Organizational Behavior in Education: Leadership and School Reform

by Robert G. Owens

As an immature science, education has no overarching paradigm. This is a fundamental reason that the effort to improve schools, teaching, and learning is currently characterized by many different theories, ideas, programs, and approaches—all of which are said by their adherents to work, but none of which has unified the relevant constituencies in acceptance and endorsement.

In fact, the legislation called for scientific work to be done to justify the new paradigm after the fact instead of establishing a new paradigm based upon new knowledge arising from a scientific revolution, which effectively turns Kuhn’s analysis on its head.

Behaviorism still remains influential in curriculum and instruction circles. It has been embraced, knowingly or otherwise, by many advocates of school reform. Such pedagogical notions as programmed instruction, scripted teaching, diagnostic-prescriptive teaching, and behavior modification (e.g., the popular program called Positive Behavior Support [PBS]) draw upon behaviorist ideas familiar to many U.S. teachers.

Systematic methods for evaluating the outcomes of instruction should be, in the behaviorist view, objective and tend to emphasize standardized testing.

Clearly, this view of teaching and learning is alive and well in our own time of school reform: many who advocate the standards movement and high-stakes testing in education reform today are comfortable with it.

Cognitive psychology, having been widely accepted as a principal component of the scientific paradigm of education, has had considerable impact on the practice of teaching and learning in school classrooms.

But social psychology interprets behavior as arising from an interaction between two factors: (a) the distinctive personality characteristics of the individual and (b) the distinctive social characteristics of the group or the organization in which the behavioral action occurs.

possibilities for influencing the characteristics of the culture and the climate of the organization. Because the organization has no independent physical reality but exists only as a socially constructed reality, and because our construction of reality is dependent on our perception of what is real, we can easily see how the organization emerges as a primary factor in evoking the behavior of people in

it.

Their groundbreaking view was that every organization constitutes a...

Psychologists tend to focus on the ways in which individuals learn, including their learning styles, motivation, and relationships with both the teacher and classmates. “Sociologists,” on the other hand, “look at the entire school and how its organization affects the individuals within it”

The study of organizational behavior is, in fact, the study of the internal needs and personality characteristics of individuals and groups in dynamic interaction with the environment of the organization.

Coaching is a time-honored and respected method of teaching, and it is one that school leaders must master.

Many in-service programs intended to improve the instructional skills of teachers flounder because they emphasize didactic teaching methods, which are not always well received by adult learners.

This teaching method has limited but sometimes useful applications for the school leader when he or she is working with teachers.

The coach “stands back to observe performance and then offers guidance, identifies weaknesses, points up principles, offers guiding and often inspiring imagery, and ...

University professors normally use coaching techniques in working with advanced graduate students, and it is commonly the method of choice in working with students at the doctoral level.

We emphasize that there is no single paradigm that will unify and give direction to the diverse ways of thinking about schools, teaching, and learning.

It is equally crucial for the leader not only to share this vision for change with others—particularly teachers and parents—but to encourage their collegial participation in developing it and adopting it as their own vision for the future, which we call the school’s game plan.

To be effective (to get results), the vision must be developed into a workable implementation plan.

The vision becomes a plan that will guide you in choosing effective strategies and ways of implementing them in the real world of schools.

The vision becomes a plan that organizes the work of the leader and establishes priorities for action.

One is the traditional way: to think of organizations as hierarchical systems in which power and intelligence are concentrated at the top; hence, initiative and good ideas originate at the top and are passed down through command and control as programs and procedures that people in the lower levels put into practice. The other, newer way—discovered in chrysalides fashion over the course of the twentieth century—is to think of organizations as cooperative, collegial, even collaborative systems in which good ideas exist everywhere in the organization and can be made manifest and put into action only when those in the hierarchy of command and control act in ways that release the capabilities and motivations of subordinates.

Organizational behavior is both a field of scientific inquiry and a field of applied practice.

As a field of scientific inquiry, organizational behavior seeks to illuminate the behavior of individuals and groups of people in the social and cultural context of organizations.

The social sciences are the disciplines from which organizational behavior derives (a) its intellectual base of knowledge and theory and (b) the research methods that give credence to claims of scientific legitimacy.

five principal social science disciplines: cultural anthropology, sociology, social psychology, political science, and economics.

