IndexOrganizational BehaviorIntroduction to Organizational Behavior (OB)Conceptualization of Sustainability and Organizational SuccessHuman Resource Management and SustainabilityThe Meaning of the Human FactorThe Meaning of Scientific Management and Other MovementsHuman Resources Laws and Organization BehaviorHuman Resources AdministrationOrganizational BehaviorIntroduction to Organizational Behavior (OB)OB research has exploded. We have moved from prescription to theory and experiment, from induction to deduction and from humanism to scientism. As for application, these research findings had a curiously negative impact (Organ,. 1983): OB succeeded in refuting what we now understand to be intuitive errors, but offered little to fill the void. Quality control far surpasses production. Blanchard's best seller, The One Minute Manager (1983), is notable for its brevity and common sense. But what is truly remarkable is that much of OB's applied knowledge is found in its slim pages. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay While disclosures may oversimplify, but they are an indication of real-world influence. OB brought a healthy skepticism and open mind to everyday organizational relationships. Today's "B" school students and recent graduates share a bond with behaviorists across campus, at least in terms of jargon, interests, and precepts. Maybe, just maybe, we will discover that OB's contribution has been to reintroduce some social science values ​​into business schools where language and action are closely linked. It remains to be seen whether current slogans like “congruence, dyad, dysfunction, or paradigm” will have more meaning as arbiters of action than yesterday's “maximization, burden, overload, or utility.” But if the vocabulary and values ​​of today's students are any omen, tomorrow's workers should enjoy a more humane and effective existence even if OB's contribution to that end would seem less direct than OB specialists would like to admit. OB is also changing: partly in search of meaning; partly in response to social change; partly to explore more trending topics. OB changes in accordance with the provisions of influential scholars. A delay of several years is not as crucial as it would be, for example, in the field of chemistry. True "discoveries" and fundamental contributions are rare events in the behavioral sciences. However, an OB text must be timely to be accepted and the textbooks to be reviewed here are as up to date as any others. As for OB texts as expository vehicles, they follow separate paths that remind me of cartography (in the cartographic sense). In their in-depth explorations of our behavior, many OB scholars earn their reputations for precise, sometimes elegant, even sterile research. There are compelling reasons to believe that increasing the quality of knowledge will improve an organization's sustainability. In the long term, it may be much more difficult for an organization to adapt to the consequences of environmental damage or losses suffered by other entities in the system. Since relatively small changes in the balance of the overall system can cause catastrophic changes in other parts of the system – especially with respect to sustainability issues – an important managerial question emerges: How can such problems be identified and prevented? System dynamics methodology is particularly suited toimprove organizational performance and the sustainability of the complex system in which the organization exists. There are precedents that combine system dynamics and knowledge-based methods (e.g., Barton 1999; Firestone and McElroy 2003; Morecroft and Sterman 1994). However, these studies do not focus exclusively on learning as the key to the knowledge construction process. Conceptualizing Sustainability and Organizational Success At its essence, sustainability involves a system in a steady state, a dynamic equilibrium in which inputs equal outputs. For our purposes, we have chosen a more relaxed definition of sustainability provided by Brundtland 1987. A complex environment provides managers with few heuristics for achieving desired states of sustainability. Ascher notes, “In many cases, complexity challenges the organization's efforts to understand how the ecosystem and social system will behave in reaction to the organization's level of control and creates additional causes of intra-organizational conflict” ( 2000, 2). However, learning by trial and error in real-world conditions is slow and tuition is terribly expensive. According to Wiig, “organizational effectiveness is determined by many factors, the most important of which is the quality and availability of relevant knowledge at the points of actions used.” managing situations, that is, making sense of information, innovating, deciding what to do, taking action and evaluating the implications of approaches and actions” (2004, 33). Organizations with a sustainability goal but low-quality knowledge about how to achieve it are likely to be ineffective. McElroy (2006) proposes that achieving sustainability depends on unlimited knowledge of human impacts on the world and the ability to learn. In organizations where low-quality knowledge is ubiquitous, highly effective actions are unlikely to occur. Effective actions arise from high-quality