Assignment: Personality Development Behavior

Assignment: Personality Development Behavior

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Assignment: Personality Development Behavior

Submit a 2- to 3-page paper that addresses the following:

• Analyze the most important contributions to humanistic theory by Maslow and Rogers and explain your reasoning.
• Analyze your own process of self-actualization (i.e., achieving personal potential) and comment on how your ideas about your potential have developed over time. In your answer, explain the concept of success in the culture in which you were raised and discuss whether your own concept of success aligns with that culture and what has influenced any shifts you have made.
• Using the case example of Katherine, describe how you could use humanistic theories and concepts to explain Katherine’s personality development and behavior. Be specific in the concepts you choose and apply them to specific aspects of Katherine’s case.A ten-year review of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management concluded that, while the journal has produced an archive of behavioral change data in organizations, “…we have yet to investigate very large scale interventions in which behavioral principles are employed to change the ‘cultural foundations’ of an organization” (Balcazar et al., 1989, p. 36). More recently, however, interest in organizational culture from a behavioral point of view has gained momentum, including a special issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management devoted exclusively to behavioral approaches to organizational culture. In-depth coverage of the potential of OBM for the study of organizational culture is beyond the scope of the present chapter (see Eubanks and Lloyd, 1992, for an overview of possibilities in this area).Within the context of OBM contributions to OD goals discussed thus far, the issue of how to maintain and reinforce behavior in organizations leading to enhanced quality in products and services seems most cogent. Total quality management (TQM) emphasizes the improvement of organizational performance and work life quality (Deming 1982; Mawhinney, 1992). A primary emphasis of TQM is on employee participation (Red-mon, 1992), which places it squarely within the class of OD interventions known as employee involvement (Cummings and Worley, 1993). The implementation of TQM, however, is not without its problems, and it is becoming clear that it is not a panacea for enhancing the productivity of either America or Japan (“Is the Baldrige Overblown,” 1991; “The Quality Imperative,” 1991). The importance of OBM in this context is that it provides a way of determining the set of contingencies required for implementing TQM or related employee involvement interventions. performance feedback, for example, has been shown to be effective in enhancing the implementation of TQM in a small metal-part processing company (Henry and Redmon, 1990).

  Organizational culture represents a crossover point wherein OBM and OD significantly overlap in their influence. OBM is new to the cultural analysis scene, while OD interventions have been concerned with culture change issues for well over a decade. OBM, as we have noted, has potential for enhancing the implementation of OD-related interventions such as TQM. Much of the OD literature related to organizational culture, how-ever, is concerned with large-scale system change, an area that has not been well represented in OBM literature (Balcazar et al., 1989). However, both the volume on behavioral perspectives of culture (Lamal, 1991), and the current Handbook of Organizational Performance with repeated references to organizational culture attest to the changing interest within OBM related to large-scale system change issues. At this point of crossover between the two fields, we consider what OD may suggest about the question of how to broaden the scope of OBM.

  What OD Can Offer OBM

  As we have seen, OD has a history of beginning and executing large, systemwide change programs in a plethora of both public and private sector organizations since the 1950s. But what can a traditionally nonempirical, humanistically oriented discipline offer the empirically-based field of OBM? Can we still learn something from a discipline, though tradition-ally much different from our own, that has nearly a generation of seniority? We now examine four ways in which OD might enhance current OBM technology.

  Large-Scale System Change Emphasis

  A systems view of organizations clearly plays an important role in organization development efforts (French and Bell, 1990, pp. 52-59). Al-though systems concepts are not new to OBM, wide-scale, system-level interventions are still the exception (Balcazar et al., 1989; but see Brethower, 1982, and Parsons, Cash, and Reid, 1989, for variations on this exception).

  Goal setting, for example, has been a primary strategy in many OBM interventions, but generally at the individual rather than the organization-wide level. We might begin thinking about goals in terms of descending levels of abstraction, e.g., end-result, strategic, tactical, and program goals (see French and Bell, 1990, p. 59; Gilbert, 1978, p. 118; Rummler and Brache, 1995). Viewed in this manner, goals and the goal-setting process, including the development of mission statements and strategic planning, become part of the larger organizational system (cf. Locke and Latham, 1990). Another view is that these processes are an integral part of organizational culture (Mawhinney, 1992; Redmon and Agnew, 1991; Redmon and Wilk, 1991).

  Focus on Work Team Performance

  An integral part of systemwide interventions is the examination of an organization’s component subsystems (Weisbord, 1987). Work units, or teams, often constitute an intermediate level of analysis between system-level and individual worker behavior change. As we have seen, a primary emphasis in OD activities is the ongoing work team, including both superiors and subordinates.

  A great deal of the current emphasis on work teams can be attributed to the attention, sometimes to the point of obsession, directed at the competitive threat of Japan and other Asian countries. A key element in the TQM approach advocated by Japanese management style and quality gurus such as Deming, Juran, and Crosby is the coordination of work team output to reduce defects. An entire issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (Mawhinney, 1987) was devoted to reviewing advances in statistical process control (SPC), a prevalent technique within the TQM movement, and its relevance to current OBM technology. Data and guide-lines are now increasingly available on how OBM can be used to enhance implementation of SPC programs (Brown, 1989; Henry and Redmon, 1990; Mawhinney, 1987; Redmon, 1992).