One of the celebrated collaborations in the history of organizational behavior inquiry was that of Kurt Lewin, who is generally credited with founding the discipline of social psychology, and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead in the 1940s. Lewin, a renowned field researcher in social psychology, and Mead, equally renowned as a field researcher in cultural anthropology, demonstrated and modeled interdisciplinary collegiality in studying human social behavior.

Organizational behavior is also a field of applied science—that is, it is a field of professional practice that seeks to apply knowledge from the social sciences to solve practical problems in improving the performance of organizations.

We define organizational behavior as a field of social-scientific study and application to administrative practice that seeks to use knowledge of human behavior in social and cultural settings for the improvement of organizational performance

These organizational concepts tend to emphasize the linear, logical, hierarchical, authoritarian, and disciplinary structure that one would expect of the military tradition.

As the twentieth century unfolded, social scientists came to realize that the ubiquity of organizational life mandated that they seriously consider the nature of organizations as human environments.

The short answer to this question is because organizational behavior provides the indispensable foundation of knowledge that is absolutely essential if one hopes t...

Indeed, the shift from classroom teaching to a school leadership position, such as the principalshi...

A major cause of such failure is often the fact that the principal simply does not have a strategic plan—that is, a theory of practice—for dealing with the all-critical human dimension of the school enterprise.

One of the outstanding characteristics of successful teachers is their skill in planning their work, both in the formal sense of written plans as well as in the sense of coherent mental maps of what work to do and how to do it.

From about 1900 to 1915, as he worked to solve practical production problems in factories all over the United States, Taylor developed what later became known as his four principles of scientific management: 1. Eliminate the guesswork of rule-of-thumb approaches to deciding how each worker is to do a job by adopting scientific measurements to break the job down into a series of small, related tasks. 2. Use more scientific, systematic methods for selecting workers and training them for specific jobs.

3. Establish a clear division of responsibility between management and workers, with management doing the goal setting, planning, and supervising while workers execute the required tasks. 4. Establish the discipline whereby management sets the objectives and the workers cooperate in achieving them.

They mandate a top-down, hierarchical relationship between managers and workers. This traditional concept of labor–management relationships was hardly original with Taylor, but its formalization as a basic principle of organization and management has proven to be extremely powerful in shaping the assumptions and beliefs of managers and thus their thinking about concepts such as collaboration and teamwork, which were to emerge in the years ahead.

Frank B. Gilbreth, one of Taylor’s closest colleagues and an expert on time-and-motion study —the study of efficient body movement in individual job skills.

In practice, Taylor’s ideas led to time-and-motion studies; rigid discipline on the job; concentration on the tasks to be performed, with minimal interpersonal contacts between and among workers; and strict application of incentive pay systems

1. Unlike Taylor, who tended to view workers as extensions of factory machinery, Fayol focused his attention on the manager rather than on the workers. 2. Fayol clearly separated the processes of administration from other operations in the organization, such as production.

3. Fayol emphasized the common elements of the process of administration in different organizations. Fayol believed that a trained administrative group was essential to improving the operations of organizations, which were becoming increasingly complex.

He defined administration in terms of five functions: (a) planning, (b) organizing, (c) commanding, (d) coordinating, and (e) controlling. It should be noted that, in the sense in which he used these terms, commanding and controlling mean what are now called “leading” and “evaluating results.”

Fayol went further by identifying a list of fourteen principles, among which were (a) unity of command, (b) authority...

flexibil...

In this setting, a German sociologist, Max Weber, produced some of the most useful, durable, and brilliant work on an administrative system; it seemed promising at that time and has since proved indispensable: bureaucracy.

impersonal, minimizing irrational personal and emotional factors and leaving bureaucratic personnel free to work with

a minimum of friction or confusion.

1. A division of labor based on functional specialization. 2. A well-defined hierarchy of authority. 3. A system of rules covering the rights and duties of employees. 4. A system of procedures for dealing with work situations. 5. Impersonality of interpersonal relations. 6. Selection and promotion based only on technical competence. ( Hall, 1963 , p. 33 )