Organizational Behavior

Organizational Behavior

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Organizational Behavior

KEYNOTE: Henry Two of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, and Rufus Miles of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget: How a Medieval King, a Martyred Saint, and an American Bureaucrat Illustrate Miles's Law

Laws are enacted by governments to regulate our behavior in a seemingly infinite number of ways. Thus, citizens are obligated to stop at traffic lights when they turn red, pay their taxes on time, and not impose violence on fellow citizens who are merely rude or dishonorable.

Laws also govern the physical world. Isaac Newton, sixteen forty-two to seventeen twenty-seven, wrote that

"To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction." This is known as Newton's "third law of motion." Because Newton discovered so many laws of the physical universe, he is widely considered to be the founder of modern physics.

Then there are laws that are not of the legal world or of the physical realm but that merely explain human behavior. This last category has a long tradition in both literature and the social sciences. For example, Jane Austen wrote as the first sentence in her novel Pride and Prejudice, eighteen thirteen, that "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." If you believe that, maybe you'll also believe what Tolstoy wrote in his novel Anna Karenina, eighteen seventy-five: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is the plot of countless other novels, plays, films, and real-life adventures. But in their essence, they are not laws, but merely observations.

The observatory nature of such laws is their chief commonality and characteristic. A law, to be truly a law, must be universal; this is the chief characteristic of the laws of science and the goal of laws enacted by governments. Observational laws as offered by literature, however great, invariably fail this test of universality.

Surely you have heard of single men "in possession of a good fortune" who are most decidedly not "in want of a wife."

For greater, if not universal, consistency in observational laws we must turn to the social sciences. The Austrian-born British philosopher Karl R. Popper is generally credited with being the first to promulgate the law of unintended consequences, that conscious human efforts to accomplish one goal will lead to "as a rule, the indirect, the unintended and often the unwanted by-products of such actions." Thus, in nineteen sixty-four the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act with its Title Seven equal employment opportunity provisions intended to help African Americans; but the most immediate beneficiaries of this new law were white women. Not a bad result and not an "unwanted by-product," but unintended and unexpected.

Another observational law is Laurence J. Peter's law from his book The Peter Principle that "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Corollaries of the Peter Principle hold that in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. In answer to the logical question of who then does the work that has to be done, Peter asserts that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence."

The problems with observational laws is that they are, of course, not laws at all, merely strong tendencies, just as Peter suggests when he asserts in his principle that "every employee tends to rise." Nevertheless, even if such laws or principles are not to be depended on for all occasions, they remain useful in explaining and understanding human behavior.

The preceding discussion has been the preamble to our main story that

"proves" one of the best-known observational laws in public policy and administration, Miles's Law. It was first put into words in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States, but it has always been applicable. We'll prove this by using a famous example of the law taking effect from England in the twelfth century.