Organizational Behavior

The organizational behavior group is dedicated to advancing research, teaching, and practice regarding the management of organizations.

The group’s faculty members research fundamental questions in organizational behavior, from both a social psychological and a sociological perspective, and publish their research in books and in the top management and social science journals.

MBA courses in organizational behavior help students to understand behavior at both the individual and organization levels. Topics at the individual or “micro” level include individual motivation and behavior, decision-making, interpersonal communication and influence, small group behavior, and individual, dyadic, and intergroup conflict and cooperation. At the organization or “macro” level, topics include organizational growth, organizational change, organizational learning, organizations and leadership, power, social networks, and social responsibility.

More generally, the organizational behavior curriculum helps prepare students for their managerial careers, providing them with frameworks for diagnosing and dealing with the problems and opportunities that typically arise in organizational settings.

Recent Journal Articles in Organizational Behavior

Michal Kosinski, Yilun Wang
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (in press). September
7 , 2017

We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain. We used deep neural networks to extract features from...

Nir Halevy, EY Chou, AD Galinsky, JK Murninghan
Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. September
2017, Vol. 113, Issue 3, Pages 393-412

Contracts are commonly used to regulate a wide range of interactions and relationships. Yet relying on contracts as a mechanism of control often comes at a cost to motivation. Integrating...

Gabriel Doyle, Amir Goldberg, Sameer B. Srivastava, Michael C. Frank
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. August
2017

Cultural fit is widely believed to affect the success of individuals and the groups to which they belong. Yet it remains an

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Kieran O'Connor..., Glenn R. Carroll, Balázs Kovács
PLOS ONE. June
26 , 2017, Vol. 12, Issue 6

While shaping aesthetic judgment and choice, socially constructed authenticity takes on some very different meanings among observers, consumers, producers and critics. Using a theoretical framework positing four distinct meanings of...

Bryan Walker, Sarah A. Soule
Harvard Business Review. June
20 , 2017, Pages 2-6

Culture is like the wind. It is invisible, yet its effect can be seen and felt. When it is blowing in your direction, it makes for smooth sailing. When it...

Francis J. Flynn, RL Schaumberg
The Journal of Applied Psychology. June
2017, Vol. 102, Issue 6, Pages 982-992

We propose that the relationship between job satisfaction and absenteeism depends partly on guilt proneness. Drawing on withdrawal and process models of absenteeism, we argue that job satisfaction predicts absences...

Andrei Boutyline, Robb Willer
Political Psychology. June
2017, Vol. 38, Issue 3, Pages 551-569

We predict that people with different political orientations will exhibit systematically different levels of political homophily, the tendency to associate with others similar to oneself in political ideology. Research on...

Lisanne Van Bunderen, Lindred Leura Greer, Daan Van Knippenberg
Academy of Management Journal. June
2017, Vol. in press

Organizational teams frequently come into conflict with one another over limited resources. Prevailing wisdom suggests that such inter-team resource conflicts unite teams internally, reducing intra-team power struggles. However, conflict spill-over...

Dale T. Miller, Jennifer E. Dannals, Julian J. Zlatev
Perspectives on Psychological Science. May
2017, Vol. 12, Issue 3, Pages 454-467

We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and...

Lauren C. Howe, Benoît Monin
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. May
2017, Vol. 112, Issue 5, Pages 718-735

In the article, the beginning phrase of the second paragraph of the Internal Meta-Analysis of Studies 3 Through 5 section is incorrect. It should instead begin as follows: Across the...

Stephanie C. Lin, Julian J. Zlatev, Dale T. Miller
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. May
2017, Vol. 70, Pages 198-203

Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people’s desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a...

Ran Duchin, Amir Goldberg, Denis Sosyura
Review of Financial Studies. May
2017, Vol. 30, Issue 5, Pages 1696-1743

Using hand-collected data on divisional managers at conglomerates, we find that a change in industry surplus in one division generates large spillovers on managerial payoffs in other divisions of the...