Customer Reviews

A Primer on Organizational Behavior (Wiley Series in Management)

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I am currently using this text in a class for organizational behavior. The text is well written and has symmetry in its topics. I do believe that the average reader will find some of the references in the book long and redundant. The use of many technical terms and inference are very common in this book.

This book is like most Organizational Behavior (OB) or Organizational Psychology textbooks in the sense that it is modular, overviews most of the major areas of research in the field, and is fairly easy to read. It does have a few unique pros & cons:

Pros:
1) Has a GREAT set of appendices reviewing basic statistics and explaining how to read an OB research article. This makes this book a good choice for teachers who want to pair textbook readings with source readings.
2) Emphasizes application more than many OB textbooks and pulls in recent research.
3) Has a low price point for an OB textbook, although it honestly should be cheaper given the absolute lack of frills (paperback, all B&W, some diagrams but no pictures).

Cons:
1) Several important topic areas are absent, like job attitudes (covered in three pages with no mention of specific attitudes like satisfaction, commitment, etc.)
2) Neglects micro issues in general -- about halfway through Ch 3 the focus shifts to macro, system-wide concerns and never looks back.

Overall, this textbook might be a good pick if you are more interested in macro aspects of OB, if your course is focused more on lecture or outside readings, and if textbook cost is a concern.

If you want to learn management, this book is not the way to go. Writing style is boring and the sections in each chapter are non-cohesive. After reading, you are like so what?