Aaron Pun <
apun@CITY.TORONTO.ON.CA>
> One of the Universities in China is reviewing their curriculum for its undergraduate studies in Management. A point of review is whether OB should be a pre-requisite for OT. They are two different disciplines and some argue that it should while others hold a different opinion. Certainly, OB should be a pre-requisite of OD but for OT, some hold different opinion. If you have taught both OT and OB or have similar considerations in the above, your practice and experience will be appriciated.
Carter replies:
First of all, let me commend you that an undergraduate program in
Management is including a course in OD! I suspect the question of "OT
after/before OB" has no clear answer. However, I would come in on the
side of having OT before OB for the following reasons:
1) A major principle of systems theory (and, of course, organizations
are systems) is that structures (OT?) determine behaviors (OB?) which
determine events. Systems theory asserts that we too often only focus on
events, and miss the larger patterns and causes in organizations because
we interpret events in terms of behaviors -- we don't understand the
structures. So if your learners want to manage organizations and their
changes, they should probably have clear understanding of structures
(OT) before they examine changes in behaviors (OB). (There's so much
focus on OB-related matters today, that they'll get plenty of OB
anyway.)
2) Many OB-related practices (leadership development, empowerment, group
facilitation, emotional intelligence, etc.) are explained in terms of
structures (goals, policies, teams, etc.). Therefore, it's useful to
have some understanding of OT before learning more about OB.
3) (Related to point #1 above): Learning OT before OB might avoid some
pain in organizations.
I am seeing some organizations getting hurt because we managers,
practitioners, authors, professors, etc. don't understand and/or
minimize OT. We truly want to help organizations and would never want to
hurt anyone, but we end up inadvertently doing so. We focus primarily on
what we know and have experienced as human beings: organizational
behavior. (Besides, organizational behavior can be very warm,
humanistic, etc. to talk about and experience -- OT can be rather dry.)
But without consideration to OT, our expectations can be unrealistic and
ignore important driving forces in/on the organization. For example, we
espouse universals about leadership, while ignoring important OT
considerations, such as the size of the organization, the nature of its
products and services (retail? wholesale? manufacturing? service?), the
external environment of the organization, its life cycle stage, span of
control of managers, etc.
4) Can you teach both OT and OB at the same time?
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