Organizational Behavior 3

Historical Origins, Theoretical Foundations, and the Future

John B. Miner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780765615275
• eBook ISBN: 9781317463511
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This is the first comprehensive overview of the development of the field of Organizational Behavior. It belongs on the shelf of every scholar and student in the discipline.

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR 3

PART I

THEORY, RESEARCH, AND KNOWLEDGE OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

What is organizational behavior? It is a social science discipline—much like cultural anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. This means that it utilizes the scientific method to establish truth and to validate its theories. It is a discipline that historically has had its intellectual home in business schools. It is a new discipline relative to the other social sciences, having its origins in the mid-twentieth century. The key points are that it is a science and that it has a history, which, though short, has been quite turbulent.

Although the exact boundaries of the discipline are somewhat fuzzy (see Blood 1994), organizational behavior’s focus is clearly on the world of organizations. The concern is first with the behavior and nature of people within organizations, and second with the behavior and nature of organizations within their environments. The term organizational behavior initially referred only to the behavior and nature of people in organizations. Given the fuzziness of its boundaries, the discipline always had a tendency to stretch beyond that domain, however. By the time it approached twenty-five years of age it clearly had staked a claim to incorporating the behavior and nature of organizations as well (see Miles 1980). This is historically consistent in that both the study of the behavior and nature of people and the study of the behavior and nature of organizations emerged in the business schools in the same places at the same times.

In line with its professional school origins, organizational behavior is an applied discipline, concerned with matters of practice and application. Despite this orientation, it currently has relatively few members who actually devote their primary professional efforts to the practice of organizational behavior in business and other organizational settings; rather, most are concentrated in academia—teaching, writing, and conducting research. In my opinion this is unfortunate; the field would be better off not by reducing its academic efforts, but by expanding its practitioner efforts. We will return to this theme in various ways throughout this book.

Several other terms have become intertwined with organizational behavior over the years, although none has achieved quite the same level of acceptance. One is organization theory, which has come to refer almost exclusively to the study of the behavior and nature of organizations in their environments. A second is organization(al) science, which appears to cover essentially the same ground as organizational behavior, and which in many respects I prefer as a designation for our field (see Miner 1984). However, right now organizational behavior has won the day. Finally, there is the term organization studies, which also has a broad connotation extending, at least in the recent period, beyond the science of organizations to incorporate several different philosophic positions (see Clegg, Hardy, and Nord 1996).

Having explained what organizational behavior is, I need to say something about what it is not. It is not strategic management, a field that has emerged and achieved stature more recently than organizational behavior (see Schendel and Hofer 1979) and has differentiated itself at the border that previously existed between organizational behavior and economics, borrowing from and overlapping with each. Furthermore, organizational behavior is not economics, although in recent years there has been some confounding of the two fields and there are those who foresee a possible future takeover of organizational behavior by economics (see, e.g., Pfeffer 1995). There is even some theory as to how this takeover might come about (Ferraro, Pfeffer, and Sutton 2005). However, economics was well established in business schools long before organizational behavior arrived, and organizational behavior was spawned, in large part at the behest of economists, as a separate and distinct discipline. Historically, the two are clearly different entities with very different origins.

Finally, organizational behavior is not philosophy. That, however, is a rather complex story. As a science our field is closely tied to, though separate from, the philosophy of science. In this respect it is like all other sciences, and the relationship can be expected to continue as long as organizational behavior defines itself as a social science. But philosophy has been threaded into organizational behavior in other respects as well from the very beginning, not always to the benefit of either field. Sometimes, in the hands of certain individuals, organizational behavior and philosophy have become almost indistinguishable from one another. Understanding what is involved here requires a background in the nature of science, scientific theory, scientific research, and in the history of science—in short in the scientific foundations of the field. It also requires a background in the ways in which philosophy has become threaded into organizational behavior at various points in time. These matters are considered in the chapters of Part I.

The primary focus of this book, however, is on the heritage of organizational behavior, both within science and within the historical roots of the field. In point of fact, we all participate in various organizations such as schools, companies, and hospitals throughout our lives, and we devote a large percentage of our time to such participation. Most people would like to function more effectively in organizations and to contribute to more effective functioning of the organizations themselves. It seems logical that the more we know about organizations and the way they operate, the better our chances of coping with them adequately and of achieving our own goals within them and for them. Giving us this knowledge is what organizational behavior aims to do.

In writing this book I attempt to establish the Zeitgeist, the intellectual climate, within which organizational behavior emerged and gained acceptance. An idea too outlandish even to be considered at one point in time in one cultural context may win wide acclaim later after times have changed (Boring 1950). Thus, an understanding of the backgrounds out of which ideas came to the fore, and of the values that nurtured and thwarted them, is crucial to a real appreciation of any field. The context that spawned organizational behavior, including certain ideas and theories that were already on the scene under other disciplinary names, is therefore of prime importance in understanding the true meaning of what the field has become.

As a foundation for understanding what is involved here, it is essential to know what scientific theory is and what it is not, as well as how theory relates to research, and where organizational behavior stands relative to the dictates of science. These are the concerns of Part I.

REFERENCES

Blood, Milton R. (1994). The Role of Organizational Behavior in the Business School Curriculum. In Jerald Greenberg (Ed.), Organizational Behavior: The State of the Science. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 207–20.

