Intro

I owe my Big O title to Heath and Sitkin whose 2001 Journal of Behavior  article addresses the issue of context in a very interesting way. (Heath, C., & Sitkin, S. B. (2001). Big‐B versus Big‐O: What is organizational about organizational behavior?. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, 22(1), 43-58.)

Organisational Behaviour could have three different emphasis. First oB with the Behaviour part emphasised where the real focus is on interesting behaviour but not necessarily passing the (Organisational)  Core competence or Centrality test.

Second the Contextualised B where the behaviour is relabeled from another field with no contribution to that field.

Third  Ob which is called the Big O where the O is understood as the verb form 'organising' which is to say that OB of this kind would enlighten us on behaviour that is central to organising. The purpose of this blog is precisely to draw attention to the need for bringing the O into focus. This would mean to highlight the context of behaviour or put behaviour in its context.


They first identified the gap between research topics and ideal topics in OB through a survey and ordered the list in the sequence from big gap to small gap. This would mean that those on top of the list are the ones that the relevant community identified as under researched but highly desirable to be researched.

Next they explained the three different emphasis and suggested that the topics on the top of the list were the ones that fell into the Big O category.