Human Resources

Human Behaviour in Business Managers studying skills and techniques of determining human resources can apply them to individuals in business. By learning human behaviour, managers can acquire the skills and techniques necessary to properly allocate human resources. As a manager, first of all you must learn about how people learn personality dimensions. Then you can determine people's behaviour types, and apply them to different employee positions. Crucial to the grand scheme of things is that managers must learn that implementing particular behaviour sciences requires a good deal of patience, effort, and time. Suggestions for managers to be successful in management include examining the needs of jobs, and matching them to the principals of human behaviour. HUMAN BEHAVIOUR: HOW PEOPLE LEARN Understanding the basics of human behaviours are critical to the improvement of businesses and organizations. Most human behaviour is learned as we grow up, in a long process that begins when we are born. Many behaviours are learned from our parents, siblings, and close friends when we are younger. As we grow older, some of these behaviours can change as our peer groups influence us more than our family. As we mature, some of us drop bad habits, or pick them up, as the case may go. That being said, we can now see how people learn behaviours and can proceed with how we can learn and apply these behaviours. Nowadays there are many behavioural tools provided to managers, each having different purposes. Managers have to use these principals by combing them through their own personality, style, and environment. Applying these principals, offered by behavioural scientists requires a good deal of effort, patience, and time. The better managers know enough not to apply multiple techniques simultaneously, and when to use the ones they deem important. Managers must also realize that with the abundance of new theories that have been developed, many of them are either based on illogical assumptions, or they are irrelevant when trying to actually apply them. DETERMINING PEOPLE'S BEHAVIOUR TYPE One way of determining people's personalities, is the Myers Briggs Type indicator. The Myers Briggs is a test that gives the subject a series of questions on how they would react to a certain situation. From the 100 questions posed, experts have developed a way to classify these people into 16 personality types. These people are either extroverted or introverted, sensing or intuitive, thinking or feeling, perceiving or judging. What this does is enables managers to match these people with jobs by determining what individuals enjoy doing and what positions are best suited for them. Chris Argyris is a former professor at Yale University, and is known as the father of organizational learning. He looked at human behaviours that blocked learning in organizations. He believed that behaviour of organizations could create defensive routines that can prevent information from getting to the top. Thus, he believed in the actions of employees to learn hoe to overcome these defensive routines. If we can do this, then we have a better chance to improve an organization from feedback of all employees. Determining people's behaviour is essential to choosing where employees fit into jobs. In order to determine what behaviour type a person is will look at several different personality traits. These are most valuable to managers as they analyze people's control over their destinies, their need to achieve, self-esteem, their ability to self-monitor, risk-taking and personality type. Analyzing a person's locus of control can decide if people are internals or externals. Locus of control is the idea of having control over your own destiny. An internal person believes that they hold their own key to the future, while an external is someone who feels their life is mostly controlled by fate. On the whole, internals are better in business, however, this can differ by job. Internals are more willing to work harder to achieve their goals, while externals would be more apt to accept things the way they are. An individual's need to achieve (nAch) is easily understood. People that have high need to achieve continually strive to do things better. These people would perform better in situations that challenge their ability. So high nAch people would do better in sales and professional sports than low nAch. Another area of behaviour that is important to business is self-esteem. People with high self-esteem will take more risks and choose those odd jobs that nobody else wants. Those with low self-esteem usually

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