prior emotional responses and it depends upon a person’s belief and values.
Stable Vs Evolving Experiences: Every stimuli creates a response which is stored in the long-term memory, repetition of the same stimuli over a period of time, hard wires the response. These patterns of stimuli and response form a stable section of our cognitive processes, thus as the person ages, more and more responses get hard-wired.
On the other hand, stimuli that have little or no previously recorded responses are in the evolutionary stage, the response might change depending upon the cumulative degree of success of the previous responses.
Congruence between manager’s and individual’s Behavior
Most of the text and research emphasizes the importance of individual behavior and how managers should use this knowledge for better task- to-employee matching, what they ignore is the importance of organization as a system. In the organizational social system, the relationship between manager and the employees is not unidirectional but bidirectional. While the manager tries to assess the behavior of the subordinate, the subordinate also makes a continuous effort to evaluate the manager’s perspective and adapt to it. If this bi-directional process is successful, it would create a behavioral congruence between manager and subordinate and would be a positive outcome.
Otherwise it would lead to dissatisfaction and frustration for both of them and would eventually lead to end of their relationship through job termination.
The subordinate will have a perception of his own job and non-work responsibilities and an expectation of how his manager would perceive the same. He will also have a selective and biased perception of his manager’s job and that would in turn influence his expectations and Behavior. Due to identification of this bi-directional relationship, the following discussion is adapted to reflect this concern.
