Introduction
This research essay is about the organizational behavior of a company situated centrally in the Middle East region. The company selected to carry out research for is the renowned and prospering construction company known as “Fast Construction Company” whose headquarter is in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Organizational Behavior
(Vasu, Steward, Garson; 1998, p. 1) Organizational Behavior is the concept and set of principles that represent a group of people working and reacting professionally together to carry out several tasks and generate profit. The main aim of this group is to attain a common goal. This common goal could be working for saving the environment, wildlife, to make money, to serve communities and people, or to spread knowledge among people. The group of these professionals can be known as an organization. These people are professional trained to carry out the specific tasks by maintaining a good reputation for the company they are working for in a way that could generate valuable and remarkable revenue. Organizational behavior is for every company. Basically, organizational behavior reflects the systematic and scientific study of individuals, groups, or organizations with respect to different levels of analysis, studies, evaluation, viewpoints, and methods. It emphasizes how people react and act in the company. The purpose to perform this analysis is to understand the working of the company, its pattern of work, the way it conducts operations and set goals ahead, the way its people are working to achieve that common goal; so that the overall performance of the organization could be predicted and improved to generate the maximum output and revenue.
Organizational behavior reveals the mixture of logical, scientific and psychological, and management human skills; and helps in predicting the future growth and performance of the company. In short, Organizational behavior provides a set of tools through which people and performance of an organization could be understood, analyzed; and helps Managers of the company to improve, augment and amend work operations in such a way that could help the individuals, groups and coordinators to achieve the goal of the business by putting the best output and get the highest revenue margins (Cherrington, 1994, p. 4).
Main Objective of Organizational Behavior
The idea of organizing people and individuals to form a group and work mutually is not new; it is there since human beings started working together. People working jointly in this group belong to different brought up and cultures, religions, and most of all, every single person thinks separately from the other so making a group of people gave the need to work in accordance by following a set of rules and patterns which could be practiced by all without collision (Tosi, Neal, Rizzo; 2000, p. 9).
Organizations need to maintain their present good performance and to make a set of rules that could boost the business performance more effectively. Organizational Behavior analysis helps companies in achieving this goal. The main purpose to do so is to understand the capabilities of the workers, evaluate the present position of the company, and boost up the performance level of the company for effective profitable future growth. It also helps in encouraging the individuals and groups working in the company more efficiently to bring flexibility and innovation. Another purpose is to develop and maintain a course of actions that could lead the company to effective management (Reid, Parsons, Green; 1989, p. 8).
Observing Organizational Behavior in companies is important in order to prevent the gap between the company and its employees; when a company is trying to do something and it’s not being accomplished by the team and workers.
Fast Construction Company & Organizational Behavior
Fast Construction Company is a locally-based construction company that has carried out several remarkable projects in the United Arab Emirates. The headquarters of the company is mainly situated in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates and the basic licensing of the company was completed in Ajman, but the company personally has no sub-branches available in the region of Ajman. The company has its competition with other local and internationally related construction companies, and Fast Construction Company has outstandingly made its unique standing and position in the competitive construction marketplace of the Middle East region. All the departments of the company are categorized into divisions which are based on the functional working of each department.
The organizational environment of the Fast Construction Company is loaded with extraordinary organizational behavior since it covers many employees belonging from different areas of the world and with separate nationalities. The working staff at the Fast Construction Company comprises of people ranging from Egypt, Philippines, India, and United Arab Emirates; so these people have their own separate cultures, thinking processes, working habits, environments, and entirely different nature. The entire company operates with an entirely different module of diverse organizational culture where “Ethnicity” plays a vital role. All the employees here are treated equally on the basis of their work and performance, rather than their civilization background. All the matters, disagreements, and issues are dealt with very professionally in such a manner that could satisfy all the parties involved in the matter. The local nationalists have no deep involvement in the internal affairs of the company because the management along with the Senior Administrator of the company, Mr. Wael Mohammad Abdel-Hameed have set up a very productive setup in the office using organizational behavior principles and certain legal interventions which could operate and govern the organizational environment perfectly. All the rules and regulations of the company are based on safety and informative procedures which could be helpful for the employees and productive for the revenue generation of the company.
