Introduction to Organization and Behavioral Science

Management science (MS) is the broad interdisciplinary study of problem solving and decision making in human organizations, with strong links to management, economics, business, engineering, management consulting, and other fields. It uses various scientific research-based principles, strategies, and analytical methods including mathematical modeling, statistics and numerical algorithms to improve an organization’s ability to enact rational and accurate management decisions by arriving at optimal or near optimal solutions to complex decision problems. Management science helps businesses to achieve goals using various scientific methods.

Organizational studies deal with the analysis of how people prepare organizational structures, practices, and processes and how all these create social relations and institutions which have an impact on people. Organizational studies include different fields which deal with the different spheres of the organizations. Organizational change is the base of the study. Historical trends and theories are also included in the study to show the relation between the traditional, present and future of the organizational structures, practices, and processes.

The field was initially an outgrowth of applied mathematics, where early challenges were problems relating to the optimization of systems which could be modeled linearly, i.e., determining the optima (maximum value of profit, assembly line performance, crop yield, bandwidth, etc. or minimum of loss, risk, costs, etc.) of some objective function. Today, management science encompasses any organizational activity for which a problem is structured in mathematical form to generate managerially relevant insights.

Management science is concerned with a number of areas of study:

• Developing and applying models and concepts that may prove useful in helping to illuminate management issues and solve managerial problems. The models used can often be represented mathematically, but sometimes computer-based, visual or verbal representations are used as well or instead.
• Designing and developing new and better models of organizational excellence.

Management science research can be done on three levels:

• The fundamental level lies in three mathematical disciplines: Probability, Optimization, and Dynamical systems theory.
• The modeling level is about building models, analyzing them mathematically, gathering and analyzing data, implementing models on computers, solving them, experimenting with them all this is part of management science research on the modeling level. This level is mainly instrumental, and driven mainly by statistics and econometrics.
• The application level, just as in any other engineering and economics disciplines, strives to make a practical impact and be a driver for change in the real world.

Applications:

Applications of management science are abundant in industries such as airlines, manufacturing companies, service organizations, military branches, and in government. Management science has contributed insights and solutions to a vast range of problems and issues, including:

• Scheduling airlines, both planes and crew.
• Deciding the appropriate place to site new facilities such as a warehouse or factory.
• Managing the flow of water from reservoirs.
• Identifying possible future development paths for parts of the telecommunications industry.
• Establishing the information needs of health services and appropriate systems to supply them.
• Identifying and understanding the strategies adopted by companies for their information systems.

Organizational behavior can be referred to as an applied behavioral science founded on the contributions from different behavioral fields such as psychology, social psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

Psychology:

Psychology aims to determine, describe and often alter humans’ and other animals’ behavior. The contemporary organizational or industrial psychologists studied boredom, fatigue and other working problems and conditions which could hinder the performance of the employees. Their contributions led to the including of perception, emotions, personality, leadership effectiveness, training, motivational forces, performance appraisals, job-satisfaction, attitude-measurement, decision-making processes, work-design, job stress and employee-selection techniques, etc. in organizational behavior.

Social Psychology:

Social psychology which is a branch of psychology combines the concepts of psychology and sociology to understand human influence on one another. Change, it’s implementation and decreasing hindrances to its acceptance, is one of the main study area of social psychology. Understanding, determining and altering attitude, building trust, identifying communication patterns, power, group behavior, conflict, etc. are the contributions of social psychologists to organizational behavior.

Sociology:

Sociology describes the relationship between people and their social culture or environment. Group behavior in any organization, organizational culture, organizational structure, theory, communications, technology, conflict, power, etc. are the contributions of sociologists to organizational behavior.

Anthropology:

Anthropology studies about the society to acquire knowledge about people and their functions. The differences among the behaviors, norms, and values of people of different nations or organizations, organizational environment, culture, etc. are the contributions of anthropologists to organizational behavior.

Guidelines for Managers:

Managers should flourish their interpersonal skills to effectively perform their roles. Some guidelines for managers are mentioned below:

• Sometimes generalizations can lead to erroneous information, so OB depends on systematic study rather than intuition to predict human behavior within the organization properly.
• People differ in their behavior so managers have to apply OB depending on situational variables to describe cause and effect relationship.
• OB initiates a need to change in the workforce diversity and practices in different countries.
• OB helps to increase employee productivity and efficiency by guiding managers on how to motivate employees, change work design and programs, improve customer service and aid employees to balance conflicts within the working place.
• OB initiates managers to be innovative in this ever-changing
• OB directs managers to make a morally healthy working environment.

Behavioral Sciences

Behavioral Sciences explore the cognitive processes within organisms and the behavioral interactions between organisms in the natural world. It involves the systematic analysis and investigation of human and animal behavior through naturalistic observation, controlled scientific experimentation and mathematical modeling. It attempts to accomplish legitimate, objective conclusions through rigorous formulations and observation. Examples of behavioral sciences include psychology, psychobiology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Generally, behavioral science primarily has shown how human action often seeks to generalize about human behavior as it relates to society and its impact on society as a whole.

Categories

Behavioral sciences include two broad categories: neural; Information sciences and social; Relational sciences.

Information processing sciences deal with information processing of stimuli from the social environment by cognitive entities in order to engage in decision making, social judgment and social perception for individual functioning and survival of organism in a social environment. These include psychology, cognitive science, behavior analysis, psychobiology, neural networks, social cognition, social psychology, semantic networks, ethology, and social neuroscience.

On the other hand, Relational sciences deal with relationships, interaction, communication networks, associations and relational strategies or dynamics between organisms or cognitive entities in a social system. These include fields like sociological social psychology, social networks, dynamic network analysis, agent-based model, behavior analysis, and microsimulation.

Applications

Insights from several pure disciplines across behavioral sciences are explored by various applied disciplines and practiced in the context of everyday life and business. These applied disciplines of behavioral science include: organizational behavior, operations research, consumer behavior, health, and media psychology.

Consumer Behavior is the study of the decision making process consumers make when purchasing goods or services. It studies the way consumers recognize problems and discover solutions. Behavioral Science is applied in this study by examining the patterns consumers make when making purchases, the factors that influenced that decision, and how to take advantage of these patterns.

Organizational Behavior is the application of Behavioral Science in a business setting. It studies what motivates employees, how to make them work more effectively, what influences this behavior, and how to use these patterns in order to achieve the company’s goals. Managers often use organizational behavior to better lead their employees.

Using insights from psychology and economics, behavioral science can be leveraged to understand how individuals make decisions regarding their health and ultimately reduce disease burden through interventions such as loss aversion, framing, defaults, nudges, and more. The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Health Incentives & Behavioral Economics uses behavioral science to inform health policy, improve health care delivery and increase healthy behavior in areas such as physical activity, vaccine uptake, medication adherence, smoking cessation, and food choice.