Organizational Behavior Quotes

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

The ideal organizational environment encourages everyone to observe, collect data, and speak up.

Business people need to understand the psychology of risk more than the mathematics of risk.

the fundamental attribution error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors.

Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.

Leaders need to correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.

Leaders need to sacrifice "power-over" to get "power-to".

Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.

Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.

People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off.

The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems.

When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.

Strategic coherence is more important than strategic perfection.

Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data.

Leadership behaviors are one of the most critical influences on an organizational culture.

people get trapped by using patterns of behavior to protect themselves against threats to their self-esteem and confidence and to protect groups, intergroups, and organizations to which they belong against fundamental, disruptive change.

Human behavior is only unpredictable and dangerous if you don’t start from humanity in the first place.

The best way to encourage out of the box thinking is to draw the box correctly in the first place.

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.

The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.

That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.

Resistance to change should be a thing of the past if we could develop growth mindsets and create organizations with growth cultures.

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste

Leadership must evolve into a “science-based craft”, like surgery.

The most damaging cognitive bias is overconfidence (illusory superiority), making leaders use their “gut” when they should be more rational.

The key to behavioral change is to pass behavioral control to the environment.

Compared to ecosystems and some species, corporations are very fragile entities indeed.

Green light, STOP - if you want to see where you are taking the most risk, look where you are making the most money.

All of us are not always smarter than one of us, leaders need to distinguish between the wisdom of crowds and the madness of crowds.

The nonessential employees, the type of workers whom remain at home when it snows, are the quickest to complain about how the talented persons of an organization behave.

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

Structure significantly influences behavior, thereby dramatically impacting results.

Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.

A habit can be regarded as something that we do regularly without giving it too much thought. It is an automatic behavioral and mental activity, which makes us possible for us to do things without spending excessive mental energy.

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits—that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information—make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident—the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.

As I developed as a CEO, I found two key techniques to be useful in minimizing politics. 1. Hire people with the right kind of ambition. The cases that I described above might involve people who are ambitious but not necessarily inherently political. All cases are not like this. The surest way to turn your company into the political equivalent of the U.S. Senate is to hire people with the wrong kind of ambition. As defined by Andy Grove, the right kind of ambition is ambition for the company’s success with the executive’s own success only coming as a by-product of the company’s victory. The wrong kind of ambition is ambition for the executive’s personal success regardless of the company’s outcome. 2. Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate. Certain activities attract political behavior. These activities include:   Performance evaluation and compensation   Organizational design and territory   Promotions Let’s examine each case and how you might build and execute a process that insulates the company from bad behavior and politically motivated outcomes.

Western Civilization is in the crisis it is because we have sacrificed more profound values than the immediate and quantifiable consequences we tend to associate with the pursuit of our material interests. Among these are peace; liberty; respect for property, contracts, and the inviolability of the individual; truthfulness and the development of the mind; integrity; distrust of power; a sense of spirituality; and philosophically-principled behavior. But when our culture becomes driven by material concerns, these less tangible values recede in importance, and our thinking becomes dominated by the need to preserve the organizational forms that we see as having served our interests.

Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management.

We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today.

Malcolm Gladwell puts the "pop" in pop psychology, and although revered in lay circles, is roundly dismissed by experts - even by the researchers he makes famous.

Mindfulness promises a great number of desirable benefits, and is based on much more solid research than many competing ideas on how to change people.

Behaviorism was a busted flush, but neo-behaviorist theories, especially choice architecture, achieve behavioral change without coercion or the downsides of carrots and sticks.

There was nothing scientific about Scientific Management (Taylorism), and neither was it good management.

The change "grief cycle", for some people, may be excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, effort, and excellence.

Business is the most important institution on the planet for furthering human flourishing.

Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience.

Most change strategy models are not very strategic – change strategy is an important lynchpin between business strategy and change tactics.

The human side of analytics is the biggest challenge to implementing big data.

The psychological theories that inform day-to-day business practices are comprised mostly of folk-psychology, fads, and myths.

Yesterday’s decision-making strategies are ill-equipped to deal with petabyte information flows.

The notion of "business as usual" is a harmful myth.

