Experiments in Organizational Behavior

Organizations are social systems that pursue their goals by coordinating people to engage in joint production. Organizations are characterized by division of labor and interdependent reward structures, which result in its members trying to accomplish their own, their group’s, and their organization’s goals while competing against other individuals, groups, and organizations. The intense interdependence of work and the resulting mixed motives for its members lead to problems that can negatively impact the productivity of individuals and, by extension, the groups and organizations in which they work. The ultimate goal of the scientific study of organizational behavior is to solve problems that arise from interdependent work (cf. Wagner & Hollenbeck, 1995). In so doing, organizational scholarship aims to generate insights that can help improve the effectiveness of work (e.g., by improving coordination in organizations) as well as the experience of people at work (e.g., by improving the well-being of individuals in organizations). Examples of interdependence problems include coordination failures, lack of trust, free-riding, and unfairness. Organizational scholarship includes examination of both the role of individual (dispositional) characteristics and features of organizational contexts on these different problems. For example, a study of unfairness in organizations may consider individual differences in social comparison orientation (i.e., individual propensity to compare their inputs and outcomes with others) or the distribution of rewards within organizational subunits to make empirical claims about the relationship between unfairness perceptions Experiments in Organizational Behavior