GERRY.in | MBA blog | Ryerson University | Ted Rogers School of Management: Organizational Behaviour or OB - some random info. (HRM is a component of OB. But HR is not the same as OB. Different B-Schools have different approaches to the teaching of these subjects).

Some random links:

An Organization is defined as a collection of people who work together to achieve a wide variety of goals. Organizational Behavior is defined as the actions and attitudes of people in organizations. The field of organizational behavior (OB) covers the body of knowledge derived from these actions and attitudes. It can help managers understand the complexity within organizations, identify problems, determine the best ways to correct them, and establish whether the changes would make a significant difference.

Organizational behavior is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals,groups and structures have on behavior within an organization.It is an interdisciplinary field that includes sociology, psychology, communication, and management; and it complements the academic studies of organizational theory (which is more Macro-level) and human resource studies (which is more applied and business-related). It may also be referred to as organizational studies or organizational science. The field has its roots in industrial and organizational psychology.

Organizational studies is a fragmented field. Its foundations are from the disciplines:

Psychology, Sociology &, Economics as well as

Applied fields like Industrial Psychology, Labour Relations, Human Resource Management, Organizational Development & Management.

Each field of inquiry focuses on different phenomena, employs different research methods and makes different assumptions about the nature of people and about organizations and their purpose in society. This diversity has prevented the emergence of a common language or theory of Organizations (Pfeffer, 1997).

The Meaning of Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior (OB) is the study of human behavior in organizational settings, how human behavior interacts with the organization, and the organization itself. Although we can focus on any one of these three areas independently, we must remember that all three are ultimately connected and necessary for a comprehensive understanding of organizational behavior. For example, we can study individual behavior (such as the behavior of a company’s CEO or of one of its employees) without explicitly considering the organization. But because the organization influences and is influenced by the individual, we cannot fully understand the individual’s behavior without knowing something about the organization. Similarly, we can study an organization without focusing specifically on each individual within it. But again, we are looking at only one piece of the puzzle. Eventually, we must consider the other pieces to understand the whole.