Organizational Behavior

Conceptual Overview

OB is a field that did not exist until after World War II. One of the first uses of the term in print was by

Chris Argyris in 1957. The field itself did not emerge until the late 1960s and early 1970s. The three principal driving forces that resulted in the formation of this new interdisciplinary field, initially in the United States, were (1) the publication, beginning in the latter part of the 1950s and continuing through the following decade, of a string of seminal books; (2) developments during the late 1960s and early 1970s in U.S. collegiate business schools; and (3) developments in what has become the major academic professional organization that includes the largest number of OB scholars, namely, the Academy of Management. Each of these factors was critical to the birth of the field, and together they shaped the nature of the field for a number of years thereafter.

The first of the immensely influential books that provided a stimulus for academics to attend to behavior in organizational settings appeared around 1957. The early authors were such scholars as Chris Argyris, Douglas McGregor, Rensis Likert, James March, and Herbert Simon, and the books had such titles as Personality and Organization, The Human Side of Enterprise, New Patterns of Management, and, simply, Organizations. These four books appeared from 1957 to 1961, and together they changed a previously rather placid landscape into a highly energized one and set the stage for the launch of a new field that we now call organizational behavior. Throughout the remainder of the 1960s, additional influential books appeared, such as Organizational Psychology, Industrial Organization, The Social Psychology of Organizations, and Organizations in Action. Their authors—Edgar Schein, Joan Woodward, Daniel Katz, Robert Kahn, and James D. Thompson—along with the five listed earlier, were to become the leading luminaries of the early years of the OB field.

The second major factor that provided an impetus for the birth of OB was a set of developments taking place in schools of business located in major U.S. universities. At the end of the 1950s, business school education in the United States came under severe criticism.

Two reviews, sponsored separately by the Ford and Carnegie foundations and both published in 1959, came to the same conclusion: University education for business was a woefully weak academic enterprise in need of a strong infusion of rigorous instruction and scholarship, especially in quantitative and behavioral science areas. In the latter area, the challenge for business schools was where to find qualified faculty members. One major approach to solving the problem was to hire particular faculty members from departments of social and behavioral science, such as psychology, who might already have an interest in business and organizations. This was done, and the result was that appropriate new units were formed in business schools and new elements were introduced into the curriculum. A name that seemed apt for both the units and the curriculum courses, and one that was not associated with any single behavioral science discipline, was organizational behavior. The hiring of additional faculty members in this new area was accelerated by the mushrooming of business school enrollments throughout the 1970s.

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