Organizational Behavior

preface

Our Approach

This book is unique because it presents two approaches to organizational behavior (OB), which we call “conventional OB” and “sustainable OB.” Conventional OB refers to traditional research and practices that you might find in the best OB textbooks on the market today. Sustainable OB refers to emerging research and practices that are growing in importance and use in many organizations. The conventional approach emphasizes things like performance, commitment, short-term profits, predictability, and personal considerations. The sustainable approach also emphasizes performance and commitment, but places greater emphasis on long-term consequences, creativity, and community considerations. The two approaches are related, with sustainable OB building upon but also being different from conventional OB. Compared to the conventional approach, sustainable OB places more emphasis on social and ecological concerns, consistent with a broad definition of sustainability promoted by many leading OB scholars and practitioners, such as Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford Professor of Organizational Behavior.¹

By offering these two approaches to OB, the textbook has three important advantages. First, many OB instructors already see their course as serving as somewhat of a counterbalance to the primacy of focusing on short-term financial well-being and shareholder interests found in many business courses. A textbook like ours helps instructors to underscore and draw attention to the distinct ...