Organizational Behavior - Current State of The Field

Current State of The Field

Organizational behaviour is a growing field. Organizational studies departments generally form part of business schools, although many universities also have industrial psychology and industrial economics programs.

The field is highly influential in the business world with practitioners such as Peter Drucker and Peter Senge, who turned the academic research into business practices. Organizational behaviour is becoming more important in the global economy as people with diverse backgrounds and cultural values must work together effectively and efficiently. It is also under increasing criticism as a field for its ethnocentric and pro-capitalist assumptions (see Critical Management Studies).

During the last 20 years, organizational behavior study and practice has developed and expanded through creating integrations with other domains:

• Anthropology became an interesting prism to understanding firms as communities, by introducing concepts like Organizational culture, 'organizational rituals' and 'symbolic acts' enabling new ways to understand organizations as communities.
• Leadership Understanding: the crucial role of leadership at various levels of an organization in the process of change management.
• Ethics and their importance as pillars of any vision and one of the most important driving forces in an organization.
• Aesthetics: Within the last decades a field emerged that focuses on the aesthetic sphere of our existence in organizations, drawing on interdisciplinary theories and methods from the humanities and disciplines such as theatre studies, literature, music, visual studies and many more.