Organisational Behaviour & HR: the Models, Types and Cases

Leadership continua, motivation theory and the employment structures organisations work within.

What this section covers

Organisational behaviour asks how people actually work in organisations rather than how an organogram says they should. The entries divide into three.

How is direction given? — leadership style, the continuum from telling to delegating, and the conditions that make each appropriate. How is influence exercised? — power, its bases, and where it sits when it is not on the chart. What shapes behaviour before anyone decides anything? — culture, national and organisational, and the career motives people bring with them.

How the entries relate

The Tannenbaum-Schmidt continuum is the spine of the leadership material. It replaces the question "which style is best" with "which style fits this manager, these subordinates and this situation", and every later contingency model is a refinement of that move.

The power entries sit underneath it. A style is a choice about how to use authority; the power entries are about where authority comes from and what happens when the person with the position lacks the expertise, or the reverse. The two together explain most of what goes wrong in a restructure.

GLOBE and the cross-cultural entries put the same questions in an international frame, which matters because leadership research is overwhelmingly produced in one part of the world and applied everywhere. The career anchor entry is the individual-level counterpart: what a person is actually optimising for, which is frequently not what their employer assumes.

Where to start

Read the Tannenbaum-Schmidt continuum first. It is short, it is the most frequently examined entry in the section, and it supplies the vocabulary the leadership entries use.

Then read the power entry, because it answers the question the continuum leaves open: a manager choosing where to sit on the scale is spending something, and the power entry says what.

The limit worth stating

The models here describe tendencies across populations and are routinely applied to individuals, which is not what they can support.

A continuum position is a description of a decision, not a personality type. A cultural dimension is an average over a country and tells you nothing reliable about the person in the meeting. A career anchor is a self-report about motives that people are not always able to articulate.

An answer that uses a model and then says what it cannot predict is doing the subject properly; one that treats a dimension score as a fact about a colleague is not.

What the evidence in this field actually supports

More than in any other section here, the entries come with a caution about what the research can carry, and it is worth stating once.

Most of it is correlational. A study finding that participative leadership is associated with higher satisfaction has not shown that the style produced the satisfaction; a manager with a willing, competent team can afford to be participative, so the causation plausibly runs the other way. The entries say which direction a study could establish.

Most of it is self-reported. Satisfaction, motivation, commitment and culture are measured by asking, and people answer instruments about their own workplace with an eye on who might read them. That is not a reason to discard the findings; it is a reason to treat a two-point difference as noise.

Almost all of it is narrow in origin. The samples behind the best-known models are overwhelmingly drawn from a small number of countries and a narrower range of industries, and they are applied everywhere. The cross-cultural entries exist because that gap is the subject rather than a footnote.

Why the section still matters

None of that makes the field soft. It makes the claims smaller than they are usually quoted as being, which is exactly what an examiner rewards a student for noticing — a model used with its limits stated is worth more than the same model asserted.