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Organisational Behaviour

Faculty Research Group

We study phenomena in a wide range of settings, examining both the organisations themselves and the people within those organisations.
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The Organisational Behaviour (OB) Faculty Research Group’s mission is to address contemporary social and organisational issues and pursue the LSE vision of improving society and understanding the causes of things. 

In order to develop a global understanding of people and organisations, we study phenomena in a wide range of settings, examining both the organisations themselves (macro-OB) and the people within those organisations (micro-OB) through rigorous and innovative research.

The OB group is unique in its intellectual placement at the heart of the LSE, an international institute of social sciences, and in its geographic location at the heart of London, a key financial and political hub. 

Members of the group represent a wide range of disciplinary perspectives (management, economics, psychology, sociology, judgment and decision making) and draw on theories and research from these diverse perspectives in order to achieve academic excellence and publish in leading journals. 

We collaborate with faculty from other disciplines in the Department of Management and the wider School through initiatives such as the LSE Behavioural Lab as well as our postgraduate degree programmes. We actively engage with practitioners, policy-makers, and LSE students and alumni in our efforts to improve society by enhancing the quality of working life and changing organisational and economic practices.

Research focus

At the macro-OB level, we strive to understand:

  • Organisational structure
  • Market and organisational change due to social, technological and societal influences
  • Boundaries of organisations and their evolution
  • Entrepreneurship and organisational networks across nations

We explore industrial (e.g., pharmaceutics, occupational pension), economic (e.g., social enterprises in emerging economies) and societal (e.g., the responsible investment) contexts in different regions of the world. 

At the micro-OB level, we examine:

  • Different types of individual/team behaviour and outcomes (e.g., workplace proactivity, workplace mistreatment, decision making and biases, emotional labour, career development, and well-being)
  • Forces shaping individual/team behaviour (e.g., personality, mentorship and leadership, interpersonal and employee-organisation relationship, team context, human resources practices, nudges and choice architecture and cultural settings)
  • Mechanisms driving individual/team behaviour (e.g., cognitive, motivational and emotional processes) and improving decision making (debiasing, and choice architecture) 
  • Individual and team decision making (e.g., processes, biases, debiasing, and choice architecture/nudging)