Academic field of study concerned with human behavior in organizations; also called organizational psychology. It covers topics such as motivation, group dynamics, leadership, organization structure, decision making, careers, conflict resolution, and organizational development . When this subject is taught in busi- ness schools, it is called organizational behavior; when it is taught in psychology departments, it is called organizational psychology.
Organizational behavior is an academic discipline concerned with describing, understanding, predicting, and controlling human behavior in an organizational environment. Organizational behavior has evolved from early classical management theories into a complex school of thought—and it continues to change in response to the dynamic environment and proliferating corporate cultures in which today's businesses operate. "The task of getting organizations to function effectively is a difficult one," wrote David A. Nadler and Michael L. Tushman in Hackman, Lawler, and Porter's Perspectives on Behaviors in Organizations. "Understanding one individual's behavior is a challenging problem in and of itself. A group, made up of different individuals and multiple relationships among those individuals, is even more complex…. In the fact of this overwhelming complexity, organizational behavior must be managed. Ultimately the work of organizations gets done through the behavior of people, individually or collectively, on their own or in collaboration with technology. Thus, central to the management task is the management of organizational behavior. To do this, there must be the capacity to understand the patterns of behavior at individual, group, and organization levels, to predict what behavior responses will be elicited by different managerial actions, and finally to use understanding and prediction to achieve control."
The Behavioral Sciences
Organizational behavior scientists study four primary