It is time to euthanize change management.

Most businesses would profit greatly from just applying Change Management 101 well.

The problem is not lack of competence, it is confidence without competence.

21st century leaders will be growers, not knowers.

Conflict is about issues and ideas, while accountability is about performance and behavior.

Good managers don't set a goal to increase efficiency, but rather an implementation of business process improvements that result in higher efficiency as well.

Success is mainly the result of hard work.

Leaders need to consider three types of hardwiring—Behaviors, Abilities, Motivations—that work together to describe the unique gifts, talents, and spin that you can bring to work.

Regardless of what people say they value or believe, what actually shows up in their behavior is the best indication of the true culture.

Organizational culture is simply the response of an organization to its political influences, both internal and external.

A good systems thinker, particularly in an organizational setting, is someone who can see four levels operating simultaneously: events, patterns of behavior, systems, and mental models.

Employees come to us in a state of readiness to engage, and it is the behavior and decisions of managers and organizational leaders that can result in even the best employees becoming disengaged over time.

Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.

If you’re trying to predict human economic behavior—and you don’t include emotions in your equation—your predictions will probably be way off. Emotions factor heavily into the algorithms that produce our trade-off decisions.

When dramatic organizational change is added to the normal levels of job insecurity, personality clashes, and political battling, the resulting chaotic milieu provides both the necessary stimulation and sufficient “cover” for psychopathic behavior.

The most significant transformational moment in my career was an act of elimination. It wasn’t my idea. I was in my late thirties and doing well flying around the country giving the same talk about organizational behavior to companies. I was on a lucrative treadmill of preserving, but I needed my mentor Paul Hersey to point out the downside. “You’re too good at what you’re doing,” Hersey told me. “You’re making too much money selling your day rate to companies.” When someone tells me I’m “too good” my brain shifts into neutral—and I bask in the praise. But Hersey wasn’t done with me. “You’re not investing in your future,” he said. “You’re not researching and writing and coming up with new things to say. You can continue doing what you’re doing for a long time. But you’ll never become the person you want to be.” For some reason, that last sentence triggered a profound emotion in me. I respected Paul tremendously. And I knew he was right. In Peter Drucker’s words, I was “sacrificing the future on the altar of today.” I could see my future and it had some dark empty holes in it. I was too busy maintaining a comfortable life. At some point, I’d grow bored or disaffected, but it might happen too late in the game for me to do something about it. Unless I eliminated some of the busywork, I would never create something new for myself. Despite the immediate cut in pay, that’s the moment I stopped chasing my tail for a day rate and decided to follow a different path. I have always been thankful for Paul’s advice.

four suggested explanations are ideological, rather than economic or organizational: (1) Risk-taking behavior, essential for efforts at innovation, is more widespread in some societies than in others. (2) The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence. (3) Tolerance of diverse views and of heretics fosters innovation, whereas a strongly traditional outlook (as in China’s emphasis on ancient Chinese classics) stifles it. (4) Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.

Dr. Brown's book is able to make the subject matter interesting in a very pragmatic way, without losing the attractiveness and appeal of his academic writing and sound background. I would recommend the use of this book for teaching in leadership, management and organizational behavior courses knowing that it would make a great contribution to the learning experience of the reader." Alberto DeFeo, Ph.D. (Law) Chief Administrative Officer of Lake Country and Adjunct Professor of University of Northern British Columbia

Amy Wrzesniewski, associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale University, has been studying a classification system that can help you recognize your orientation toward your work and attain greater job satisfaction. She defines work in three ways: 1.​A JOB is a way to pay the bills. It’s a means to an end, and you have little attachment to it. 2.​A CAREER is a path toward growth and achievement. Careers have clear ladders for upward mobility. 3.​A CALLING is work that is an important part of your life and provides meaning. People with a calling are generally more satisfied with the work they do.

However, in part for reasons of organizational convenience, modern societies are structured as if all humans had the same sleep requirements; and in many parts of the world there is a satisfying sense of moral rectitude in rising early. The amount of sleep required for buffer dumping would then depend on how much we have both thought and experienced since the last sleep period.

