Why do we study OB?

Organizational behavior focus on the invidious and groups in organizations. Studying OB helps us develop a better understanding about how people and gougers works in the organization. My primary goal is to better understand how organization works, then learn how to develop a more effective and productive organization, and as a return moving to higher place in the organization and achieve bigger success.

Wait, what is an organization?

Before we dive into OB, let’s first understand what is an organization first. In the context of a work setting, an organization is a collection of people working together in a divine of labor to achieve a common purpose.

There are a few important elements about the working organization:

  • Purpose

The purpose of an organization may be stated as the creation of goods or services for customers. The important part about the organization purpose is to understand that all the corporates are created for some economic purpose. True that many organizations are able to create cultures that make the employees feel like it is a home, to make friends, to explore their potentials. But after all, all the cultures are created for the purpose of creating a more effective organization to better achieve the economic purpose, either directly or indirectly.

  • Mission

The mission statement focus the attention of organizational members and external constituents on the core purpose. For example, the mission of my current company is simply stated as: to grow and empower local economies. Many times, mission statement are written to communicate a clear vision in respect to the long term goals and future aspirations.

Vision provides a North Star for the organization member, while challenging visions also help attract attention and help draw the members together in the quest for high performance.

  • Strategy

Organization pursues action strategies to accomplish the purpose and mission. For example, the following is the mission of my current company in order to achieve the mission above.

To grow an economy, we believe you must start with the merchant, the local businesses of all sizes and from all industries that provide 60%+ of a city’s GDP.

To help these merchants and achieve our North Star, we will build three things:

  • Last mile logistics platform
  • Merchant services
  • Membership program for the physical world

The organizations today

We must understand that organizations are not static, the organization today are totally different from he organizations 50 years ago. To better understand the organization, we need to:

  • Understand the overall trend of the organization
  • The typical organization in your industry
  • The sub organization of your own team

Overall, there are three important concepts about the modern organizations:

  • Intellectual capital is the sum total of knowledge, expertise, and energy available from organizational members.
  • Human resources are the people who do the work that helps organizations fulfill their missions.
  • Open systems transform human and material resource inputs into finished goods and services.

Organization can be viewed as an open system. It obtains resources from the environment and transfer them into outputs. Tech industry is different from other industry that intellectual capital is the most important part of the overall working competitive.