knowledge produced by robust knowledge processing systems. Our strategy for improving the quality of knowledge needed to achieve greater effectiveness is to increase an organization's capacity to process knowledge. Without a rigorous methodology to discover new patterns and make sense, managers tend to become passive observers of organizational phenomena and rely on their knowledge. own habits of thought and perception. Without a common methodology for conducting investigations and experiments, knowledge-building efforts fall between open-ended problem statements and conflicting worldviews. Managers with insufficient skills in conducting action research become dependent on having others direct them through the stages of the knowledge life cycle (KLC). Such dependencies are costly inefficient and place managers in the awkward position of making their private knowledge deficits public. So managers spend their time solving problems they understand and are confident they can solve, and little knowledge is created, resulting in actions to address important problems being postponed. System dynamics methodology provides a powerful means for understanding complex problems and a framework for guiding inquiry and action research (see, for example, Sterman 2000). Facilitated engagement in system dynamics can test the feasibility of policies and help participants learn the feedback nature of sustainability issues. The system dynamics simulation model generated as part of the effort can be used to test alternatives, providing an inexpensive means of experimentation. The intuitionsgenerated in involvement can be preserved within the organization through the sharing of simulation models (Thompson 2009, chapter 6). There is a long-standing tradition of using system dynamics to address sustainability issues. Forrester (1971) first established the potential of applying system dynamics to find fundamental solutions to the sustainability problems of what he called the “world system” caused by the unbridled forces of growth and the limits of nature. Vennix et al. (1994) and Ford and Sterman (1998) propose that a structured approach to knowledge elicitation is one of the major advantages of the methodology. Andersen et al. (1994) suggest critical factors for selecting the type of knowledge Dynamic knowledge, organizational growth, and sustainability elicitation techniques to be used in a team model building effort of system dynamics. “Engaging in a system dynamics modeling process encourages participants to examine their own beliefs and hypotheses about how a system's behavior is caused” (Senge et al. 2007). While system dynamics is not the only methodology with the potential to impose a discipline on managers rigorous enough to challenge prevailing assumptions about causality, it is one of the most advanced approaches to analyzing complex systems. Senge et al. (2007) propose that system dynamics offers a framework capable of accommodating fluid interdisciplinary discussions by practitioners on sustainability issues: “issues such as sustainability require systems thinking skills that are not widely shared. When the goal is effective collaboration, developing a shared conceptual “systemic sense” is even more important” (Senge et al. 2007, 45). Management and sustainability of human resources There is a confluence of interests among those managers who deal with sustainability, action research, knowledge and system dynamics. However, the learning mechanisms are not well established. Therefore, we examine the case of Prestwick Memory Devices where system dynamics were combined with knowledge management principles to improve the sustainability of a company. One of the biggest historical concerns in the workplace is how to improve and sustain productivity growth. In public school education this concern concerns programs aimed at improving the daily outcomes of teaching and learning processes. The quality of the school environment largely determines the results achieved by teachers and students. For many decades there have been concepts and ideological movements aimed at effectively enhancing the human resources (HR) function and improving the school environment to create effective teaching and learning situations. In recent years the primary focus has been on the development and implementation of regulations and policies to improve HR administrative practices, as evidenced by the proliferation of HR laws. These practices have become fully established and treated as if they were the best-established administrative methods for promoting a supportive organizational environment in public schools. The general belief is that these regulations, policies and associated practices drive the wheels of the HR function and drive its engine to accomplish the desired administrative tasks. These observations revealed the true value of their contributions and established that scholars have made significant contributions towards the evolution of personnel administration. From the scholarly efforts of this honorable gallery of academicians who have contributed copiously to the movements ofscientific management, we gain deeper insight into their contributions towards the meaning of the human dimension and institutional aspects of employee effectiveness in organizational