History Of Organizational Behavior

1450 Words6 Pages
Abstract During the late 19th and early 20th century the world witnessed America’s transition from a nation of farmers to an industrial powerhouse. With this conversion, people stopped working at home and started working within the confines of a formal organization. Several intellectuals laid the philosophical foundation that would either direct or explain the actions of both management and employees. Arguably the three most important were Fredrick Taylor, who had fundamental ideas that could be incorporated into any organization. Elton Mayo et al, who witnessed the Hawthorne Effect, and Douglas McGregor who put companies into two distinct categories under Theory X Theory Y. Though businesses have changed greatly over the past hundred plus years, remnants of these three ideals are still prominent in workplaces throughout the world today. The late 19th into the early 20th century marked the rise of the business organization, which eventually evolved into the places of work that we know them as today. With the formation of organizations came the formation of organizational philosophy, theories and attributes that dealt with the workplace. The story of organizational philosophy begins in the late 1800’s, where employee problems were a very real concern in the workplace (Sheldrake, 1996). For the average blue-collar worker, most jobs were not only low-paying, but boring and unsafe. Some industries experienced difficulty recruiting and retaining employees because of the poor working conditions workers were exposed to (Sheldrake, 1996). As the means of production continued to shift from farmlands and to city factories, concerns grew about wages, safety, child labor and 12-hour workdays. Workers began to band together in unions to protect their interests and improve living standards. Government stepped in to provide basic rights and protections for
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