Organizational behavior – Defining the field

Organizations are collections of interacting and inter related human and non-human resources working toward a common goal or set of goals within the framework of structured relationships. Organizational behavior is concerned with all aspects of how organizations influence the behavior of individuals and how individuals in turn influence organizations.

Organizational behavior is an inter-disciplinary field that draws freely from a number of the behavioral sciences, including anthropology, psychology, sociology, and many others. The unique mission of organizational behavior is to apply the concepts of behavioral sciences to the pressing problems of management, and, more generally, to administrative theory and practice.

In approaching the problems of organizational behavior, there are a number of available strategies we can utilize. Historically, the study of management and organizations took a closed-systems view. The preoccupation of this view is to maximize the efficiency of internal operations. In doing so, the uncertainty of uncontrollable and external environmental factors often were assumed away or denied. This traditional closed-systems view of organizations made substantial contributions to the theory of organizational design. At the same time, for analytical reasons, organizations came to be viewed as precise and complex machines. In this framework, human beings were reduced to components of the organizational machine.

More recently, the study of organizations and the behavior of human beings within them have assumed a more open-systems perspective. Factors such as human sentiments and attitudes, as well as technological and sociological forces originating outside the organizations, have assumed greater importance in analyzing organizational behavior.

This book adopts the open perspective, because this is a contemporary and more meaningful way to view organizations and human behavior within them. After some preliminary issues, we shall examine the individual. We shall move from the individual to the small group, to the complex organization, and finally to some environmental factors important to the process of organizational change.