Organizational Behaviour in a Global Context

In today’s world we rely on formal organizations for almost everything that we do. These organizations in turn shape our expectations of how people should behave. Whether our interaction with an organization is positive or negative will depend on the structure, character, and control of the organization.

The text introduces and explains the central theories, concepts, and models of the field of organizational behaviour; at the same time, it advances the key ideas of competing paradigms, integrating many of their main issues. In this way Organizational Behaviour in a Global Context offers a unique view into twenty-first century organizations.

Featured studies and cases of several major organizations including British Airways, Scandinavian Airlines System, Ontario Hospitals, Pfizer, the Catholic Church, Mountain Equipment Co-operative, Workbrain, Wal-Mart (and many others) allow the reader to understand the context in which to consider specific themes. These themes are also explored in separate chapters--including chapters on gender at work and race/ethnicity in the workplace. Finally, the authors use current research to examine aspects of organizational behaviour from a gender, class, or race/ethnicity approach.

An instructor’s manual, available on CD-ROM, includes chapter-by-chapter PowerPoint presentations, a 500-question test bank, additional discussion questions, and previously unpublished case studies drawn from the Dark Side Competition (on Rwanda, Coca-Cola in India, Bhopal, and Nestle).

Albert J. Mills is Director of the PhD (Management) program and Professor of Management at the Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, Canada. His twelve books include (with T. Simmons) Reading Organization Theory: A Critical Approach, third edition (Broadview Press, 2004) and Sex, Strategy and the Stratosphere: The Gendering of Airline Cultures (Palgrave, 2006). Jean C. Helms Mills is Associate Professor of Management at the Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University. She has researched and written extensively on gender and the culture of organizations and is the author and editor of five books. Carolyn Forshaw teaches rhetoric and business communications at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC. She has had over twenty-five years experience in the field in the UK and Canada. John Bratton is a visiting professor at both Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, in the UK.