Organizational Behavior And Criminal Justice Agencies

Felicia A. Baldwin

Organizational Behavior and Criminal Justice Agencies

University of Phoenix

Abstract

This paper shall discuss what the meaning of operational behavior is and the characteristics that is possesses. I will also talk about how those factors or elements contribute to the effectiveness of a criminal justice agency. Researchers believe that one of the most important aspects of effective management is to learn the science of organized behavior.

Organizational Behavior and Criminal

According to the article on www.nwlink.com., it stated that organizational behavior or OB is the study and application of knowledge about how people, individuals, and groups act in organizations. It doesn’t matter what field of work
you go into, the behavior of the human beings tend to shape the behavior of others. Organization behavior is drawn from several different disciplines including psychology, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and also political science. Based on the website, www.web.cba.neu.edu, it lists the top ten cited skills of effective managers of an organization: verbal communication, managing time and stress, managing individual decisions, recognizing, defining, and solving problems, motivating and influencing others, delegating, setting goals and articulating a vision, self-awareness, team building, and managing conflict. All of these are critical within the criminal justice agency due to the fact that it’s filled with different employees and staff members; who result in different attitudes and behavior patterns. I have found that there are four major models in which organizations operate out of: autocratic, custodial, supportive, and collegial. Criminal Justice agencies may incorporate any or all four of these models because they all focus on a different aspect of organizational expectations. The autocratic model is focused on the power within a managerial orientation of authority while the custodial model’s focus is economic resources within the managerial orientation of money. Leadership is the focal point of the supportive model while teamwork is demonstrated in the collegial model. Many criminal justice agencies and offices have displayed the use of these four due to the fact that money is needed to provide the world with protection and service to the communities; power is given to people in high positions in order to get the duties done in a timely fashion; teamwork is needed within law enforcement agencies and the citizens so that issues can be resolved in a quicker manner; and leadership qualities are needed in all fields of work. Although there are four separate models, almost no organization operates exclusively in one.
One will be the dominate source while the other overlap each other to provide a piece from each model (www.nwlink.com). The most current trend that has been proven to be in effective control and management of organizational behavior is the need to increase the participation of individual employees in organizational decisions and processes (www.organizationalbehaviors.com). Human beings have their own method and operation of how they distribute leadership qualities, personality, sense of urgency, ethical behavior, and even teamwork approaches. No two people have the same reaction time and perspective of things when it comes to the organization in which the work and how to behave in given
situations. A way to avoid many problems that managers and supervisors may come into contact with is to provide more programs or requirements during hiring and training that would give the company or agency a better understanding of the type of person that is being hired for the position. Communication and performance ability should always be placed at the forefront because if a person is not able to effectively communicate vital information to the correct channels inside the criminal justice agency, then some problems and unnecessary incident may be reported. Many people feed off of their bosses, supervisors, managers, and team leaders when a job is to be done. That is when behaviors start to intertwine and can be used for the better and worse at the same time. The possibilities that people believe that intuition can be used to predict human behavior is not 100% accurate due to the fact that people can have excellent intuition and no natural common sense (www.web.cba.neu.edu).
Human behavior is hard to study because people keep changing over time- regardless of the situation and circumstances. According to that same website, it stated that using common sense and experience to deal with human behavior problems can work under conditions where change is very slow (Criminal Justice Agencies to a degree), and where one has likely dealt with a situation in the past and learned from past mistakes. A criminal justice agency goes through many changes involving rules, regulations, and laws, but they don’t always change to the point where organizational and human behavior cannot be looked at and evaluated. The elements of organizational behavior has a very positive affect on agencies within the criminal justice field because it gives those involved the chance to indicate what is needed to succeed and what is blocking the success from occurring such as individual attitudes and motives. Nevertheless, I believe that I have discussed the focal point of organizational behavior and how it may affect a criminal justice agency in regards to effectiveness of the actual
organization.

Reference www.nwlink.com/-donclark/leader/leadob.html. Organizational Behavior. Information retrieved on February 11, 2009. www.organizationalbehaviors.com. Human Behavior in Organizations: An Introduction. Information retrieved on February 11, 2009. http://web.cba.neu.edu/-ewertheim/introd/introd.html. Organizational Behavior- Organizational Behavior. Information retrieved on February 11, 2009.