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John B. Miner. Organizational Behavior 1: Essential Theories of Motivation and Leadership. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2005, 432 pages, $49.95 softcover.
Management and industrial psychology graduate students across the country will heave a sigh of relief when they find Miner's Organizational Behavior 1. In this volume, the first of three written by Miner and published by M.E. Sharpe in quick succession, Miner reviews and analyzes the major theories of motivation and leadership that any serious management scholar should know about and understand. The second in the series, Organizational Behavior 2, Essential Theories of Process and Structure, takes a decidedly macro approach to organization behavior, tackling topics grouped around areas such as systems theory, theories of bureaucracy, institutional theory, and decision making. The final volume, Organizational Behavior 3, Historical Origins, Theoretical Foundations, and the Future, overlaps some with the other two volumes while it attempts to assess the "importance, validity, and practical usefulness of 73 core theories in OB" (available at http://www.mesharpe.com/mall/resultsa.asp?Title=Organizational± Behavior±3%3A±Historical±Origins%2C±Theoretical±Foundations% 2C±and±the±Future).
Miner has done the field a great service pulling all this material together. He devotes nine chapters to the luminaries of motivation theory (Lewin, McClelland, Herzberg, Hackman, Lawler, Oldham, Vroom, Porter, Hammer, Luthans, Kreitner, Adams, Locke, Latham, Mitchell, and Green) and eight to the seminal leadership theorists (Vroom, Yetton, Jago, Fiedler, Graen, Lord, Kerr, Miner, House, and Bass). Miner takes a systematic approach, discussing the background of each theorist or set of theorists and placing each theoretic contribution in context, highlighting precursor ideas and subsequent theoretical developments. He also examines how subsequent research based on each theory proceeded and whether practical applications of the theory have emerged. In essence, each chapter is a historiographical essay that begins with the roots of an idea...