Spotlight: Organizational Behavior and Cross-Cultural Management
Organizational behavior is the multidisciplinary study of human behavior within organizational settings and the organization itself, while the area of cross-cultural management examines the influence of societal cultures on individuals and management practice. This page features a curated selection of annotated bibliographies drawn from Oxford Bibliographies in Management, designed to help scholars understand key theories and topics in our discipline.
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Organizational Behavior
“Organizational behavior (OB) is the study of human behavior in organizational settings, of the interface between human behavior and the organization, and of the organization itself. OB is multidisciplinary in nature, synthesizing several other fields of study […] especially industrial and organizational psychology...”
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Organizational Development and Change
“Organization development and change (ODC) is a term used to refer to organization development (OD) as it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a discrete area of inquiry. The term also refers to subsequent developments in planned organizational change and broader labels (such as change management) since the mid-20th century. ODC originally focused on humanistically oriented process interventions within comparatively small groups of organizational members aimed at improving their functioning. Its scope has expanded considerably over the decades to include many more types of interventions, a much wider array of participants, and a much broader scope of activity...”
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Automation
“Since the first decades of the 20th century, there has been concern that automation, including mechanization, computing, and more recently robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), will take away jobs and damage the labor market. There has also been concern that large, dominant firms will capture whatever value is created by automating technologies. In an effort to understand these issues, a wide variety of scholars have studied automation [...] at a number of levels, including country, industry, firm, occupation, and even the occupational-task level, and by a range of disciplines, including economics, innovation, management, organizational theory, sociology, and strategy...”
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Ethical Leadership
“Within the past fifteen years ethical leadership has become a topic of scientific inquiry, with established measures and a corpus of research and theoretical work examining antecedents and consequences. During the same period the unethical acts of organizational leaders have received increasing attention in both the commercial media and the organizational literature...”
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Global and Comparative Leadership
“…[G]lobal leadership [is defined] broadly as the capacity to bring about change and enhance organizational performance across national borders. This capacity in turn requires the skills and acumen to influence and energize employees, business partners, and other organizational stakeholders. Closely related and overlapping with the study of global leadership, the cross-country or comparative leadership field explores the similarities and differences in leadership traits and practices across countries, which helps explain the aspects of leadership that are generally universal across countries, or largely dependent upon the unique institutional and country context...”
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Cross-Cultural Management
“Cross-cultural management […] includes the study of the influence of societal culture on managers and management practice as well as the study of the cultural orientations of individual managers and organization members. At the individual level, individuals’ values as well as their understanding of and reactions to their cultural context and experience figure prominently....”
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Global Teams
“Globalization continues to occupy headlines, and thus the minds of business professionals throughout the world. As a consequence of globalization, organizations have increasingly expanded the markets they serve while simultaneously relying on diverse labor pools to exceed both current and future customer needs. Accordingly, global teams (GTs) have proliferated, relying on the diverse talents within each of these teams to meet organizational goals of reaching overseas markets and to execute and implement complex business strategies. GTs, also called multinational work teams, are defined as a specific type of work team in which members come from two or more national or cultural backgrounds...”
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International Strategic Alliances
“International strategic alliance is typically defined as a collaborative arrangement between firms headquartered in different countries. Partnering firms remain legally independent after the formation of alliance and the alliance relationship is relatively enduring. International strategic alliances can be categorized along multiple dimensions...”
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