Behavior and Theory in Organizations
Final Project, November 12th 2012

Adrian Furnham: “Managing People in a Downturn”

So far, we’ve learned in class that understanding organizational behavior is not an easy task to accomplish.
Studying the behavior within an organization requires extensive knowledge, and expertise within the areas of psychology, social psychology, and sociology.
Due to globalization, the world has become smaller, and organizations are no longer constrained by national borders, making it even more important to understand organizational behavior (Robbins & Judge, 2011) but it has also become far more difficult.
With the globalization, organizations have embraced more workforce diversity, inviting people into an e.g. American organization, from all over the world, plus more companies merge with foreign countries in e.g. Asia. This puts even more emphasis on how important it is to understand the behaviors within an organization, because each person will have a different background, culture and biographical characteristics.
Because of the globalization, a crisis in one country, will quickly influence other countries. As we saw with the economic crisis in 2008 – the worst recession since the Wall Street crash in ’29 – a crisis in the US very quickly spread to the rest of the world. This crisis put a huge strain on both big and small businesses all over the world; challenging managers to still keep focused and engaged. Because with the recession, the reality presents two discrete leadership challenges: Keeping a company on track while the global economy is falling apart and keeping it functional until the economy recovers (Robison).

The book “Managing people in a downturn” written by the psychologist Adrian Furnham, is a collection of 74 essays, diatribes and thought pieces. He addresses the issues that every manager faces at