Behavioural science approach is an improvement over the human relations thinking. This may be explained in the following ways:
1. Areas of Study
The human relations movement kept it limited to the study of psychological needs of people, supervision styles, working conditions, interpersonal relations, communication etc. On the other hand Behavioural scientists have gone very far and wide in the study of organizational and managerial aspects covering the areas as mentioned in the previous paragraph.
2. Human Nature Assumptions
Human relation theorists have made some general, unverifiable assumption about human nature holding “social man” view. In contrast, Behavioural scientists have understood the factual nature of individuals and of their behaviour-holding “self-actualizing man” model.
3. Human Needs
Human relations thinkers presume that people have only social needs, whereas the Behavioural scientists regard individuals as different from one another and dynamic with respect to their needs and attitudes and emphasize both social and psychological needs.
4. Organization Nature
Human relations approach believes organizations to be purely social systems, while Behavioural science approach views organizations as socio-technical systems which are required to accomplish a set of individual, social and corporate (economic) goals.
5. Employee Satisfaction
Human relations theorists advocate that employees satisfaction is achieve through economic and other incentives and then it automatically leads to higher employee productivity. On the other hand, Behavioural scientists assert that employee satisfaction is a matter of a set of factors including fulfillment of social and self-actualization needs and high morale is also necessary for achieving higher employee productivity, which is a composite thing made by different factors including participative management.
6. Conflict Treatment
Human relation thinkers proposed that conflict, competition and disagreement is to be avoided or should always be resolved, whereas Behavioural scientists concede that conflict is not always bad, it may be constructive too, it is inevitable and may not always be resolved.
7. Manager’s Role
Under human relations model, manager’s traditional role of controller is modified to include responsibility for maintenance of the human system. On the other hand, under the behavioural science model, the manager’s basic role is rather dramatically redefined and he is no longer viewed as a controller but rather as a developer and facilitator of the performance of the socio-technical system to which he is assigned.
8. Nature of Approaches
Human relations approach is criticized for being unscientific (i.e. vague and simplistic and for patting forth broad conclusions having personal bias. On the other hand, behavioural scientists have made their propositions based on extensive researches and its sub discipline organizational behaviour also has a strong research orientation