Human activity.

Last time we started looking at the question of management and wonder ing what the term actually meant. Then we took a brief look at the concept of scientific management. You remember, we decided it was useful but not enough on its own. So today we’re going to look at another aspect—behavioral management. You may not really have come across this word "behavioral" before, though I’m sure you are familiar with the word "behavior". Behavioral simply means having to do with behavior. And that is our starting point for today;We are going to start by realizing that the activity of any organization is human activity, designed to achieve human goals. So we are really talking about human behavior.
    Any business concern does two things. First, it provides either goods or services that the customer needs. That is, it either makes things or does things for other people in exchange for money. Second, it provides people with work—and most of us have to work in order to make a living.
    Work, much as we may sometimes wish we didn’t have to do it, or not quite so much of it, has in fact two advantages. First—and I spoke about this last time—it can give us satisfaction. We can be proud of what we are doing—like a craftsman making something beautiful, or a doctor of a nurse helping people who are ill or in pain. This is what I called job satisfaction, and without it I am sure work can become an awful burden. And on a more basic level, work earns us money, which we can use to buy the things we need in order to live, like food and somewhere to live, as well as all the luxuries we could probably do without but still like to have.
    Behavioral management is based on a research of how people behave at work. It uses the findings of psychologists and sociologists, and so on. These make a study of individuals and groups to see what things influence the way they behave in different conditions. The results can then be used to design the best conditions in which people will perform—or behave—in the way that a manager wants them to in order to make a business more efficient and to achieve its goals. They have collected a lot of evidence and formulated a lot of theories to help the manager, and there is no doubt that properly understood and applied, this can be very useful.
    But still we return to the fact that people are individuals, all different from each other, and all—as we say—with minds of their own. So no matter what the manager knows about the way people behave in groups and so on, he has really to treat everyone on his staff as an individual in his own right. Of course, he can be helped in this by knowing how to encourage people to do things, how to stimulate them to behave in a certain way, and so on. A manager can himself be taught how to do this, but however unscientific this may sound, it is more likely that a good manager is born rather than trained. He has some natural ability to recognize what people are likely to do, what abilities they have, and other things like that. Realizing this, and then applying what he has learned about human behavior, is what makes someone a good manager.
    So behavioral management is management based on an assessment of an individual and the application of what is known about how people in general tend to behave. Like scientific management, it is undoubtedly useful, but not, the complete answer.