The Journal of Organizational Behavior aims to report and review the growing research in the industrial/organizational psychology and organizational behavior fields throughout the world. The journal will focus on research and theory in all the topics associated with occupational/organizational behavior including motivation, work performance, equal opportunities at work, job design, career processes, occupational stress, quality of work life, job satisfaction, personnel selection, training, organizational change, research methodology in occupational/organizational behavior, employment, job analysis, behavioral aspects of industrial relations, managerial behavior, organizational structure and climate, leadership and power (Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2007a).
While this mission (and its predecessors) has served the journal well for 27 years, I see it as in many ways too limiting. The wording is skewed toward the topics that have been the staple of JOB, including its most cited articles (see Ashkanasy, 2007, for a list), but seem to omit some of the important topics-like group processes-that one normally associates with our discipline. What I would like to see is a mission that is more broadly targeted to encompass the total domain of OB. Possibly something more aligned with the Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division's Domain Statement, viz: Specific domain: the study of individuals and groups within an organizational context, and the study of internal processes and practices as they affect individuals and groups. Major topics include: individual characteristics such as beliefs, values, and personality; individual processes such as perception, motivation, decision making, judgment, commitment, and control; group characteristics such as size, composition, and structural properties; group processes such as decision making and leadership; organizational processes and practices such as goal setting, appraisal, feedback, rewards, and behavioral aspects of task design; and the influence of all of these on such individual, group, and organizational outcomes as performance, turnover, absenteeism, and stress (Academy of Management, 2007).
As you can see, the OB Division's Domain Statement is considerably more generalized than JOB's, and includes the study of both internal processes and organizational outcomes. At the same time, this