دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله ویژگی سازمانی در رابطه با رفتار سازمانی (نشریه وایلی 2001)

Big-B در برابر Big-O: در رابطه با رفتار سازمانی، چه ویژگی سازمانی ای وجود دارد؟

Big-B versus Big-O: What is organizational about organizational behavior?

Summary

This paper is an empirically grounded essay about the current state of organizational behavior (OB) research and productive future directions. We report the results of a survey of OB scholars about the current importance of various research topics and their importance in an ideal world. We compare the survey responses with an archival analysis of papers published in leading OB journals over a 10-year period. We suggest that many of the topics that our respondents perceive to be “under researched’ can be summarized with one particular definition of OB that emphasizes organizing behavior. Considering all three definitions together, we highlight the limitations of the traditional (Big-B and Contextualized-B) definitions and discuss the benefits ofa more organizational (Big-O) approach

1 Introduction

The purpose ofthis empirical essay is to be provocative. This paper is empirical in that it surveys leading organizational behavior (OB) scholars to identify which topics they believed are currently important in the field and which should be important in an ‘ideal’ world and we compared their responses to an archival analysis of papers published in leading OB journals over a 10 year period. However, the paper is an essay because it is less like a traditional theory-building or theory-testing study, and more like an empirically grounded opinion piece. We use the empirical evidence as a springboard to raise questions about the boundaries and trajectory of research in OB, and to highlight areas of the field that may deserve more attention in the future. We explore three potential definitions of organizational behavior, and we argue that the empirical results suggest some provocative, but useful, answers to the question: What should organizational behavior be?’

What is organizational behavior?

The field of organizational behavior (OB)’ has emerged from the disciplines of psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, although it is primarily identified with psychology (Schneider, 1985). It has often been defined as studying behavior of individuals and groups within organizations (e.g. see annual review articles such as Mitchell, 1979; Schneider, 1985; or introductory texts such as Duncan, 1978; Organ and Bateman, 1986; Wagner and Hollenbeck, 1995). Thus, the field has historically focused on the behavior and attributes of individuals and groups, while focusing less attention on the organizational aspects of OB. Because of this focus, OB has come to be synonymous with what is referred to as ‘micro-OB’ (e.g. Staw, 1984).

One concern that stimulated us to prepare this essay is that OB – as currently defined – seems to be having less and less of an impact on how research on organizations is conducted. For example, O’Reilly (1990) pointed out that, among general management journals, the market share of microOB research has dropped dramatically over time. This drop may have happened because management researchers have expressed less interest in research that fits a traditional narrow definition of OB. Yet, as a field, we have rarely examined the implications of how OB has come to be defined, or what the alternatives might be.

There are many potential reasons for the decline observed by O’Reilly, but at least two have been noted by multiple reviews of the field. First, reviewers have noted that OB research tends to focus more on empirical studies rather than theory, and they called for more careful attention to theory (Mitchell, 1979; Staw, 1984; Ilgen and Klein, 1989; O’Reilly, 1990). In addition, reviewers have noted that our field tends to borrow heavily from related fields without necessarily contributing new insights (Ilgen and Klein. 1989; O’Reilly, 1990).

In this paper, we report on a survey of leading OB researchers that asked these scholars to identify theoretical themes that are actually present in the current OB literature, to suggest themes that would receive more attention in an ‘ideal’ literature, and to identify gaps between current and ideal research foci. By identifying topics that researchers see as under-researched and over-researched, we hope to encourage research on important OB topics that may recapture the attention of the management field. In addition, by suggesting topics that are under-researched, we hope to point out areas where the field requires new theoretical contributions to ensure its vitality. Such areas represent opportunities for OB research to contribute important insights to our peer disciplines rather than unilaterally borrowing from them.

Note that by focusing on under-researched topics, our focus differs from an important methodological debate that has been actively engaged over the last few years (e.g. Pfeffer, 1993; Van Maanen, 1995; for a review see Fabian, 2000). Our goal here is not to consider methods for conducting research, but to consider which topics represent interesting and important questions for researchers in organizational behavior.

Although our survey allowed us to ask leading researchers about the actual and ideal importance of a wide array of potential research topics, it is impossible to be comprehensive in any single survey. Thus, one of our goals in this paper is to propose a broader definition of organizational behavior that could summarize the results of our survey and provide a useful agenda for future research. At the end of the paper, we use our results to discuss two traditional ways of defining organizational behavior that appear to us to fall short of providing a useful agenda for research. We also propose a third definition of organizational behavior, that we believe better summarizes the results of the survey and that provides a useful principle for directing our attention to research topics that may be more ideal.