Introduction
Welcome to the Instructor’s Manual for the seventeenth edition of Organizational Behavior!
Long considered the standard for all organizational behavior textbooks, this edition continues its
tradition of making current, relevant research come alive for students. While maintaining its
hallmark features—clear writing style, cutting-edge content, and engaging pedagogy—the
seventeenth edition has been updated to reflect the most recent research within the field of
organizational behavior. This is one of the most comprehensive and thorough revisions of
Organizational Behavior we’ve undertaken, and while we’ve preserved the core material, we’re
confident that this edition reflects the most important research and topical issues facing
organizations, managers, and employees.
I. How to Prepare for the Course
The concept of organizational behavior is an interesting one. It brings together ideas and
practices developed in a diverse group of disciplines to better understand the behaviors of people
in the organizational context. Organizations usually have goals to produce whatever their desired
output in the most effective and efficient manner. Optimizing these factors creates an
organization with the highest level of productivity and success.
The human factor in this productivity equation has been of interest to management studies since
the early days of Frederick Taylor, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, Henry Gantt, and others and their
applications and derivatives of Scientific Management. Henri Fayol included concepts of
directing and controlling in his functions of management, which have been the basis for
management theories and research for almost a century.
People are the organization. Without people, the organization cannot survive and be productive.
Therefore, preparing this course for introducing concepts and developing skills and talents in
students is essential to their success in managing organizations of any type. For that reason, this
book and instructor’s manual provide you with a myriad of support material such as cases,
discussion topics, ethical concerns, global perspectives, video studies, and other components you
can use innovatively and creatively to build course content for your students to make skill
development a fun, exciting, and challenging experience. All it takes is time for preparation.
II. Who Is Your Audience?
Depending on your institution’s curriculum requirements for business/management, you could
have a combination of juniors and seniors in your classes, some traditional college student age
and some non-traditional students. Regardless of age or academic year/status, what is typical of
the first-time student in an organizational behavior class is a feeling that many of the topics, such
as communication or leadership, are natural things that people do automatically. Students have
little realization that they can improve effectiveness and efficiency of such topics by
understanding them as they have been researched and variables of influence have been isolated.