contexts. Unfortunately, it is disheartening to know that almost everything the HR function deals with today is aimed exclusively at strengthening the institutional (i.e. legal) aspects of people's performance, grossly neglecting the need to improve the quality of the human factor. Human resource management ignores or pays superficial attention to the development of positive qualities of the human factor. Human resource development programs focus exclusively on training in the acquisition of human capital (i.e., knowledge and skills). Unfortunately this is not enough because human capital is only a small aspect of the human factor. The importance of human factor The comprehensive dimensions of human factor are classified into six categories such as “spiritual capital, moral capital, aesthetic capital, human capital, human capital”. ability and human potential” (Adjibolosoo, 2005, pp. 45-51). Unfortunately, empirical evidence from personnel management does not validate Weber's point of view nor does it corroborate current HR administrative practices. For example, today new HR regulations and policies are drafted and implemented indiscriminately to prop up old and failing ones. However, the more HR regulations and policies we implement, the more failures we will see with administrative HR policies. We thus find ourselves, unconsciously, in the strangling links of the network of the austere human factor. As a result, the more we fail in our HR practices, as revealed by the proliferation of HR laws, the more regulations and policies we aggressively create, implement, and enforce. In our attempts to enforce these impotent human resources regulations and policies, we behave like a blind and naive school of fish caught in the meshes of nets stretched far and wide in the depths of the oceans. Unfortunately, the development and enforcement of human resources law does not improve the quality of the workplace or minimize the intensity of workplace problems that produce an increasing number of lawsuits and court battles. At best, it supports HR practices aimed at resolving relevant issues. If we want to improve the effectiveness of existing human resource administrative practices, it is imperative that we revisit the works of scholars from scientific management schools and associated movements to re-educate ourselves regarding their contributions to the science of human resource administration and management. The main objective of this academic activity is to guide us to discover better procedures and techniques to address the neglected dimension of the human factor in human resource administration. That is, we must become aware of the fact that the paradigm of institutional development (i.e. applications of legal authority) has not worked as effectively as we hoped. There is definitely a better alternative. This long-neglected option is the human factors model in human resources administration. The main objective of the human factor administrative model is to concentrate the scarce available resources of the FEET on developing and improving the quality of the human factor of people. The Significance of Scientific Management and Other Movements In the early 1900s leaders of scientific management and other movements brought ideas that left a permanent imprint on personnel administration and employee performance(Taylor, 1911; Gantt, 1961; Griffin, 1987; and many others). Webb and Norton (2003, pp. 8-11) also note that scientific management was introduced into educational administration during the early 1900s. Pioneering work by scholars that influenced personnel management and development in education includes, but does not limit itself to, Weber (1910); Urwick and Gulick (1937); and Fayol (1949). In Fayollian terms, for example, the key activities of administration are planning, organisation, command, coordination and control. According to Fayol, therefore, these activities must be carried out in an integrated manner with the primary objective of achieving high productivity in the organisation. The Gulikian view of people management extends the Fayollian perspective by adding two further dimensions to people management activities: reporting and budgeting (see details in Webb and Norton, 2003, p. 9). Regardless of the beauty and intensity of the work of the scholars of scientific management movements, it is obvious that the individual whose scholarly work has exerted the greatest impact on the current administrative function of human resources is Max Weber (1864-1920). Writing about his own concept of what actually determines the ideal organization, Weber (1910) argues that promotion must be linked to performance and that the safety of the individual employee must be guaranteed through established (i.e. proven) bureaucratic practices. Such practices, according to Weber, would protect employees from unfair dismissal schemes and other capricious personnel practices. For Weber, these types of bureaucratic protection minimize disharmony in the workplace. And in doing so, lead to the achievement of optimal employee efficiency. In Weberian terms, hereThere are three types of organizational authorities. These are the charismatic, traditional and legal authorities. Among these three, Weber argued that it is legal authority that provides the strongest and most