Organisation Behaviour

Analysis on 12 Angry Men- From the Perspective of Organizational Behaviour

Introduction

"12 Angry Men" is a movie about twelve people in different occupations forming a jury to make a decision on whether an 18-year-old boy growing up in the slums killed his father or not. They have to reach a consensus view in order to declare the guilty of the juvenile, if convicted, the teenager will be sentenced to death. At first, eleven members of the jury did not give much thought about this case. Because of the prejudice towards people from slums and the thought of going along with the majority, they cast their votes to guilty. The 8th juror, however, raised his own reasonable doubts and patiently convinced the other jurors during the trial.

This essay attempts to examine the organisational behaviour concepts and topics in the film "12 Angry Men" as exemplified in the dialogs between jury members from the movie. Furthermore, the essay will look for evidence of how organisational behaviour can be applied to understand events in the film. To investigate this, the methodology will undertake a close reading and contextualisation of the organisational text book as well as other relative reading materials.

Mainly speaking, the essay will analyse three questions, which are how assumptions and different attribution biases influence the decision making process, the structure of this group of people and how an individual can influence others. After analyzing the above questions, the essay will conclude by making a judgment as to whether this film is a useful illustration of organisational behaviour in modern organizations or not.

Attribution and Assumptions

An attribution is a belief about the cause or causes of an event or an action (Buchanan & Huczynski p.251) According to Bernard Weiner, there are two types of attributions, which are external and internal (Robinson et al. June 1996. pp: 165–174.) The internal attribution relates to the causes of behavior with...