BCom Notes Part II Management Human Relations & Behavioral Approaches

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Human Relations & Behavioral Approaches

Distinguish between Human Relations and Behavioral approaches? Distinction Between Human Relations and Behavioral Approaches

As indicated earlier, Behavioral science approach is an improvement over the human relations thinking. This may be explained in the following ways.

1. Areas of Study

The human relations movement kept it limited to the study of psychological needs of people, supervision styles, working conditions, interpersonal relations, communication etc. On the other hand Behavioral scientists have gone very far and wide in the study of organizational and managerial aspects covering the areas as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

2. Human Nature Assumptions

Human relation theorists have made some general, unverifiable assumption about human nature holding “social man” view. In contrast, Behavioral scientists have understood the factual nature of individuals and of their behavior-holding “self-actualizing man” model.

3. Human Needs

Human relations thinkers presume that people have only social needs, whereas the Behavioral scientists regard individuals as different from one another and dynamic with respect to their needs and attitudes and emphasize both social and psychological needs.

4. Organization Nature

Human relations approach believes organizations to be purely social systems, while Behavioral science approach views organizations as socio-technical systems which are required to accomplish a set of individual, social and corporate (economic) goals.

5. Employee Satisfaction

Human relations theorists advocate that employees satisfaction is achieve through economic and other incentives and then it automatically leads to higher employee productivity. On the other hand, Behavioral scientists assert that employee satisfaction is a matter of a set of factors including fulfillment of social and self-actualization needs and high morale is also necessary for achieving higher employee productivity, which is a composite thing made by different factors including participative management.

6. Conflict Treatment

Human relation thinkers proposed that conflict, competition and disagreement is to be avoided or should always be resolved, whereas Behavioral scientists concede that conflict is not always bad, it may be constructive too, it is inevitable and may not always be resolved.

7. Manager’s Role

Under human relations model, manager’s traditional role of controller is modified to include responsibility for maintenance of the human system. On the other hand, under the behavioral science model, the manager’s basic role is rather dramatically redefined and he is no longer viewed as a controller but rather as a developer and facilitator of the performance of the socio-technical system to which he is assigned.

8. Nature of Approaches

Human relations approach is criticized for being unscientific (i.e. vague and simplistic and for patting forth broad conclusions having personal bias. On the other hand, behavioral scientists have made their propositions based on extensive researches and its sub discipline organizational behavior also has a strong research orientation.

Contribution

The contribution of behavioral science to management thought and practice consists primarily of creating new insights rather than new techniques. It has developed a useful way of thinking about the role of a manager, the nature of organizations and the behavior of individuals with organizations.