Organizational Psychology Quotes

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

[A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means.

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

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

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.

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

Dialogue isn’t a competition to be the smartest or the most correct person in the room; it is a collaboration to find the truth.

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.

Strategy does not eliminate scarcity and its consequence—the necessity of choice. Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others. There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

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.

It seems paradoxical that an organization responsible for enforcing the law would frequently rely on illegal practices. The police resolve this tension between nominally lawful ends and illegal means by substituting their own occupational and organizational norms for the legal duties assigned to them. Westley suggests: This process then results in a transfer in property from the state to the colleague group. The means of violence which were originally a property of the state, in loan to its law-enforcement agent, the police, are in a psychological sense confiscated by the police, to be conceived of as a personal property to be used at their discretion. From the officers’ perspective, the center of authority is shifted and the relationship between the state and its agents is reversed. The police become a law unto themselves.

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.

How do we move an organizational culture toward psychological safety? We need to translate good intentions into consistent actions.

Zettler and Hilbig (2010) examined counterproductive behaviors—such as stealing from work, showing up late, being rude to coworkers, and other acts—in a sample of employees. The researchers wanted to understand how personality characteristics would be related to counterproductive behavior. To find out, they asked the employees to give anonymous self-reports about their personality, about their workplace, and about their counterproductive behavior at work. The findings of Zettler and Hilbig showed, not surprisingly, that employees who were high in Honesty–Humility generally engaged in little counterproductive behavior. In contrast, employees who were low in Honesty–Humility did a lot more counterproductive behavior. But Zettler and Hilbig noted that this finding only applied to some of the low-Honesty–Humility employees. It depended on whether the employee worked in a place where there was a lot of “organizational politics”—for example, where employees could get ahead simply by agreeing with the boss or by having the right network of allies. Employees who were low in Honesty–Humility did a lot of counterproductive behavior if they worked in places that were very “political,” but not if they worked in places that were not so political. Presumably, workplaces with more organizational politics tend to make employees feel that self-serving behaviors (including some counterproductive acts) are normal and that punishment for those behaviors is less likely. In such a workplace, employees low in Honesty–Humility are therefore likely to act on the temptation to commit counterproductive behaviors, but employees high in Honesty–Humility remain untempted. The researchers noted that these findings were an example of a person-by-situation interaction: In one situation, the personality characteristic of low Honesty–Humility was expressed through counterproductive behavior, but in another situation, it was not.

The lead partners of consulting firms, by the way, understand this self-subordination thing well. They are well into the “meta” level of this particular development in organizational psychology. To paraphrase a comment passed along from Roland Berger, a McKinsey alumnus who built up his own large consulting firm, consulting is really a branch of the lemonade business. You find anxious overachievers and bring them in with what they think is a lot of money and a few tokens of prestige. Then you squeeze them like lemons and toss out the rinds.

But in a psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea. The fearless organization is one in which interpersonal fear is minimized so that team and organizational performance can be maximized in a knowledge intensive world. It is not one devoid of anxiety about the future!

These political and psychological precepts often lead to an organizational upshot: rather than focusing on efforts to integrate society, progressives have increasingly militated for the creation of spaces and

With self-awareness, a basic definition tells us, “You know what you are feeling and why—and how it helps or hurts what you are trying to do.” Other key points: you can align your self-image on how others see you; you have an accurate sense of your limits and strengths, and so a more realistic self-confidence; you are clear about your sense of purpose and values, which helps you be more decisive. Cognitive scientists call this self-reflexive attention “meta-awareness.” We can watch our thoughts and feelings as they come and go, and know where our attention focuses—and change that focus if we want. This deliberate control of the beam of our attention is a mental skill. Think of our mind as a sort of gym, a place where we can practice in ways that will bulk up our mental capacities. The research on flow, you may recall, revealed that the person’s focus while in flow was 100 percent. They were one-pointed, fully present to the moment. Such absorption indicates meta-awareness, that ability to monitor and manage your own focus. But we don’t need that diamond-like beam of focus all the time: a stronger muscle for attention boosts the odds that we can get into an optimal state. Focus—paying attention where and when we want to—has endless uses. Deliberate concentration on whatever may be important to us at the moment lets us do our best; being distracted worsens our effort. Having control of our attention is for the mind what cardiovascular fitness is for the body; just as a fit heart enhances any physical task, full focus enhances whatever we do.

In 2012, a team of researchers at Google found that psychological safety was the top predictor of team effectiveness.8 Similarly, in the State of DevOps research, a high-trust culture, which includes psychological safety, predicted software delivery and organizational performance in technology value streams, as measured by the Westrum organizational typology model, which divided organizations into pathological, bureaucratic, and generative.

Avoid picking a winning strategy earlier than is necessary. Keep options open and be prepared—psychologically, organizationally, and politically—to change course.

Michael Robinson is a Utah real estate investor. He graduated from Brigham Young University, and he has a degree in business and psychology with an emphasis in organizational behavior.

