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Chapter III · For students
Every major theory of Organisational Behaviour, sorted across three levels of analysis — Individual, Group, Organisational — and taught first through the life you're already living.
The three columns below — Individual, Group, Organisational — are the three lenses every OB course you'll ever take is, secretly, using to look at the same workplace. Pick the lens that's bothering you most today. Start there.
Every theory card opens a short reading and, where available, a 6-to-10-minute video lesson built around it.
How people perceive, feel, decide and behave at work — one nervous system at a time.
Deci & Ryan, 1985
Why autonomy, competence and relatedness are not motivators — they are the conditions in which motivation appears.
i.02Vroom, 1964
Effort is a multiplication, not an addition — and any term going to zero collapses the whole.
i.03Adams, 1963
People do not compare themselves to ideals. They compare themselves to the person two desks over.
i.04Locke & Latham, 1990
Specific, difficult goals beat "do your best" — almost always, and especially when the work is dull.
i.05Hackman & Oldham, 1976
A job's design — skill variety, task identity, autonomy, feedback — does more for motivation than any motivational speech.
i.06Costa & McCrae, 1992
Five trait dimensions that explain a surprisingly large amount, and also a surprisingly small amount, of who shows up at work.
i.07Heider · Kelley · Weiner
When their behaviour is the issue it's their character; when yours is, it was the situation. The "fundamental" mistake.
i.08Festinger, 1957
We do not act on what we believe. We come to believe what we have just done.
i.09Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996
Small events at work produce small emotions; small emotions accumulate into the year you're having.
i.10Bandura, 1977
The single best predictor of whether someone will try the hard thing is whether they believe they can.
i.11 — i.14Reinforcement · Decision-making heuristics · Job crafting · Emotional labour
Each with its own reading and, where available, video lesson.
How collections of people coordinate, conflict, lead and follow — the workplace as a room of rooms.
Edmondson, 1999
The single condition without which most other team interventions are theatre.
ii.02Tuckman, 1965
Forming, storming, norming, performing — and the underrated fifth: adjourning, often skipped at great cost.
ii.03Tajfel & Turner, 1979
The group is not just where you work; under the right conditions, it is who you become at work.
ii.04Janis, 1972
Cohesion is good for output and bad for judgement. The team that agrees too quickly should be the team you worry about.
ii.05Bass, 1985
The four "I"s — idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualised consideration.
ii.06Greenleaf, 1970
Lead by spending your authority on the people you lead, not on the room.
ii.07Graen, 1976
There is no "the team". There are as many teams as there are dyads. Lead the relationships, not the org chart.
ii.08Thomas & Kilmann, 1974
Compete, accommodate, avoid, compromise, collaborate. None is always right; all are usually misused.
ii.09Bavelas, 1948
Who can talk to whom, in what shape — wheel, chain, all-channel — quietly decides what your team can become.
ii.101959
Five sources — coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, expert. Most workplaces over-use the first three.
ii.11 — ii.14Social loafing · Diversity & faultlines · Distributed leadership · Team reflexivity
Each with its own reading and, where available, video lesson.
How structure, culture, and the long environmental conditions of work shape everything that happens inside them.
Schein, 1985
Artifacts, espoused values, basic assumptions — and the depressing distance between each layer.
iii.02Mintzberg, 1979
Five basic shapes the organisation can take. Most dysfunction is a shape mismatch.
iii.031961
Mechanistic vs organic structures — and the conditions under which each one breaks the other.
iii.04Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978
Organisations are shaped, daily, by the things they need but do not control.
iii.05DiMaggio & Powell, 1983
Why organisations in the same field come to look uncannily alike — and what that costs them.
iii.06Argyris & Schön, 1978
Single-loop vs double-loop learning — and why most "lessons learned" sessions only do the first.
iii.07Lewin, 1947
Unfreeze, change, refreeze. Still the cleanest map of why change initiatives don't stick.
iii.08Kotter, 1996
The famous staircase — best used not as a recipe, but as a checklist of things you forgot.
iii.09Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983
Clan, adhocracy, market, hierarchy. Most workplaces try to be all four and end up being none.
iii.10Trist & Bamforth, 1951
Technology and social structure must be designed together, or one will silently eat the other.
iii.11 — iii.14Sensemaking · Ambidexterity · Organisational identity · Practice theory
Each with its own reading and, where available, video lesson.
Short, unhurried explainers — six to ten minutes each — that take a single theory and put it next to a workplace situation you've actually been in.
The three columns above — the structure every OB course is, secretly, using. Browse here.
42theoriesiiAlphabetical, citation-ready reference — for when you know what you're looking for.
A — ZreferenceiiiTwenty-eight short video lessons — one theory at a time, taught through situations you've actually been in.
28videos