The discipline of organizational behavior is concerned with identifying and managing the attitudes and actions of individuals and groups, looking particularly at how people can be motivated to join and remain in the organization, how to get people to practice effective teamwork, how

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people can accomplish their jobs more efficiently, and how employees can be encouraged to be more flexible and innovative. Attention is brought to these attitudes and actions in order to help managers identify problems, determine how to correct them, and change behavior so that individual performance and ultimately organization effectiveness increase.

As a field of study, organizational behavior is built on a succession of approaches or ways of thinking about people. Since the early 1900s those who studied behavior in organizations have attempted to prescribe ways to effectively manage employees in order to achieve the organization's goals. The...