The Nature of Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior (OB) is the study of the many factors that have an impact on how
people and groups act, think, feel, and respond to work and organizations, and how organizations
respond to their environments. Understanding how people behave in an organization is
important because most people work for an organization at some point in their lives and are
affected—both positively and negatively—by their experiences in it. An understanding of OB
can help people to enhance the positive, while reducing the negative, effects of working in
organizations.

Most of us think we have a basic, intuitive, commonsense understanding of human behavior
in organizations because we all are human and have been exposed to different work experiences.
Often, however, our intuition and common sense are wrong, and we do not really understand
why people act and react the way they do. For example, many people assume that happy
employees are productive employees—that is, that high job satisfaction causes high job
performance—or that punishing someone who performs consistently at a low level is a good
way to increase performance or that it is best to keep pay levels secret. As we will see in later
chapters, all of these beliefs are either false or are true only under very specific conditions, and
applying these principles can have negative consequences for employees and organizations.
The study of OB provides guidelines that help people at work to understand and appreciate the
many forces that affect behavior in organizations. It allows employees at all levels in an organization
to make the right decisions about how to behave and work with other people in order to achieve organizational
goals. OB replaces intuition and gut-feeling with a well-researched body of theories
and systematic guidelines for managing behavior in organizations. The study of OB provides a set
of tools—concepts and theories—that help people to understand, analyze, and describe what goes
on in organizations and why. OB helps people understand, for example, why they and others are motivated
to join an organization; why they feel good or bad about their jobs or about being part of the
organization; why some people do a good job and others don’t; why some people stay with the same
organization for 30 years and others seem to be constantly dissatisfied and change jobs every 2
years. In essence, OB concepts and theories allow people to correctly understand, describe, and analyze
how the characteristics of individuals, groups, work situations, and the organization itself affect
how members feel about and act within their organization.