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Organizational Behavior - Max Weber

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An organization, put in simple terms is a group or assembly of people working alongside one another to achieve common goal or objective through a division of labor and or responsibilities. Business organizations in free market economies are formed to provide services or deliver goods to ultimate consumers for profit. Generally speaking, people form an organization because it provides a means of using individual strengths within a group to achieve more than can be accomplished by the aggregate efforts of group members working individually.
Over time there have been several models and theories with respect to organizational function and essential characteristics. One model suggests that organizations at their core are information processing …show more content…

Competence, not “who you know,” should be the basis for all decisions made in hiring, job assignments, and promotions in order to foster ability and merit as the primary characteristics of a bureaucratic organization.
• Records. A bureaucracy needs to maintain complete files regarding all its activities.

Although his theories are now considered mechanistic and outdated, Weber's views on bureaucracy provided important insight into efficiency, division of labor, and the hierarchy of authority. Post industrial revolutionary America began to adopt a less mechanical view of organizations and to pay more attention to human influences. The notable Hawthorne experiments shed light on the function of human fulfillment in organizations and were conducted in the mid 1920s and 1930s at a Western Electric Company plant known as the Hawthorne Works. The company wanted to determine the degree to which working conditions affected output.
The studies failed to prove any positive correlations between workplace conditions and productivity. The results of the studies demonstrated that innate forces of human behavior may have a greater influence on organizations than do mechanistic incentive systems. The legacy of the Hawthorne studies and other organizational research efforts of that period began to emphasize the importance of individual and group interaction, humanistic management skills, and social relationships in the workplace.
The focus on human influences in organizations

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