Organizational Behavior Real Research for Real Managers

This is a different kind of textbook. Organizational Behavior: Real Research for Real Managers addresses those practical problems managers face in doing their organizational work. It looks to systematic organizational behavior research seeking to discover which organizational actions and practices actually do and do not work. Unlike other organizational behavior textbooks, Organizational Behavior: Real Research for Real Managers actually translates this scholarly research for real managers seeking to understand and control organizations. Other textbooks in the field of organizational behavior have failed to do this. One reflection of that failure is Ohio State’s Organizational Behavior faculty's recent finding that 80% of the top-50 MBA programs in the country did not use textbooks in their introductory organizational behavior classes. Why is this so?

• Existing organizational textbooks are targeted to large undergraduate courses where the students have little practical experience of organizations. These textbooks are chasing the largest classes: more students, more book sales. There is no need for these textbooks to address practical management problems because their readers have not yet managed anything.

• Other textbooks are not actually indigestible collections of facts, because so many of their “facts” have long been discredited by scholars. Too many organizational behavior textbooks review familiar but discredited theories, after which the most honest of them will note that the ideas are “controversial.” Doesn’t controversy require someone arguing for the other side? When all evidence points to the contrary, who is arguing for movement up and down a Maslovian hierarchy of needs, or for Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory of Motivators? These old ideas are long discredited, so why waste a reader’s time by explaining them? Other organizational behavior textbooks are a disservice to students, as well as to those scholars who have worked so hard to produce new knowledge.

• With a need to keep the attention of teenagers, other textbooks resort to long lists of this month’s trendy topics and cartoons. Rather than this straining-too-obviously for relevance, Organizational Behavior: Real Research for Real Managers helps readers with their own practical organizational problems.

• Other textbooks often do contain practical advice but make no pretense of being based in research, usually just reprinting advice from popular management books.

With increasing numbers of experienced professionals and managers taking part-time and Executive MBA courses and enrolling in university-based non-degree executive education courses in organizational behavior, there is a need for a book that clearly, honestly and accurately conveys what the field of organizational behavior can say to experienced managers. These students have no patience for dull lists of seemingly unconnected facts, and those trained in organizational behavior want to be able to share the knowledge from their field, not assign well packaged consultant’s anecdotes and advice. This book was written to fill that need.

The book is organized by managers’ practical organizational problems, but care is taken to draw on the most careful research. Readers will see extensive endnotes to that scholarly research. Because most of those works are difficult scholarly studies, student readers are not expected to consult these sources. However, their instructors may find them useful, particularly in subfields outside their own specialties. Because this book is intended to be useful to practicing managers and experienced professionals, practical advice is developed from the scholarly research; however, these generalizations are clearly identified as generalizations from research as boxed Applications.

For instructional support materials please contact the author, Jone Pearce, at jlpearce@uci.edu