Organizations are collections ofinteracting and inter related human and non-human resources working toward acommon goal or set of goals within the framework of structured relationships.Organizational behavior is concerned with all aspects of how organizationsinfluence the behavior of individuals and how individuals in turn influenceorganizations.
Organizational behavior is aninter-disciplinary field that draws freely from a number of the behavioralsciences, including anthropology, psychology, sociology, and many others. Theunique mission of organizational behavior is to apply the concepts ofbehavioral sciences to the pressing problems of management, and, moregenerally, to administrative theory and practice.
In approaching the problems oforganizational behavior, there are a number of available strategies we canutilize. Historically, the study of management and organizations took aclosed-systems view. The preoccupation of this view is to maximize theefficiency of internal operations. In doing so, the uncertainty ofuncontrollable and external environmental factors often were assumed away ordenied. This traditional closed-systems view of organizations made substantialcontributions to the theory of organizational design. At the same time, foranalytical reasons, organizations came to be viewed as precise and complexmachines. In this framework, human beings were reduced to components of theorganizational machine.
More recently, the study oforganizations and the behavior of human beings within them have assumed a moreopen-systems perspective. Factors such as human sentiments and attitudes, aswell as technological and sociological forces originating outside theorganizations, have assumed greater importance in analyzing organizationalbehavior.
This book adopts the openperspective, because this is a contemporary and more meaningful way to vieworganizations and human behavior within them. After some preliminary issues, weshall examine the individual. We shall move from the individual to the smallgroup, to the complex organization, and finally to some environmental factorsimportant to the process of organizational change.