Michael Robinson is a Utah real estate investor. He graduated from Brigham Young University, and he has a degree in business and psychology with an emphasis in organizational behavior. Michael is athletic and enjoys running. He has completed X-Terra triathlons and regularly snow skis. He has used his real estate expertise and business acumen to serve the needs of homeless populations in third world countries, providing basic housing needs and resources.

Prepare for good fortune. Be psychologically, organizationally, and politically prepared in case a window of opportunity opens for deal making or diplomacy.

Taking inspiration from Personal Construct Psychology and the work of Burr et al (2014), it can be useful for the team to reflect on the following questions: How do we perceive ourselves as a team? How do we perceive the other team? How do we think the other team perceives us? How do we think the other team perceives themselves?

Unfavorable information is lost, not by malicious intent, purposeful concealment, or reluctance to say something superiors do not want to hear (all psychological in origin), but as a collective and systemic consequence of organizational structure and roles: people deliberately do not seek out unfavorable information. He notes, “The technological consequences of such distortions can be disastrous.

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.

Dr. Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says this is because J. J. Abrams is “a giver,” a rarity in an industry full of takers. No good TV show or film is made by one person, but whereas Hollywood bigshots are known for being credit-hogs, J. J. Abrams is a fantastic collaborator. Grant would know. He wrote the book on the subject. In his bestseller, Give and Take, he presents rigorous research showing that a disproportionate number of the most successful people in a given industry are extremely generous. From medical students to engineers to salespeople, his studies find givers at the top of the ladder. “Being a giver doesn’t require extraordinary acts of sacrifice,” Grant writes in Give and Take. “It just involves a focus on acting in the interests of others, such as by giving help, providing mentoring, sharing credit, or making connections for others.” Abrams is known, acquaintances tell me, for his kindness and lack of ego, in addition to his penchant for mystery. That’s how he attracts the best people to his staff. And that’s how he’s managed to climb so far so fast.* Staffers with whom I e-mailed and met at the “typewriter shop” were eager to keep Abrams away from me because, according to his reputation, he’d probably spend way too much time helping this shaggy-haired writer out when he ought to be, you know, filming Star Wars. Initially, Abrams helped out better-connected people than himself, and doing so helped him superconnect. But once he was the superconnector, he still helped people. That’s how to tell if someone is a giver, or a taker in giver’s clothing. “If you do it only to succeed,” Grant says, in the long run, “it probably won’t work.

This relation of program to environment opened up an exceedingly important role for computer simulation as a tool for achieving a deeper understanding of human behavior. For if it is the organization of components, and not their physical properties, that largely determines behavior, and if computers are organized somewhat in the image of man, then the computer becomes an obvious device for exploring the consequences of alternative organizational assumptions for human behavior. Psychology could move forward without awaiting the solutions by neurology of the problems of component design—however interesting and significant these components turn out to be.

By far the most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring, and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.

The rate of adaptation to change in response to the evolutionary forces increases incredibly when everyone in the organization gets aligned.

The theory of person-environment fit says that you might be happier and more fulfilled in certain places because of your temperament, values, and goals. That your characteristics might match up best with a landscape or a location. It’s often applied to business structure, and organizational psychology, but could just as well apply to life in the mountains.

The order of the universe is defined as consciousness’s entanglement with itself within the holographic universe. The Law of Attraction states: The degree to which you accept/love yourself will be reflected in all that is attracted to you. Intimately connected with the above universal law, yet specifically associated with the organizational balance between Psychological Reality Framework One and Two, The Law of Consciousness Equilibrium states: The Dynamic System of Consciousness has a constant, propensity towards balancing the physical, emotional and spiritual value climate between Psychological Framework One and Two, thereby providing stabilizing, expansive solutions vital to the survival/evolution of the individual.

Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others. There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

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.

In Japan there is an approach towards company improvement called “kaizen.” It’s a generic Japanese word that means “improvement,” but is usually used to describe a program of organizational development that is based on “continuous improvement.

While the current state briefing is often sobering, it's a helpful psychological space from which to accept the need for change and generate innovative future state thinking

I have found this to be true in organizations as well as in individual lives. In an organization, the physical dimension is expressed in economic terms. The mental or psychological dimension deals with the recognition, development, and use of talent. The social/emotional dimension has to do with human relations, with how people are treated. And the spiritual dimension deals with finding meaning through purpose or contribution and through organizational integrity.

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.

Rather than relying on willpower, you’ll need to create an automated response for how to deal with challenges. In other words, you’ll need to create a trigger for the trigger. Once you get triggered to self-sabotage, that very trigger triggers you to do something more positive. Sound complex? It’s not. This is called implementation intentions, and it’s a well-researched idea in organizational and motivation psychology. Once you’ve outsourced your proactive response to self-destruction to your environment, your level of rest and recovery deepens, because your level of internal consistency increases. At the most fundamental level, rest is about alignment and being in a state of peace and confidence. You can’t have confidence if you continually act in ways contrary to your goals. Here’s how it works.

