HR DIARIES: CHAPTER 9: Learning Organizational Behaviour Through Stories: An Academic Example
One way to learn about human behaviour is through stories. The stories always fascinate me and I do use them (with a lot of discretion and without diluting core content, to the best of my ability) to teach Organizational Behaviour, Business Ethics and other such subjects. Here I am sharing my first post on how I use stories to explain some concepts of OB. Let us talk about the conformity pressures (norms) in a group and how it shapes one's behaviour due to that. The Asch Conformity Experiments, carried out by Solomon Asch, a Polish-American psychologist, also considered to be a great contributor to the field of psychology, carried out the studies, were about how the pressures from the group, would ultimately force an individual, to change his/her own actions and behaviors. To the extent that people started giving wrong answers, in order to show conformity with the group norms. The same learning can be derived from an old story. There used to live a poor man in the remote parts of I