So what exactly is HOW? For many, business and life has always been about the pursuit of What: “What do we do? What’s on the agenda? What do we need to accomplish?” Whats are commodities; they are easily duplicated or reverse-engineered and delivered faster and at a lower cost by someone else. How is a philosophy. It's a way of thinking about individual and organizational behavior. And How we do what we do – our behavior – has become today’s greatest source of our advantage. In this world, How is no longer a question, but the answer to what ails us as people, institutions, companies, nations. How we behave, how we consume, how we build trust in our relationships and how we relate to others provides us with the power to not just survive, but thrive and endure.

Chris Argyris criticized “good communication that blocks learning,” arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because “they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability.

In an organizational culture where respect and the dignity of individuals are held as the highest values, shame and blame don’t work as management styles. There is no leading by fear. Empathy is a valued asset, accountability is an expectation rather than an exception, and the primal human need for belonging is not used as leverage and social control. We can’t control the behavior of individuals; however, we can cultivate organizational cultures where behaviors are not tolerated and people are held accountable for protecting what matters most: human beings. We

Gut Feel Versus Structure Many leaders, especially those who run smaller organizations, believe that they have the natural skills they need to choose good people without any real process. They look back at their careers and remember the good employees they’ve hired and give themselves credit for having recognized those people’s potential. However, they seem to block out the memories of the unsuccessful hires they’ve made, or they justify those mistakes based on the hidden behavioral deficiencies in the people they later had to fire. Whatever the case, they persist in the belief that they know a good person when they see one and that they can go about the hiring process without much structure.

One of the simplest is the drive for survival, in other words, your very deep sense of self-protection. If, in the field of sensory inflows in which you are immersed, the parts of the self that gate inflows pick up sensory-encoded meanings that can affect your self-organizational integrity, they will have a very deep evolutionary drive to signal your conscious attention. However, if the paradigm or lens through which you view the world around you does not allow you to receive those signals consciously, this can be thought of as repression-driven gating then the unconscious parts of the self may begin to override the conscious programming. In response your emotional state or behavior may change, sometimes significantly. You just won’t know why.

As you try to balance between the socialist and capitalist systems in the world, you will come up against the biggest problem facing humanity today. Jung wrote in 1938 "Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity." Each of these systems promotes itself by pointing out the moral failings of the other, but these moral failings are actually failings brought about by people acting within the context of large organizations. What is truly needed is to learn a structure of organization of human beings that provides for the organized group the same capacity and propensity for moral behavior that is possessed by individuals.

The various ways of creating a culture of innovation that we’ve talked about so far are greatly influenced by the leaders at the top. Leaders can’t dictate culture, but they can nurture it. They can generate the right conditions for creativity and innovation. Metaphorically, they can provide the heat and light and moisture and nutrients for a creative culture to blossom and grow. They can focus the best efforts of talented individuals to build innovative, successful groups. In our work at IDEO, we have been lucky enough to meet frequently with CEOs and visionary leaders from both the private and public sectors. Each has his or her own unique style, of course, but the best all have an ability to identify and activate the capabilities of people on their teams. This trait goes far beyond mere charisma or even intelligence. Certain leaders have a knack for nurturing people around them in a way that enables them to be at their best. One way to describe those leaders is to say they are “multipliers,” a term we picked up from talking to author and executive advisor Liz Wiseman. Drawing on a background in organizational behavior and years of experience as a global human resources executive at Oracle Corporation, Liz interviewed more than 150 leaders on four continents to research her book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Liz observes that all leaders lie somewhere on a continuum between diminishers, who exercise tight control in a way that underutilizes their team’s creative talents, and multipliers, who set challenging goals and then help employees achieve the kind of extraordinary results that they themselves may not have known they were capable of.

So, let’s reorient from exterior to interior. “Distraction” then becomes boredom; “impulsiveness” becomes self-generated explorative behavior based on what captures interest; “abnormal activity level” is thus high-energy levels generating multiple task interests; “disorganization” is failure to follow rigid organizational regimens set by others; “anxiety”—well, we all know that one: what the hell kind of world did I get born into?; “emotional lability” is, in fact, a wide range of emotions that are accessed when adults or the exterior culture don’t want them to be. In other words, should you have ever read Mark Twain, what is being described is “Tom Sawyer syndrome,” a once common state of being in many if not most children. The more widely open the sensory gating channels are, the more the child’s behavior alters from what is currently held to be the cultural norm in the West. On average, some

we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war—and the world—worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats. Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents. We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.

