Influencing Organizational Events

Influencing Organizational Events

It’s nice to understand and predict organizational events, but most of us want to influence the environment in which we live. Whether you are a marketing specialist or a computer programmer, you need to know how to communicate effectively with others, manage conflict, make better decisions, build commitment to your ideas, help work teams operate more effectively, and so on. OB knowledge will help you influence organizational events. Most organizational behavior scholars take this prescriptive view by concluding their systematic research with specific recommendations for organizational action.

This articles takes the view that organizational behavior knowledge is for everyone – not just managers. Indeed, as organizations reduce layers of management and delegate more responsibilities to the rest of the employees, the concepts described in this articles will become increasingly important for anyone who works in and around organizations. We all need to understand organizational behavior and to master the practices that influence organizational events. That’s why you won’t find very much emphasis here on “management”. Yes, organizations will continue to have managers (“adult supervision,” as young employees cynically call them), but their roles have changed. More important, many employees are now expected to manage themselves. As one forward-thinking organizational behavior scholar wrote many years ago: Everyone is a manager.