People skills are important in management, at least that's what the textbook and other materials are trying to teach us. People skills has an immediate conotation of being a friendly, out-going person who can charm a room or be the life of a party. But is that what people skills mean in the context of being a good manager? No, these people skills are more about being able to lead, motivate, and earn the respect of your team. There is no one way to achieve those ends, but whatever the leadership style, having good people skills means that you are able to marshal the skills and energies of your team to achieve an objective. These kinds of people skills are not the sole domain of those people who have been conditioned to make friends easily. These skills, like any other body of knowledge, can be learned.
If leadership (or effective management, the differentiation between the two is open to debate) is a technical skill that can be learned, what is the established body or knowledge or research perspective that provides a theoretical foundation to gain the knowledge needed to become a more effective manager? Organizational Behavior combines the study of individual traits, how those individual traits interact in a team environment, and how the structure of an organization effects the work or individuals and teams. OB strives to systematically study how particular variables (which are usually contigent on the context of the behavior being studied) impact the efficiency and effectiveness of a work group (be that one person or a collection of individuals). OB is frequently deemed less important by uninitiated students because the research simply appears to confirm common sense intuitions about how people work. OB research looks for the unquestioned or unacknowledged assumptions that frequently underlie our intuitive judgements. Rather than simply accept a truth because it seems to so obvious or has become so enmeshed in a corporate culture, OB designs experiments to identifiy causal linkages between aspects of the work environment and the quality of the work product.
This is the value of statistics in this type of research. Stats provides the tools to identify how much of a particular observation is due to a particular variable in the environment and how much it is due to other, uncontrolled or seemingly unrelated conditions. The three social sciences that underlie OB, psychology (the individual), sociology (groups), anthropology (the organizational culture), and a little bit of poly sci all use the tools of stats to provide an objective evaluation of their quantitiative data. The use of stats is intended to make the research objective and scientific (in the sense that it is based on evidence and not the judgement of the individual). The cause and effect relationships that these studies demonstrate allow managers to lead by applying evidence based decision making processes rather than simply relying on experience or intuition. This does not mean that a manager should abandon all judgement to the rigidity of evidence. There are very few absolutes in OB. Deductive reasoning is not a very effective tool. Understanding the nuances of the managerial situation and the contingent conditions of a particular study is a vital skill to effectively applying OB research in a business environment.
The textbook identifies behaviors that OB is meant to reinforce and how the application of OB findings can reduce undesirable traits like absenteeism, deviant workplace behavior, and high turnover rates. Those kinds of applications strike me as outdated. The kind of research they seem interested in is more directed at production and manufacturing jobs. Those jobs are going away. The focus really needs to be on how to lead creative work groups that rely on high educated teams working on ill-defined and open ended problems. (Is there reseach out there that supports the management philosophy of Netflix? Is that an isolated system that is too small to provide justification for more sweeping conclusions?)
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