Organisational neuroscience bridges the gap between neuroscience and people strategy, linking individual performance to organisational objectives.
Every organisational decision, strategy, and interaction derives from human biology. To design a people strategy that ensures overall objectives are met, organisations must understand the biological underpinnings driving human behaviour.
Neuroscience
The American Psychological Association defines neuroscience as the scientific study of the nervous system. This complex system governs all human functioning, operation, and behaviour. The brain serves as the primary central integrator; the biological equivalent of a principal processing unit. Information is continuously exchanged between the brain and the rest of the nervous system, resulting in our functioning.
The central nervous system is the first structure to develop. That is not incidental. It reflects the fact that everything we do as human beings originates here, and neuroscience is the field of science (~60 years of research) that provides us with the information to understand this primary component of our functioning.
Organisational Neuroscience
For ~147 years, organisational psychology has provided us with the tools to implement behavioural strategy in organisations and informed us of the behavioural impact on them; organisational neuroscience provides us with the contextual foundation for the biological functioning driving these behaviours.
The field of organisational neuroscience has evolved rapidly since it was initially formally defined. In 2007, Lee and Chamberlain described it as ‘dedicated to exploring the processes within the brain that underlie or influence human decisions, behaviours, and interactions either within organisations or in response to organisational manifestations or institutions.’ By 2011, Becker and colleagues had positioned organisational neuroscience as an interpretive framework, a lens through which organisational behaviour could be understood at a biological level. In 2022, Massaro and Baljević arrived at a definition that captured what the field was moving toward: ‘a scientific field that uses neuroscience to inform management and organisational research, and vice versa.’
Massaro and Baljević’s definition highlights how Organisational neuroscience is not a one-way application of research findings into workplace strategy. It is a dual-directional reciprocal scientific discipline. Just as organisational psychology redefined how workplaces operate through applying psychology to strategy while simultaneously using information gathered from the field to inform scientific study with real insights, organisational neuroscience informs people strategy of the biological underpinnings of our functioning while incorporating organisational information into research, contextualising the biological functions driving decisions, behaviours, and social interactions influencing an organisation.
Why Organisational Neuroscience matters for your organisation:
Every decision made in your organisation begins with biology. Every action taken, every cultural norm that develops, every response to pressure, every collective output: everything is a result of biological functions operating within and in response to the professional environment.
Every human being has a nervous system capped by a brain; you will not employ someone without one, making it a biological certainty within every employee, team, and organisation. Neuroscience has helped us understand how our biological functioning shapes how we interact with the world around us, how our own functioning affects that world, and how the world we interact with, in turn, shapes our biological functioning. Just as the fields of organisational psychology and neuroscience bidirectionally influence the workplace, our neural functioning has a bidirectional relationship with corporate functioning.
The average corporate employee spends approximately one third of their life at work (World Economic Forum, 2024). This means that the workplace is one of the most significant environments influencing the brain and, therefore, your people’s performance. When those environments are not designed with an understanding of how people actually function, the costs are measurable. Organisations exist to generate profit, but profit only occurs through the effective execution of roles by people (Boyle, 2013). For decision-makers, a primary goal is to ensure that overall objectives are achieved for organisational success. The experience employees have at work is directly linked to the performance output organisations receive. A well-functioning brain is a requirement for performance. In ’24, Deloitte estimated that the cost of ‘presenteeism’, where employees are physically present but operating at significantly reduced capacity, amounts to approximately £51 billion annually for UK employers (Deloitte, 2024). In ’17, they outlined that universal, organisation-wide interventions yield an 8:1 return on investment, whereas purely reactive, one-off support yields a far lower 3:1 return (Deloitte, 2017). The data suggest that without a scientifically grounded people strategy, organisations leave impactful performance on the table.
Implementing neuroscience in the workplace has been limited by the practicalities of execution: specialist equipment, research environments, and methodologies that sit outside the practical space of everyday organisational functioning (Waldman et al., 2019). As a result, neuroscience has too often been reduced to a slide deck rather than embedded in strategy. The field itself recognises this gap. It is suggested that organisational psychology and neuroscience must collaborate to facilitate the best options for the workplace, as neither discipline has the answers in isolation (Lee et al., 2012).
Becker, W. J., Cropanzano, R., & Sanfey, A. G. (2011). “Organisational Neuroscience: Taking Organisational Theory Inside the Neural Black Box.” Journal of Management, 37(4), 933–961. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311398955
Boyle, I. (2013). Individual performance management: A review of current practices. Asia-Pacific Management and Business Application, 1(3), 157–170.
Deloitte (2017). “Mental health and employers: The case for investment.” Retrieved from [https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/uk/Documents/public-sector/deloitte-uk-mental-health-employers-monitor-deloitte-oct-2017.pdf].
Deloitte (2024). “Mental health and employers: The case for investment.” Retrieved from [https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/services/consulting/research/mental-health-and-employers-the-case-for-employers-to-invest-in-supporting-working-parents-and-a-mentally-health-workplace.html].
Lee, N., & Chamberlain, L. (2007). Neuroimaging and psychophysiological measurement in organisational research: an agenda for research in organisational cognitive neuroscience. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1118, pp. 18–42. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1412.003
Lee, N., Senior, C., & Butler, M. (2012). The domain of organisational cognitive neuroscience. Journal of Management (J MANAGE), 38, 921–931. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206312439471.
Massaro, S., & Baljević, D. (2022). Organisational neuroscience. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190224851.013.324
Massaro, S., & Baljević, D. (2022). Organisational neuroscience. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190224851.013.324
Waldman, D. A., Wang, D., & Fenters, V. (2019). The Added Value of Neuroscience Methods in Organisational Research. Organisational Research Methods, 22(1), 223–249. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428116642013
World Economic Forum. (2024, May 30). Improving workplace productivity requires a holistic approach to employee health and well-being. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/05/how-to-transform-workplace-mental-health-through-a-holistic-approach-to-employee-health-and-well-being/. The corresponding in-text citation is (World Economic Forum, 2024).