In addition to work, ADHD can significantly impact family life and relationships. The effects of ADHD on relationships are not necessarily negative; in fact, they can bring out many positive attributes. Loved ones may feel energized around you and recognize that your sense of spontaneity and creative expression brings a lot of joy into their lives. On the flip side, friends and family may complain about imbalanced relationships, issues with intimacy, and/or fraught dynamics. If you get easily sidetracked, you may be late to dates with friends and family (or completely forget to meet). You may forget to respond to emails, calls, and test. Family and friends may take these behaviors personally. This can feel hurtful to you when you are trying your best with a brain that works differently than theirs. Of course, this does not have anything to do with how much you care for your loved ones, so communicating what you're going through and strengthening your organizational skills to respect important commitments can keep your treasured relationships humming along smoothly.

Hence the term “voluntary muscle” is in many ways a figure of speech. I can consciously command a movement, but I cannot consciously command the recruitment of every muscle fiber which must be used, nor the precise order of their contractions and lengthenings which actually produce the desired effect. This is to say that every consciously willed movement is always conditioned by two things: genetically established organization and habitual usage. Our genetic organization is quite plastic, open-ended, filled with potential variations in behavior; on the other hand, habitual usage can become just as limiting as it is convenient, and can become a tyrant to exactly the degree that it becomes practiced, automatic, unconscious. We are free to train ourselves to act differently, but it is very difficult to suddenly act differently than we have been trained. The tendencies in our motor behavior created by genetically determined patterns and by habitual usage do not lie within the muscle cells, nor even in the motor neurons that unite them into motor units. The search for the organizational factors of purposeful muscular control—whether it be action or relaxation—takes us deeper and deeper into the central nervous system, where we find that every muscular response is built up, selected, and colored by the totality of our neural activity, both conscious and unconscious.

And so, when I tell stories today about digital transformation and organizational agility and customer centricity, I use a vocabulary that is very consistent and very refined. It is one of the tools I have available to tell my story effectively. I talk about assumptions. I talk about hypotheses. I talk about outcomes as a measure of customer success. I talk about outcomes as a measurable change in customer behavior. I talk about outcomes over outputs, experimentation, continuous learning, and ship, sense, and respond. The more you tell your story, the more you can refine your language into your trademark or brand—what you’re most known for. For example, baseball great Yogi Berra was famous for his Yogi-isms—sayings like “You can observe a lot by watching” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” It’s not just a hook or catchphrase, it helps tell the story as well. For Lean Startup, a best-selling book on corporate innovation written by Eric Ries, the words were “build,” “measure,” “learn.” Jeff Patton, a colleague of mine, uses the phrase “the differences that make a difference.” And he talks about bets as a way of testing confidence levels. He’ll ask, “What will you bet me that your idea is good? Will you bet me lunch? A day’s pay? Your 401(k)?” These words are not only their vocabulary. They are their brand. That’s one of the benefits of storytelling and telling those stories continuously. As you refine your language, the people who are beginning to pay attention to you start adopting that language, and then that becomes your thing.

Dye, C. F., & Garman, A. N. (2006). Exceptional leadership: 16 critical competencies for healthcare executives. Chicago, IL: Health Administration Press. Freshman, B., & Rubino, L. (2002).

executives. View this report, titled A Comparison of the Career Attainments of Men and Women Healthcare Executives, December 2006, at

Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.

The Bible reminds us that a little leaven leavens the whole loaf of bread. If one insists on maintaining a competitive spirit in the face of the above behaviors, it may be a strong indicator of a lack of value alignment. Such individuals may need to find an organization that is more in tune with their approach to organizational life.

Trust is just one of five behaviors that cohesive teams must establish to build a healthy organization.

Good units walk a thin line between indiscipline and ineffectiveness. Ignore the rules too often and you’ve got a mob, but enforce the rules too strictly and you’ve got a herd.

