Organizational Behaviour on the Ledge: What We Have Learned So Far

Standing on the Ledge began as a record of collapse, but the Organizational Behaviour learning journals have started to give that collapse a working language. At first, SOTL was about impact: what happens when the floor drops out, when work disappears, when trust breaks, and when a person is left standing in the wreckage trying to understand what just happened. Organizational Behaviour does not erase that experience, but it helps organize it. It gives names to the forces that were already moving underneath the surface: perception, self-concept, motivation, values, conflict, communication, attribution, and the way people behave inside systems.

One of the first lessons is that people do not enter organizations as blank slates. They arrive with a self-concept: a picture of who they believe they are, what they value, what they are capable of, and how they expect others to see them. For SOTL, this matters because collapse attacks self-concept directly. Losing a contract, a role, or a business is not just a financial event. It can feel like an attack on identity. “I was the owner.” “I was the one holding things together.” “I was the person who kept showing up.” When that role is removed, the person has to ask: who am I without that structure?

The learning journals also showed the double edge of self-enhancement. People need to believe they are competent, ethical, useful, and important. That belief helps them keep moving. Without it, the ledge becomes a place of paralysis. But self-enhancement can also distort judgment. It can make a person overestimate their control, excuse their own mistakes, or assume their intentions are obvious to everyone else. In the SOTL frame, the useful question is not, “Was I right about everything?” The better question is, “What part of my self-image helped me survive, and what part may have kept me from seeing the full picture?”

That leads directly into perception. Organizational Behaviour reminds us that people do not simply see reality; they interpret it. They sort information, organize it, and filter it through mental models. This is where SOTL becomes more than a personal diary. The same event can be understood very differently depending on where a person stands in the system. One person may see business necessity. Another may see betrayal. One may see poor performance. Another may see impossible expectations. One may see a policy decision. Another may experience it as personal collapse.

Learning about perceptual errors gives SOTL a sharper lens. The halo effect can cause one strong impression to colour everything else. The primacy effect can make an early judgment hard to change. The recency effect can cause the latest problem to outweigh months of effort. The false consensus effect can lead people to assume others see the situation the same way they do. Attribution errors may be the most important of all. In organizations, people often blame someone’s character when things go wrong, while ignoring situational pressure. SOTL has lived inside that tension: where does responsibility end, and where does the system begin?

The MARS model adds another useful layer. Behaviour is shaped by motivation, ability, role perceptions, and situational factors. That model matters because it prevents lazy explanations. If performance breaks down, it is not enough to say someone did not care. Did they have the ability? Did they understand the role? Were expectations clear? Were resources available? Were the conditions realistic? This applies to employees, managers, contractors, and owners alike. For SOTL, it creates a more disciplined way to look back without turning everything into blame.

Values and norms also matter. Organizations do not only run on contracts, policies, and schedules. They run on shared expectations, spoken and unspoken. Values tell people what is supposed to matter. Norms show what actually matters in practice. When the written values and lived norms do not match, trust breaks down. That lesson lands hard in the SOTL world. A workplace can say it values teamwork, fairness, growth, or communication, but if people only experience pressure, silence, shifting expectations, or disposable relationships, the real culture has already spoken.

Communication and conflict management have become another major lesson. Conflict is not always the problem. Avoided conflict is often worse. When people do not say what needs to be said early, clearly, and directly, the issue does not disappear. It goes underground. It becomes resentment, confusion, assumption, and eventually rupture. SOTL has shown that communication under load is a survival skill. When stress is high, words become heavier. Tone is misread. Silence becomes evidence. A delayed response can feel like abandonment. A poorly worded message can become the whole story.

The learning journals also point toward growth. Improving perception begins with awareness of bias, but it cannot stop there. Self-awareness matters only if it leads to better choices. A person has to ask: What am I assuming? What evidence do I have? What am I ignoring because it does not fit the story I already believe? Where am I reacting from injury rather than judgment? These are not easy questions, especially when the wound is fresh. But they are the questions that move SOTL from survival writing into field work.

So what have we learned so far? We have learned that collapse is personal, but it is also organizational. We have learned that behaviour does not happen in isolation. We have learned that identity, perception, motivation, values, and systems are all tied together. We have learned that people can be sincere and still be wrong, wounded and still responsible, pressured and still accountable. Most of all, we have learned that Standing on the Ledge is not only about what happened. It is about learning how to see what happened more clearly, so the next step is not just reaction, but agency.

Reference: Reflections based on Organizational Behaviour learning journal themes from McShane and Warner, Canadian Organizational Behaviour, Chapter 3, along with earlier course work on self-concept, values, communication, conflict, teams, and workplace behaviour.