Boring, Edwin G. (1950). A History of Experimental Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Clegg, Stewart R., Hardy, Cynthia, and Nord, Walter R. (1996). Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage.

Ferraro, Fabrizio Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Sutton, Robert I. (2005). Economics Language and Assumptions: How Theories Become Self-fulfilling. Academy of Management Review, 30, 8–24.

Miles, Robert H. (1980). Resource Book in Macro Organizational Behavior. Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear.

Miner, John B. (1984). The Validity and Usefulness of Theories in an Emerging Organizational Science. Academy of Management Review 9: 297–306.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey (1995). Mortality, Reproducibility, and the Persistence of Styles of Theory. Organization Science 6: 681–86.

Schendel, Dan E., and Hofer, Charles W. (1979). Strategic Management: A New View of Business Policy and Planning. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

CHAPTER 1

SCIENCE AND ITS THEORY

Theory and Practice

Science Defined

The Role of Theory in Science

Theory Defined

How Theory Works

Assumptions of Science

Rules of Scientific Inquiry

Conclusions

Theory is the cornerstone of any science. It provides the ideas that fuel research and practice. Theories of organizational behavior are potentially as useful when applied to organizations as theories of physics and chemistry are when used in developing new manufacturing technologies and consumer products, or theories of biology are in advancing medical practice. However, the relationship between theory and practice (or application, or usefulness) in organizational behavior is often misunderstood. For many people the term theory evokes images of a speculative, ivory-towered world, far removed from reality.

THEORY AND PRACTICE

Theories do not sound helpful in understanding the practical facts of organizational life. Yet one hears such statements as that of the eminent psychologist Kurt Lewin (1945), who said that “nothing is so practical as a good theory.” And this dictum has continued to receive widespread acceptance over the years since (see, e.g., Van de Ven 1989 and more recently, Lundberg 2004).

Confusion on this score is in fact widespread; the subject requires consideration here at the outset because a particular reader’s preconceptions regarding the theory-practice relationship (or the lack thereof) can color that person’s thinking about the entire field. The idea that theory is somehow “ivory tower” while practice is “real world”—and that the two are distinct and separate—has often permeated discussions of business school education and of the role of the organizational behavior discipline (Raelin 1993; Wren, Buckley, and Michaelson 1994), and it continues to do so (Das 2003; Donaldson 2002). Even attempts to clarify this situation seem to lead only to deepening confusion (Brief and Dukerich 1991).

What then is the state of the situation at the interface between academic theory and research, and the world of application? What do studies tell us? One of the most comprehensive of such studies deals with the research knowledge, much of it theory based, of human resource (HR) managers (Rynes, Brown, and Colbert 2002; Rynes, Colbert, and Brown 2002). This investigation indicated that these managers were not very knowledgeable regarding the research evidence; they were only neutral on the value of research findings for practice, and most read very little in the research literature. Yet those few who were more conversant with the research worked for more financially successful companies. A difficulty appears to be that many HR managers rely almost entirely on the popular press for knowledge input (Mazza and Alvarez 2000), and often get wrong information from such sources. Not surprisingly, the popular press tends to pick up on temporary fads and fashions that are “hot” at the time, many of which are simply recycled versions of old ideas that had been discarded (Spell 2001).

Another study, focused on a specific theory, failed to find evidence of an understanding of this theory among managers, although MBA students were better informed (Priem and Rosenstein 2000). Thus, practicing managers could not go in the directions prescribed because they lacked the knowledge to do so. Although value and motivational differences are involved here (see Brooks, Grauer, Thornbury, and Highhouse 2003), this in itself would not logically account for the academic-managerial gap found; the problem appears to be in not going to appropriate sources of information (Roehling, Cavanaugh, Moynihan, and Boswell 2000). Research to this effect continues to mount with additional study (Nowicki and Rosse 2002).

The data thus seem to indicate a substantial gap between theory and perceived usefulness in practice. Yet there are reasons to believe that this gap can be reduced under appropriate circumstances (Rynes, Bartunek, and Daft 2001). One objective of this volume is to facilitate this process and accordingly to narrow the gap so that practitioners will come away with a greater appreciation of the value that organizational behavior theory can bring to practice. Examples of recent academic-practitioner collaborations on research studies (Ford, Duncan, Bedeian, Ginter, Rousculp, and Adams 2003; Rynes and McNatt 2001) and of increasing concern about linking theory to practice (Cooper and Locke 2000) give reason for optimism in this regard; so, too, does the recent finding that there is a positive correlation between a managerial panel’s assessment of practical relevance and an objective index of the academic quality of published articles (Baldridge, Floyd, and Markóczy 2004). The publication of a special issue of Human Resource Management dealing with the contributions of theory and research to closing science-practice knowledge gaps represents a particularly fortuitous sign (Burke, Drasgow, and Edwards 2004).

In this context let me return to Lewin’s (1945) dictum. What Lewin meant by a good t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I. THEORY, RESEARCH, AND KNOWLEDGE OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
• PART II. MULTIDISCIPLINARY ORIGINS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
• PART III. ESTABLISHING THE GROUND AGAINST WHICH ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR BECAME FIGURE
• PART IV. THE IMPORTANCE, VALIDITY, PRACTICAL USEFULNESS, AND INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR THEORIES
• PART V. FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author