Movies about organizational behavior

An Organizational Behavioral Analysis of Office Space ORGB3201 Movie Group Paper Dr. Curtis Odom INTRODUCTION Office Space is a movie that follows the lives of employees at a software company, Initech. The film follows main character, Peter Gibbons, who hates his job and often “stares at his desk” instead of working. As the movie progresses, the viewer finds that most of the people that Peter interacts with share the same sentiment for their job. The movie directly relates to Organizational Behavior through what Initech does wrong as an organization. They lack the basic constructs an organization needs to ensure that their employees are behaving in an appropriate and efficient manner. As a group we decided to analyze and evaluate the movie through concepts learned within ORGB, and how they relate to the film. By using these comparisons, we were able to pinpoint what was failing within the organization, and how it could be improved. The concepts we focused on are as follows: Ethics, communication, perception, motivation, and work/life balance. We feel that these all directly relate to the class, and present a well rounded evaluation of the film and Initech. ETHICS Ethics is a huge part of corporate values because it is what keeps the employees behaving in the right manner. Most people are raised with a sense of ethics that came from their families, schools, and religious institutions. However, such values can be lost in the business environment if the employer does not show the right behavior to their employees. That is just another example of the proverb “society shapes human behavior”. But as you grow older you are increasingly detached from your schools or families, thus your work environment becomes your community or society that shapes your ethical values. In addition, stress also acts as a trigger to unethical behavior. In organizational behavior, we define stress as coming to work everyday and being someone that you’re not. A worker with a high-level of job stress will be more likely to be unhappy and become disengaged at work. An actively disengaged worker will have a low job performance and will act out their unhappiness through unethical behaviors, which is exactly what Peter did in the movie. Hence, unfair behavior at work coming from colleagues or managers as well as stress can act as triggers for people to behave unethically. The movie Office Space revolves around Peter who is just another unhappy employee at Initech, a software company. Every day of his work he felt unappreciated by his manager, Bill, and this became the main source of his stress, which builds up to his hatred for Initech. He then convinced his friend Michael, who felt pretty good about his job, to join him in a mission to steal money from the company. Peter told Michael that the company was going to fire him even though Michael is one of the best software programmers in the company. Feeling unappreciated and angry, Michael gladly joined Peter in this operation.