What is OB?

The discipline of Organizational Behavior encompasses three broad areas:

1. The Behavior of People in Organizations

OB draws on psychology, anthropology and sociology to gain insight into the behavior of individuals in organizational settings. Topics studied include:

• perception, cognition, learning
• personality and motivation
• leadership, power, conformity, communication
• decision making

2. Organizational Structure

Organizations consist of people organized to achieve organizational goals (like manufacture cars). One of the most important strategic elements of an organization is its structure: how the people are arranged so as to produce what the organization produces. Topics include:

• task identification and division of labor
• departmentation
• coordination and control mechanisms
• processes and procedures, such as promotion, hiring policies, compensation
• organizational form (e.g., bureaucracy)
• size
• centralization of decision-making
• the relationships among these variables

3. Behavior of organizations

Just as we can study the interactions of individuals with the organization and with each other, we can also study the interactions of organizations with their environments, which include individual citizens and other organizations including the government. Some of the behaviors of organizations that we are interested in include:

• adoption of new practices such as
  1. downsizing
  2. team-based structure
  3. domestic partner benefits (e.g., partners of gay employees get full medical coverage)
  4. re-engineering
  5. environmental protection ("green" practices)
• adaptation to changing conditions
  1. global competition
  2. increasing pace of technological change
  3. changing social structure (e.g., status of women)

As part of these investigations, we study such things as:

• the position or organizations in the economic food chain (organization A sells to organization B, which sells to organization C and so on): an economy is like an ecosystem, and an organizations position in the economy is their ecological niche
• the influence of stakeholders on organizations