The messy history of OB&D: how three strands came to be seen as one rope

Abstract

The George Washington University organizational behavior students have been privileged to learn from professors who were students of three different founders of the field. The three strands discussed here are Roethlisberger and the Harvard Business School, Kurt Lewin and NTL, and Herzberg. This learning experience is very different from introductory textbooks, which give the impression that the field has made consistent, linear progress from the early days until today. The enriched experience includes a sense of the false starts, values conflicts, egos, lack of cross‐communication, and other dimensions of the human condition that played a role in the founding of OB&D. This article reviews the development of these strands and points out that, although there are similarities, they were working on different problems, using different data sources, with different units of analysis. The article concludes with a glimpse at how these three founders would view the field of OB&D today.