The upper management of the company has great concern for the betterment of their employees, which is why the employees are provided with the basic benefits and remuneration packages that could suit according to the academic backgrounds and experience of their employees. Every year, all the employees are provided with an increase in their salaries and an additional bonus. Apart from that, other fringe benefits provided by the company to its employees are medical insurance, automobile insurance, accommodation, and official allowance. Monthly performance checks are carried out instead of annual performance evaluations by the management of the company.
Recruitment & Training Process in Fast Construction Company
The hiring process of Fast Construction is basically internally based. Whenever a new post is vacant, the old retained employees of the company make a recommendation for the new staff. Apart from that, the Head of the Human Resource Department selects the perfect match for the job while traveling in different countries and sorts out the best candidate by his own experience and expertise. Before recruiting the new staff, they are provided with a detailed briefing of the job requirement and the working environment of the company. However, they are not provided with any written statement and the entire briefing is based on oral conversation and meetings. Before this procedure, the entire recruitment for Fast Construction Company was carried out by a third party who used to select and hire the right candidate for the company; however, there was no advertisement involved. Training is mainly provided to the managers of the company and they are sent to several cities within the country to attend training sessions and seminars. Nonetheless, the company is planning to provide training to its entire staff in the near future, including the workers involved in the construction sites.
Challenges & Problems of Organizational Behavior
(Johns, 1996, p144) Organizational Behavior results in changing some rules and set of processes in the organization to which many and at times the whole environment of the company become reluctant to survive those changes. This is yet another challenge for Organizational Behavior. The analysis of Organizational Behavior also faces some problems and challenges apart from the problems residing in the organization itself. Some of the key challenges identified by our analysts are: 1) Social Changes/ Cultural Environment – The social culture is the national culture in which the organization exists comprising of the social responsibility of all employees that includes values, shared beliefs, and pattern behaviors in the company. It reflects stability and strength of the organization with diverting workforce; 2) Diversity Challenge – Diversity includes fairness and justice challenge, flexibility challenge, decision making, and performance challenge; 3) Advanced Information Technology – Most of the time, the organization is in need to change its existing Information Technology process with the new IT management and are not committed to learning new things; 4) Uncertainty aspects – People working in the organization also seem unwilling to accept the changes because they are certain whether the new system would snatch their status, power, or even jobs; 5) Job shifting/ Employment relationships – Employees are normally not mentally prepared to accept the newly made changes because they assume that it would result in the downsizing of people with new empowerment.
Recommendations for Fast Construction Company
The recommendations for Fast Construction Company in order to solve the problems by its management and to cope up with the new working traditions and innovations are: 1) To have effective communication with its existing staff, listen to their problems and solve them mutually while in mind keeping the advantage of the working staff; 2) The top management should understand the psychology of their employees and the fact that employees need more flexible strategies and working conditions to make better performance and should allow them to make self-managed teams; 3) The new information Technology system, new infrastructure, strategies, rules and processes should be made so clear to understand and easy to adopt that it could make the employees happy and contented to adopt them without any hassle; 4) The policies, processes and new set of rules and guidelines should be strategic and they should clearly state that when are the employees suppose to work, make certain amendments, analysis and to come up to the mark set by the customer to meet their demands with 100% satisfaction level.
References
- Michael Lee Vasu, Debra W. Stewart, G. David Garson, (1998), Organizational Behavior and Public Management, CRC Press, p#1.
- David J. Cherrington , (1994), Organizational Behavior: The Management of Individual and Organizational, Allyn and Bacon, p#4.
- Henry L. Tosi, Neal P. Mero, John R. Rizzo, (2000), Managing Organizational Behavior, Blackwell Publishing, p# 9.
- Dennis H. Reid, Marsha B. Parsons, Carolyn W. Green, (1989), Staff Management in Human Services: Behavioral Research and Application, Thomas Publishers, p#8.
- Gary Johns, (1996), Organizational Behavior: Understanding and Managing Life at Work, 4th ed. New York: Harper-Collins, p#144.