Organization Behavior Quotes & Sayings

They have achieved a level of organization far beyond others of their species. Unfortunately, it is being used for destructive purposes at the moment. Don't look so surprised my dear, it's in the nature of the beast.'
'But these squirrels are not beasts!' Amber protested.
'Oh pish-posh, we are all of us beasts,' the professor replied lightly. 'The trouble comes when we try to pretend that we're not. — Janet Taylor Lisle

Victims are also less likely to take initiative because they feel outcomes are not in their hands anyway. An organization filled with victims will generally have low morale, have more risk-averse behavior, and find it difficult to implement change. — John Izzo

astonishing number of senior leaders are systemically incapable of identifying their organization's most glaring and dangerous shortcomings. This is not a function of stupidity, but rather stems from two routine pressures that constrain everybody's thinking and behavior. The first is comprised of cognitive biases, such as mirror imaging, anchoring, and confirmation bias. These unconscious motivations on decision-making under uncertain conditions make it inherently difficult to evaluate one's own judgments and actions. As David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, has shown in countless environments, people who are highly incompetent in terms of their skills or knowledge are also terrible judges of their own performance. For example, people who perform the worst on pop quizzes also have the widest variance between how they thought they performed and the actual score that they earned.22 — Micah Zenko

Once randomly aggressive behavior gets started in an organization, it tends to be contagious, rapidly spreading itself because of a built-in mammalian device for relieving stress, called redirected aggression. Stanford physiologist Robert Sapolsky describes it this way:"Numerous psychoendocrine studies show that in a stressful or frustrating circumstance, the magnitude of the subsequent stress-response is decreased if the organism is provided with an outlet for frustration. For example, the [glucocorticoid] secretion triggered by electric shock in a rat is diminished if the rat is provided with a bar of wood to gnaw on, a running wheel, or, as one of the most effective outlets, access to another rat to bite. — Richard Conniff

Your behavior will guide the behavior of the other members of your team or the people in your organization. — Brian Tracy

When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think. — Steven Pinker

Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition. Then power laws emerge-nature's unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favor of order. The theory of phase transitions told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organization and is paved by power laws. It told us that power laws are not just another way of characterizing a system's behavior. They are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

If your incentives are set up wrong - if for some reason you reward people for behavior that's actually bad for your customers or your organization - then you're going to encourage that behavior. — Ramez Naam

It turns out that creativity isn't some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few - it's a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked. And unblocking that creative spark can have far-reaching implications for yourself, your organization, and your community. — Tom Kelley

One will only be free when one plays and one's society will become a piece of art". - Herbert Marcuse
"Play is a phenomenon of nature and has directed the course of the world from the beginning of time: the formation of matter, its organization into living structures as well as the social behavior of man. — Manfred Eigen

Our behavior is driven by a fundamental core belief: the desire, and the ability, of an organization to continuously learn from any source, anywhere; and to rapidly convert this learning into action is its ultimate competitive advantage. — Jack Welch

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. — Robert Conquest

If the CEO's behavior is 95 per cent healthy while the rest of the organization is only 50 per cent sound, it is more effective to focus on that crucial and leveraged 5 per cent that makes up the reminder of the CEO's behavior. — Patrick Lencioni

Goal Selection: They can choose goals based on priority, relevance, experience, and knowledge of current realities while also anticipating consequences and outcomes. Key Words: Choose Goals and Anticipate Outcomes. Planning and Organization: They can generate steps and a sequence of linear behaviors that will get them there, knowing what will be needed along the way, including resources, and create a strategy to pull it off. Key Words: Generate Behaviors and Strategy. Initiation and Persistence: they can begin and maintain goal-directed behavior despite intrusions, — Henry Cloud

Two Dimensions of Executive Skills: Thinking and Doing Executive skills involving thinking (cognition) Working memory Planning/prioritization Organization Time management Metacognition Executive skills involving doing (behavior) Response inhibition Emotional control Sustained attention Task initiation Goal-directed persistence Flexibility — Richard Guare

The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head. — Steven Pinker

Those who disrupt their industries change consumer behavior, alter economics, and transform lives. — Heather Simmons

If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. — Robert Noyce

As a general rule, moderate levels of arousal facilitate deployment of skills, whereas high arousal disrupts it. This is especially true of complex activities requiring intricate organization of behavior — Albert Bandura

Having a pleasant time can extend a long period of time to have a fun time. — Travis Polso

Belonging to the Catholic Church gives your support to an organization that conceals and protects child rapists. Again, not as a few isolated incidents, but as a massive, institution-wide culture, a matter of policy even, that extends throughout the organization and reaches all the way to the top. Belonging to the Catholic Church - giving them money, letting them count you in their rolls, sending your children to their schools - gives this behavior your personal thumbs-up, and actively enables it to continue. — Greta Christina

It won't do away with hierarchy totally, but the principal leader will be the person who most exemplifies the kind of organization and behavior required who is best able to create the conditions such organizations require. — Dee Hock

I plead that it's very difficult when you deal with ISIS and organizations like that whose behavior is so barbaric and so vicious that it doesn't seem to have any purpose other than lust for killing and power and that's very difficult to put ourselves in the other shoe. — Hillary Clinton

Nobody thought the direct business model would work. But work it did, and spectacularly. Until it didn't. And therein lies the tale. — Heather Simmons

Positive reinforcement generates more behavior than is minimally required. We call this discretionary effort, and its presence in the workplace is the only way an organization can maximize performance. — Aubrey Daniels

Truth be told, nobody thought Dell's direct business model would work, at least back in the early 90s. As Bill Sharpe, head of the advertising agency that held the Dell Canada account from 1996 to 2006, told me, "I had a business partner in California who said, we have a client, Dell. It sells computers over the phone, and ships them to you. I said, 'There's no way, who's gonna buy a computer over the phone? They're complicated. — Heather Simmons

Nature programmed us to think for ourselves, take risks, and seize unexpected opportunities. This in turn suggests that if an organization wants to encourage such behavior, the most important thing it can do is to identify and stop doing whatever is currently inhibiting it. To put it bluntly, it should get off people's backs. — Stephen Bungay

Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization. — Daniel H. Pink

The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture — Fred Brooks

Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity. — M. Scott Peck

A $10,000 investment in Dell at its 1988 initial public offering would have yielded a fortune of ~$6 million at the stock's peak. — Heather Simmons

The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government's assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors' needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior. — Doug Bandow