Perhaps their child wasn't feeling well when they left for work. They may not be too anxious to get to work, perform when they do arrive, and they may want to leave early. Add to that each person's distinct personality and learning style and you have an individual that may be technically proficient, but have interpersonal issues that eclipse that proficiency. If you have a leader that doesn't believe in addressing interpersonal skills then his advice might be something like, "Get over it and get to work. Do the job I pay you to do." Conversely, a leader who values those "touchy-feely" skills will realize that the person may not be of much use today because they"re motivation is down. The leader could advice the person to go home early and make up the time later in the week after their child recuperates. At the end of the week, which leader will get more work out of their employee? Which leader was more effective in their leadership and ultimately helped make the business a success one small step at a time? The answer is the one who understands OB.
Now, consider a bigger example. Think of an Information Technology (IT) department with the various technical skills that are usually present and place that department into any business that can make use of those skills. Assume that the department contains helpdesk personnel, network administrators, database administrators, and web developers and that all of the positions are filled with technically competent people. They were just handed an important project to create an Intranet web site that contains company-wide information, front-end access to the inventory database, and reporting capabilities of the financial system. It needs to be easily viewable by everyone in the company and done in three months. For those of you not familiar with IT projects, this particular project will require teamwork from every member of the department and nearly constant communication with the rest of the business on every level, i.