Use of analytics is accelerating, and that means more data-driven decision making and fewer hunches. Evidence-based management complements analytics by adding validated cause-and-effect relationships between policies and effects.

Specifically, they reference the work of Argyris and Schon on distinguishing between single and double-loop learning in both papers.72 Naot, Lipshitz, and Popper state that double loop learning is, “considered to be of higher quality because effective solution of some problems requires the examination of sensitive undiscussable issues, and the reframing of assumptions, values and goals.”73 Whereas single loop learning is more interested in a quick fix, double loop considers the larger context and works to shift organizational culture (values, beliefs, assumptions, etc.) when necessary to truly implement a lesson, and more importantly, change individual and organizational behavior. For example, Moynihan states, “The creation of the ICS can be considered an example of intercrisis double-loop learning, as it shows practitioners and policy makers questioning basic approaches to crisis response, and developing a new framework for future responses.”74

Drawing on the latest findings from psychology, organizational behavior, and neuroscience—research on resilience, creativity, mindfulness, compassion, and more—I will show you how the following six strategies for attaining happiness and fulfillment are actually the key to thriving professionally.

The relations outlined on an organization chart provide a framework within which fuller and more spontaneous human behavior takes place. The formal system may draw upon that behavior for added strength; it will in its turn be subordinated to personal and group egotism. Every official and employee will try to use his position to satisfy his {9} psychological needs. This may result in a gain for the organization if he accepts its goals and extends himself in its interests. But usually, even in the best circumstances, some price is paid in organizational rigidity.

Analysis of the history of any successful organization will show that it owed its success to a team of people whose styles, behavior, and needs were different but who could work together. Although organizational success is usually attributed to one person, behind that person is a team that enabled him to perform well.

Just as personal values influence and guide an individual’s behavior, organizational values influence and guide the team’s behavior.

As we now know, there are no credible, routine ways to unambiguously separate the influences of nature and nurture in the control of behavior that will apply across different environments. To understand the aspects of behavior that derive their organizational essence mainly from nature, we must first identify how instinctual behaviors emerge from the intrinsic potentials of the nervous system. For instance, animals do not learn to search their environment for items needed for survival, although they surely need to learn exactly when and how precisely to search. In other words, the “seeking potential” is built into the brain, but each animal must learn to direct its behaviors toward the opportunities that are available in the environment. In addition, animals do not need to learn to experience and express fear, anger, pain, pleasure, and joy, nor to play in simple rough-and-tumble ways, even though all of these processes come to modify and be modified by learning. Evidence suggests that evolution has imprinted many spontaneous psychobehavioral potentials within the inherited neurodynamics of the mammalian brain; these systems help generate internally experienced emotional feelings.

in order to understand the neural nature of emotional feelings in humans, we must first seek to decode how brain circuits control the basic, genetically encoded emotional behavioral tendencies we share with other mammals. Then we must try to determine how subjective experience emerges from or is linked to those brain systems. Progress on these issues has been meager. In general, both psychology and modern neuroscience have failed to give sufficient credence to the fact that organisms are born with a variety of innate affective tendencies that emerge from the ancient organizational structure of the mammalian brain.

Over the course of time, we settled on the following seven keys:    Demonstrate competence. You possess the necessary and critical skills required to lead in your organizational context.    Exhibit conviction. You display assurance that the chosen course of action will lead to positive results.    Set high standards. You aim high, both for yourself and your team.    Listen to your team. You listen to feedback and you incorporate that feedback appropriately.    Work hard. You put in the time and effort necessary to get the job done.    Do the difficult. You do the hard things, like holding people accountable, confronting bad behavior, and staying true to your values even when it hurts.    Be consistent. Your words, actions, decisions, and investments are in alignment.

Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives. The term “psychological safety” was coined by Amy Edmondson, an organizational behavioral scientist at Harvard. In her TEDx talk, Edmondson defines psychological safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

Most told me Goldman’s behavior does not reflect how clients interpret the principles, which is based in part on how Goldman itself portrays them externally. However, most people I interviewed said that does not necessarily make the firm’s behavior criminal or illegal.