Every organization has to deal with important decisions and challenges to be successful. Many of these situations pose a challenge because of the nuances of human behavior and how actions affect not only the development of problems but also how they affect the outcomes. In the investigation of an organizational disaster – for example, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 – several different behaviors can have an effect on how well the organization recovers from this disaster. The first action should be to undertake an evaluation of the current behaviors that are present in the organization and how these may have led to the disaster. Additionally, investigating how individuals respond to the disaster (e.g. panic, remorse) can help to illustrate which individuals are beneficial to the organization and which are not, as well as potentially highlighting whether someone’s personality fits better in a different role to the one they currently hold (Luthans & Youssef, 2007).
Teamwork and communication are also important in most lines of business, and some disasters, such as the one that affected the Ukraine when the Chenobyl nuclear power plant failed could have been prevented if lines of communication were properly open and everything went as planned (Luthans & Youssef, 2007). This means that an understanding of how well management and employees interact within the company is a good way of preventing future disaster as well as understanding why the current one happened. It is also a good time to investigate whether there is a “blame culture” within the organization, which can have a negative impact on employee self-esteem and cause changes in organizational behaviors (Starbuck & Farjoun, 2009). An actionalist approach would be the best plan here as it “focuses on how people make sense of what happens within organizations” (Mills, Bratton & Forshaw, 2006, p29). This would help to give an understanding of the behaviors that both originate from the disaster and those that contributed to it.
The appointment of a new organizational leader is always an important change for a business or company and can have a profound effect on the way that people work together. In the case of Steve Jobs being appointed for Apple in 1997, there was a definite shift in the values of the company and a new focus on both innovation and capturing a higher market share (Thompson, 2011). This means that the values of the employees were also expected to change to fall in line with that of Jobs in order to fit in with the new hierarchy. By studying the behaviors that occur after the instigation of a new leader, it becomes evident who is best suited to dealing with change – a benefit particularly in an industry that moves as fast as the tech industry (Thompson, 2011).
A feminist or racioethnicity approach to organizational behavior may be interesting here, although it is certainly not the only way of viewing behavior in the case of a leadership change. It cannot be denied that the leaders of the majority of large organizations tend to be white, heterosexual and male (Thompson, 2011) and this can have an impact on the way that workers behave after the change. If the original leader fit into this stereotype but the new leader is a female black women, the power dynamic within the entire company is changed. In traditional views of masculinity, for example, there is the assumption that many male employees do not want to work for a female leader which could cause problems in the case of a leadership change (Mills et al., 2006). Additionally, any underlying racioethnic lines of communication could be altered in the case of appointing a new CEO or leader who differs from what is considered “the norm” for that business, which is again a very interesting behavioral change that should be studied in this scenario.