The Human Element: Understanding and Managing Employee Behavior

by Lee Roy Beach

Here's practical help for the day-to-day concerns that keep managers awake at night. Written in an informal, first-person style, this useful book fills the gap between the legal and policy issues that are the mainstay of human resources and supervision courses and the real-world needs of managers as they attempt to cope with the human side of their jobs. The author is a noted scholar in both cognitive psychology and organizational studies, and has drawn from extensive personal experience as well as careful observation of good and bad managers. "The Human Element" is organized around six fundamental commitments that good employee managers make in order to succeed. It is filled with practical examples and step-by-step guidelines for performing important tasks and dealing with common problems - everything from how to conduct a meeting, to how to write a code of conduct, to how to diagnose the cause of performance problems. "The Human Element" is designed to reduce the stress of management by providing insight into why employees do what they do, and what to do about it. It is an ideal supplement for any course in "people management," including supervision, HRM, and applied OB courses.

209 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Academic Biography

I am the McClelland Centennial Professor Emeritus of Management at the Eller College of Business, University of Arizona, where I also was a Professor of Public Administration and of Psychology. I received my Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Colorado, under Ken Hammond, and then served in the U.S. Navy at the Aviation Psychology Laboratory in Pensacola and the Office of Naval Research in Washington. This was followed by two years of post-doctoral work in decision research, under Ward Edwards, at the University of Michigan.
I began my academic career in the Cognitive and the Organizational Studies programs at the University of Washington, where I served as Chair of the Psychology Department, received the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, was named Professor of the Year for the State of Washington and Bronze Medalist for National Professor of the Year, received the Feldman Award for research and was named to the University Teaching Academy. I have been a Visiting Professor at Cambridge (U.K.) and Leiden (Netherlands) Universities and at the University of Chicago.After joining the business faculty at Arizona, I was named Professor of the Year, served for three years as Vice Dean, taught graduate and executive education courses, and was active in research and consulting.
Before I retired, I was a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society and a member of the Society for Organizational Behavior, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a regular contributor to the European Conferences on Decision Making. I was on the editorial boards of Organization Behavior and Human Decision Making, The Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and The Journal of Forecasting and have published over 120 scholarly articles and 7 books on decision making and organizational behavior. Among the more recent of the latter are:

The Psychology of Decision Making: People in Organizations (2nd Ed.) (With Terry Connolly). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage (2005).
Leadership and the Art of Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage (2006).
The Human Element: Understanding and Managing Employee Behavior. Armonk, NY: Sharpe (2007).
Narrative Thinking and Decision Making: How the Stories We Tell Ourselves Shape Our Decisions, and Vice Versa.