Organizational Climate as a Predictor to Employees' Behavior

Introduction

Since the dawn of Human consciousness, mankind has been engaged in the pursuit of happiness, peace and stress free life. These are accountable too for the growth of an organization and its role incumbents on the one hand and society at large on the other hand. Very often the human element is reduced to a mere insignificant cog in the wheel of the total technological system. This tends to generate a feeling of powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness and consequent stress. The Indian Government has made various changes in its industrial, trade and fiscal policies after liberalization in the business environment. Through this modification Indian organization started facing the changes and competition with domestic as well as international business players. The organizations and its management were expected to be more efficient and productive against the multinational and other global players which were competing in the domestic market in the new liberalized scenario. The overall changing business structure had forced every organization to modify or alter their perspective on their on their function and role overnight. The companies having obsession to focus exclusively on bottom line i.e. customer, mission and organization’s role, were forced to make changes in their organization to given emphasis primarily to productivity.

The Indian organizations, to survive in the present scenario, were forced to undergo massive changes. Thus the important factor with the most positive impact on the performance had been identified from the organizational environment. It had been found that human behavior issues have never been bothered in Indian organization. And the factors like stress, satisfaction of the individual employees regarding their jobs were found to have significant effect on the employee’s behavior. Any organization is being established with a common goal and involvement of a group of individuals. To achieve the predetermined goal, it is very important to understand behavior related problems of employees for management. It has been observed that Indian organizations too have started bothering about behavioral issues now. The highlighted issues these days were, whether the employees are under organizational role stress, whether working climate is matching to their requirement or not, whether employees are satisfied with their jobs and if managerially they are successful or not. The level of these behavioural issues, Organiastional Role Stress and Job Satisfaction will vary from person to person, group to group and organisation to organisation. These psychological problems are not easy to ignore in Indian organisations also. Even the better facilities provided, the increasing level of stress among the employees can be seen. Particularly in a labour intensive organization, it will not be possible to sustain effectiveness unless the workforce is in a stress free and satisfied work environment.

Stress arises essentially from their way of responding to a particular situation. Stress is a part of everybody’s life. Stressed employee may be unhappy and thus produce nominally. Stress can deteriorate family and social relationship. It can cause poor work performance and lower employee morale. These factors in turn, increase employee turnover rate and lessen quality of life. Therefore, organization needs to recognize stress as a problem and take necessary steps to act upon it. Stress is dependent on the individual appraisal of what is at stake and what resources are available for meeting the demands posed. The modern view of stress is that it arises from a lack of fit between a person and his/her environment when there is an inability to cope with the demands made. Survey of the literature on organisational role stress reveals that there are so many factors related to job which affect the behavior of the employees and which results to disturbance in a normal life. Different stressors in work can be categorized to be caused by job content, working conditions, employment conditions and social relations at work. In following table some general job-related stressors are presented.

Source: Information technology-related stress, Reetta Raitoharju