Business psychology, the science of understanding, predicting and influencing human behaviour at wor

Business and psychology in Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka’s corporate sector, psychology still does not enjoy the same degree of popularity, acceptance and attention that it receives in other parts of the world, but the use of psychological theories, models and testing in business is slowly and steadily increasing. Similar to any other concept, this is also an example of the process of evolution seen in any field.

The Sri Lankan corporate sector has grown and developed to the level that it now should go beyond mere observation and imitation and come to a level of observation, understanding and application. For example, most of the practices and strategies recommended for a work place is based on the fact that these practices and strategies are found to be successful in other organisations. In other words, this is an observation of successful strategies and practices of others for replication at another workplace. Unfortunately this process has not achieved its anticipated success resulting in organisations resorting to testing one strategy after the other on a trial and error /success basis, causing a significant loss of money, effort and time. In analysing why such methods fail, the answer is obvious. No two organisations are alike. Even two branches of the same company could be very different in terms of the people employed, cultural and sub cultural norms, clientele and other various factors. Thus applying what works in one place to another is not better than resorting to probability or intuition.

Not “What works” but “Whyit works”

What we should do is to understand the underlying mechanisms of a successful strategy or a practice to identify the reasons behind its success. Once we have identified the key underlying factors that lead to its success, we are able to come up with a strategy that is suitable for the setting that we need to have to achieve the same success; thereby not focusing on “what worked for them’’ but “why it worked for them”. This would prevent blind imitation of practices that could lead to disastrous results, but instead, the application of proven mechanisms with the understanding of the core factors that lead to success. Some of us are born with the ability to analyse and understand these processes and some of us gain such skills and expertise over time as a result of working in the industry. But what about the others? The majority of us would fall in to the category where our main strength is not analysing and understanding human behaviour or having worked for so many years to gain such skill through experience.

Expertise and experience

When you sit in an audience of a speech made by a successful business leader, what amazes you is either his or her natural skill or the skills gained through years of experience. If you are not born with a skill, or you can’t wait till you gain it through experience, the best option is learn how to do it. This is where a professional and a credible source of learning can give you the advantage you need, while still being young. If one analyses and summarises what all of us do in business, it can be simplified to understanding, predicting and influencing people. When we say we are providing leadership, motivating staff, improving job satisfaction, advertising, branding, forecasting or for that matter anything in business, we simply try to predict and /or influence people. But we would know how to influence them only if we can predict their behaviour and to predict their behaviour, we would need to understand them and to understand them we need to be able to analyse them. This is where our knowledge of human behaviour could be put to good use. Like I mentioned above, some are naturally gifted with the ability to do so and some may learn these to a certain degree through experience. But the way to gain this expertise, is to obtain these skills through learning.

Business psychology

Business psychology is a field of study in which such skills can be learnt. If someone’s interested in receiving a broad view and an understanding of human behaviour and thinking, they may need to study psychology in depth, but the essential aspects of human behaviour needed for a work setting can be covered to a certain degree through business psychology programs. But the important thing is these programs should not be done with the aim of gathering paper qualifications or titles, unless you are enthusiastic and truly interested in psychology and therefore properly engaged in the process of learning, your knowledge of human behaviour would not be much different at the end of the program compared to the beginning of the program. Psychology is for everyone, for everyone who is observant, analytical and curious.