Psychology

Effective human relations are important for the success of an organization. This is what determines how individuals get along with others thus aiding in the realization of personal, professional andor organizational goals. Man is not an island. That is why most organizations invest much of their resources in enhancing human relations and leadership skills in its workforce rather than caring of the inborn or professional skills and talents of its employees.

The main aim of any business is to maximize profits which are mainly dependent on the effectiveness and reliability of its workforce. Therefore, the sole goal of human relations should be to create conducive environment that satisfies employee needs while working towards realizing the objectives of the organization. This environment is quite crucial as it eliminates worker-employer conflicts as well as improving productivity through employee engagement or motivation. Effective human relations should thus involve all aspect of the employee life rather than their job. Although human relations targets group and organizational behavior levels, it is the individual behavior which forms the basis of success in these higher behavior levels. Therefore, in determining the effectiveness of an organization, it is important to determine how individual workers influence each other and hence the system as a whole.

Concerns for human relations can be traced many years back.  Failure to recognize the crucial role of employing human relations in an organization is evident from Frederick Taylor, the father of science management, who failed due to his failure to recognize the social needs of employees. On the other hand, by caring for social and economic being of his employees, Robert Owen laid the basis of personnel administration principles as are used nowadays. Elton Mayo, in his contribution to the importance of human relations, believed in improving employee performance by paying special attention to their special needs rather than workplace and money needs. However, with the ever increasing trend to globalization in the twenty first century, the concept of human relations is frequently changing to reflect new globe economy requirements. This has posed many challenges thus calling for increased awareness for upholding ethical business practices and other recently developed corporate governance requirements. This also demands for the innovative involvement of organizations in developing effective plans of preventing and dealing with crisis.

According to available research findings, the main cause of human relations breakdown in an organization is due to failure of psychological contracts between parties. Here, the process of resolving human relations problem can take three different approaches namely changing the opponent, changing the conflict causing situation or changing the self. All these require a number of personality traits such as conscientiousness, agreeableness, adjustment and openness to experience. By understanding the personality traits of other, one is able to determine performance in a given situation thus aiding to maximize interpersonal relations.

In the modern society, technology and globalization among other factors and their effects are quite influential in calling for innovative human relation practices. This is because they can lead to stress, erosion of confidence and efficiency and uncertainty in balancing life and work thus potentially compromising vision, objective and purpose among individuals as well as in organization. All these have the potential of leading to infection by terminal and psychological diseases and indulgence of individuals in health risky behaviors such as drug abuse.

The process of realizing an effective interpersonal behavior must entail understanding and appreciating personality diversity, social or organization core values and perception of work as a spiritual path that give individuals an opportunity to grow individually and contribute meaningfully to the society. This is why there are various principles of ethics in an organization that dictate the interpersonal, interdepartmental and coordination relations in the organization. By shaping character, understanding and acceptability, individuals can as a team, effectively oversee the sustainable prosperity of the organization. An important thing to avoid in building human relations is self-centered justifications on unethical behaviors such as questions on morality, responsibility displacement, diffusion of responsibility and advantageous comparison. Other unethical justifications are disregarding of consequences, shifting of blames and euphemistic labeling of behaviors to make them sound true and thus acceptable to others.

On realizing efficiency in any organizational setting, communication is an important element. Communication ensures not only effective transmission of information among parties but also enhances understanding thus reducing conflicts. Due to this reason, whether verbal or nonverbal communication is employed, care must be taken to eliminate misinterpretation andor misconception of information by the target audience. This is why the communicator must possess effective communication skills which are reflective of the audience type. Such help not only in improving acceptability but also realizing effective conflict resolution by the principle of listening and compromising.

Understanding the cause of anger and violence and how to deal with it serves to strengthen interpersonal relations in an organization. A successful individual must be able to deal with self as well as the anger of others. This is best found in the acquisition of leadership skills which must at the least include an understanding and respect for cultural, ethical, social, and economical and personality diversities of the various individuals making the group or organization.