powerful foundation to the ideal bureaucratic organization. Seen in this light, we might argue that Weber's conclusion regarding the supremacy of legal authority has surreptitiously and powerfully influenced, shaped, and directed HR administrative practices ever since. An in-depth and detailed content analysis of Chapter 10 by Webb and Norton (2003, pp. 319-362) also reveals that HR programs aimed at maximizing employee performance focus primarily on institutional development, as reflected in regulations and in policies, rather than human factors engineering. In general, the primary objective is to find programs and compensation packages to motivate employees to give their best. A careful and diligent analysis of the Weberian view on the primacy of legal authority reveals that educational administration and the human resources function today draw numerous inspirational ideas from Weber (1910). Thus, as Webb and Norton (2003, p. 10) note, the primary emphasis that human resources administrators today place on “…accountability, teacher evaluation, merit pay, teacher selection, scientific supervision, training in the workplace and job analysis..." is a direct offspring of the era of scientific management. Scholars such as Follett (1924), Mayo (1933), and Lewin, Lipitt, and White (1939) contributed significantly to the human relations movement. Supporters of the behavioral science movement have highlighted the importance of interactions between the institutional dimension and the human element for productivity growth. They further argued that ongoing symbiotic relationships between institutions and humans impact behavior and the degree to which organizational goals and objectives can be achieved.achieved. Leading scholars of this paradigm include Barnard (1938), Maslow (1954), Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman (1959), McGregor (1960), Trist (1963), Scott (1970), and Kempton (1995). obvious from the definition of human resource administration, it is “important to recognize that everyone involved in the human resources function has a great impact on employee performance” (Senge et al. 2007). Therefore, it is imperative that any plan aimed at maximizing the human resources function and its associated administrative practices does everything possible to create an environment conducive to optimal employee performance. The plan must focus on improving the quality of the climate within which people operate in their work. Unfortunately, the growing interest in institutional development, evident in the creation of regulations and policies, may not necessarily be conducive to maximizing employee effectiveness in the workplace. Although the introduction of the law may temporarily provide sufficient incentives and motivation for employers and employees to be on their guard, in the long term it will not lead to the development of the positive qualities of the human factor. Any uncompromising faith in the power of human resources law to promote effective human factors development will lead to disastrous results. Historical evidence and real-life cases have supported the conclusion that the legal solution has not worked well and will never work. Human Resource Laws and Organizational BehaviorIndeed, since the law is usually made for the lawless, the legal solution will be more effective in environments within which the positive qualities of the human factor are well developed. Likewise, in an environment where the positive qualities of the human factor exist, there will be no need for too many laws. Today we are somewhat stuck with the legal solution. Until we succeed in our human factors engineering programs, this will be our predicament for centuries to come, unless we become more open to human factor-based transformation.development education programs. Getzels and Guba (1957) came closest to understanding that institutional and personal factors (e.g., personality) exert an extraordinarily large impact on human attitudes, behaviors, and actions. Unfortunately, Getzels and Guba failed to recognize that the quality of institutional factors is a direct reflection of the quality of personal factors. If we must recognize that the efficiency of social systems and any other institutionalized structure is as great as the quality of the human factor of the people who design and manage them, we will be in a better position to achieve greater results with human resources and human resources . its administrative practices rather than locking itself into the false and reckless paradigmatic way of thinking that institutions, organizations and systems are a sine qua non for the optimal performance of human resources. The truth is that they are not. Indeed, observed human behavior, as evident in attitudes and actions, is representative of the quality of the human factor rather than existing institutions, organization and systems. However, when behavior is temporarily simulated, it does not necessarily reflect the quality of the individual's human factor. Therefore, while improvements in the quality of the human factor equate to greater institutional and organizational efficiency in the long term, transformations in institutions, organizations and systems will not necessarily lead to improved human performance in the absence of the qualities.