Effect On Culture Organizations are made up of people. Those people work and “live” there with other people at least 40 hours per week. Like the connective tissue that begins to form when we are injured or when we are healing and becomes a part of who we are, team members are a part of the connective tissue of the organization. What happens when we remove or tear out a piece of that tissue? Not only does it hurt a lot, it causes heavy bleeding. If it doesn’t heal properly, there are complications. We may never regain our function in that area. When good productive people leave, we feel the pain and so does the culture of the team. The only way to mend the tissue permanently is to do the right things to engage and retain them. Spillover Effect We don’t talk about this much, but there is a psychological impact on other productive and engaged employees when they are forced to work with disengaged employees. Whether it is during water cooler talk or just in combined work spaces, the negative energy that disengaged employees pass to the entire team and organization can be toxic. Oftentimes, the disengaged employees are the scapegoats to deeper organizational issues. When we do not look at what is causing them to be disengaged, we enable the spillover effect to continue. Organizations that want a thriving workplace must rid themselves of disengaged employees, not necessarily by termination, but by living by the Laws found in this book. Negative Word Of Mouth Remember that unhappy employees don’t make for good promoters of your brand. In fact, disengaged employees are likely to tell more people and blurt it out all over social media and at every party. Reputationally, this negative word of mouth works against your brand promise. Who are you out in the world to your customers? Whatever that is, it must match who you are to your employees. Loss Of Organizational Stability Stop for a minute and think about what it says to your customers, partners, and investors when your employees keep walking out the door. Potentially, they could be in the middle of a complex project implementation and having a consistent point of contact through that process is key.

1994, a partner, addressing a gathering of new partners, highlighted the relationship between the partnership structure and the cultural view it promoted: “We own this business … We are partners—emotionally, psychologically, and financially. There can be no borders between us, no secrets.”21

In organizational psychology, culture has three elements:9 practices, values, and underlying assumptions. Practices are the daily routines that reflect and reinforce values. Values are shared principles around what’s important and desirable—what should be rewarded versus what should be punished. Underlying assumptions are deeply held, often taken-for-granted beliefs about how the world works.10 Our assumptions shape our values, which in turn drive our practices.

External environment is more important than internal, personal motivation— because if you change your environment, behavior change will follow, and so will a change in your thoughts and beliefs.

Instead of blaming individuals for their poor habits, Behavior Analysis focuses on understanding observable behaviors and how the environment can be adjusted to support desired changes.

Sometimes the cause of behavioral hotspots lies hidden elsewhere in the process.

Simply relying on leaders isn’t enough to make habits stick in a company.

Make sure you consider how performance improvement in one area might have a positive or negative ripple effect on the rest of the organization.

The behaviors must connect at an emotional level for people. They must be personally rewarding, not just for the organization.

Vital Behaviors reflect an organization’s brand, policies, procedures, work processes, terms, and tools.

People need to know that leaders are doing everything possible to remove barriers that hamper their doing the “right” things.

Rather than blaming people for their poor habits, Behavior Analysis focuses on altering the environment to help them succeed.

The reality of execution is that nothing changes until people’s behaviors change.

Consistent behavior can be like a turbo boost for your organization, and it won’t cost you anything extra. In contrast, inconsistent behavior can be a major stumbling block if you underestimate its importance in achieving effective execution.

Research has established, however, that burnout is primarily the result of psychologically hazardous factors that occur at your workplace. (So no, it isn’t just an individual problem; it’s an organizational issue.) More specifically, burnout happens when there’s an ongoing mismatch between the conditions an employee needs to support their well-being and their best work, and what their organization actually provides. Not being given the resources or time you need to manage your workload, for example, or working in an environment where you have insufficient control and autonomy, are known burnout triggers.

The behaviors must connect at an emotional level for people. They must be personally rewarding, not just for the organization.

Embedding Vital Behaviors into an organization’s DNA is both a science and an art.

The important thing to remember is that Vital Behaviors are dynamic, not static. They will change as people ask for more clarity and as conditions change.

Behavior Analysis provides the systematic way to do this. It’s a positive approach that helps people focus on what they want, rather than the fear they wish to avoid.

Lasting habits can only be created when a person’s internal and external environments are aligned.

Our ultimate promise brings surprisingly good news: achieving organizational behavior change is easier than achieving individual behavior change.

External environment is more important than internal, personal motivation— because if you change your environment, behavior change will follow, and so will a change in your thoughts and beliefs.

People need to know that leaders are doing everything possible to remove barriers that hamper their doing the “right” things.

There are 3 Pillars that every employee needs to succeed: (1) clear expectations, (2) actionable feedback, and (3) barrier removal.

Vital Behaviors can be relatively straightforward (like safety procedures) or extremely complex (like decision-making). They can be identified at any level of an organization.