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No, actually there is much more to management and the missing links can be explained by studying psychology. Having a look at the very elementary definitions of both the disciplines will make it clearer. Management is the art of getting things done through others and psychology is the science of human and animal behaviour. Keeping the animals aside (though we might need to draw some parallels here and there) don't you think psychology should be a separate and a compulsory discipline for that matter? Because any and everything you do boils down to understanding people, why they do what they do, can you change the way they perform and so on. I definitely advocate psychology sessions in all leading MBA institutes (due apology to those all over the world who think they have mastered the art of understanding people).
And it is about you yourself as much as it is about others. But how do we understand what others feel? How do we comprehend our own inexplicable behaviour? There are no easy answers to these but rethinking the questions and answers that this study has already posed will surely give us new insights.
The various 'isms' of psychology
In the late 1800s and the early 1900s when the mind was thought to be the central concern of psychology, a school of thought called 'structuralism' developed. The structuralists believed that the behaviours could be understood by making the subjects 'introspect' or describe minutely every experience (like hot water, a fragrance etc.) they are exposed to as 'sensations' (because according to them every element was a sensation like hot, cold, putrid etc.). They hoped to look for answers through the combination of these elements of experiences. Although this approach has by far disappeared, the interest in mind is still going strong.
Functionalism, inspired by the Darwinian theory of evolution was propounded by William James (wrote The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890) and John Dewey. The functionalists believed that our behaviour is adaptive and that we can change according to the changing environment, so instead of studying the structure of the mind they concentrated more on the adaptive functions of behaviour and mental life.
Another school of psychology is the ' behaviorism', which completely did away with the introspection and solely dealt with behaviour. It said that there is no such thing as inborn tendencies and that all behavior is learned behaviour, which could be conditioned as well as understood by observing animal behaviour.
Gestaltism or the Gestalt psychology criticized both the struturalists and the behaviorists. This school emphasized the interrelationships between elements. E.g. a five cm line segment will look smaller than a nine cm segment but will look huge compared to a dot. Accordingly, our experiences depend on the context in which they occur. Therefore instead of studying behaviours as elements, they should be studied holistically considering the interrelationships and the interactions also. "The whole experience is more than the sum of its parts."
Psychoanalysis, though not a conventional 'ism' is discussed here because it has made important contributions to the field of psychology. It was founded and developed by Sigmund Freud between 1885 and 1939. His theory was brushed aside by lot of eminent people in this field as they were too pristine to follow a theory, which said everything, we do and think emanates from our hidden sexual desires. This is more of a corrective theory and a theory of personality as it seeks to treat patients who suffer from mental aberrations. The emphasis of this treatment is on 'free association' where in the subject thinks and says whatever comes to his mind. It is the unconscious motives (motives play an important part), which are expressed in different ways.
Some areas that I have discussed in this article are perhaps so elementary that we often tend to overlook them or don't care to understand why we behave in a certain manner. Then the question arises why to bother about such trivialities. The answer is not so simple as it might not appeal to everyone. My own logic is that understanding the underlying principles behind people's behaviours (no matter how basic they are) makes it easier to understand why they do what they do. And this can be used as an important tool when dealing with people of different temperaments in culturally diverse organizations.
All this brings us to the modern psychology. Have you ever wondered why you suddenly want to seclude yourself from people? Why some people display such sudden shifts in moods? Why is it so difficult to bring people out of their rooms when everyone else is having fun at the dance parties?
Next..Why do we indulge in Self-pity?
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