The History Corner:  Birth of the S.O.B.

Scott Highhouse
Bowling Green State University

Historian-psychologist Ludy Benjamin wrote a fascinating article in American Psychologist that documented the development in 1936 of the “psychological round table” (Benjamin, 1977). Benjamin described a rebellious group of young experimental psychologists who formed an elite society of 50 invited members who met annually to discuss innovative research ideas. Many readers of TIP are probably unaware that a very similar group, composed of I-O psychologists, was formed in the mid-1970s and continues on to this day. In this History Corner article, I thought it would be interesting to document the formation and early meetings of the Society for Organizational Behavior (S.O.B.).

S.O.B. was founded in 1976 by Jim Naylor (who also founded the journal now known as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process). As Naylor (1977) described it, he and his Purdue colleagues Bob Pritchard and Dan Ilgen were lamenting the fact that there was no good place for I-O psychology types to meet and discuss research in a meaningful way. So, in 1975, Naylor came up with the idea to form an invitation-only society. It was to be modeled somewhat on other groups he belonged to, such as the Gesellschaft fur Unendliche Versuche (GUV) and the Bayesian Research Group. The initial reactions of Pritchard and Ilgen were mixed. As Naylor recounted it, his colleagues felt that the selective membership was “presumptuous” and that those excluded would have hurt feelings. Pritchard and Ilgen also felt that the formation of a separate society might be perceived by Division 14 as a “slap in the face” (Naylor, 1977, p. 1).¹ Naylor was undaunted.

¹ Ilgen and Pritchard don’t recall having these reservations.

In the opinion of some I-O psychologists in the mid-1970s, the needs of scholars were not being met by APA. They were impatient with Division 14 and felt that a mechanism was needed for keeping abreast of the research their colleagues were doing. As Milton Blood, an original member, commented “SOB allowed us to know in advance what was coming down the research road.” Indeed, nearly all of the original 50 invitations were met with a positive response. Naylor (1977, p. 1) reported the primary guidelines in deciding who the original 50 invitees should be:

We felt that individual behavior should be the focus of people’s interest as opposed to more macro variables. A demonstrated research competence was also required (no new PhDs). Old fogies, no matter how eminent, were avoided. We wanted people who were in the center of the action right now!

Of the 50 original invitees, only 4 or 5 declined or failed to respond. These were replaced by people on the “alternate” list.

Eighty percent of the members attended the first (1976) meeting in West Lafayette, Indiana. There is very little record of what took place or who spoke at this first meeting, which included 20-minute talks by anyone who expressed a strong interest in speaking. The only recollection of the initial meeting came from Rich Arvey, who recalled “I was a really ‘green’ junior academic member and was in some awe of meeting all these luminaries.” More structure was imposed on the society following this first meeting. For example, Naylor assembled a six-person governing board, which included himself, Bob Pritchard, Jeanne (Herman) Brett, Bill Scott, Paul Goodman, and Peter Dachler. Also introduced was a rule that 2 years of absence would result in removal from the society. J. Richard Hackman remembered “I was kicked out twice for nonattendance! (I’m kind of proud of this because most people get kicked out only once).”

Record keeping was better for the second meeting, also held in West Lafayette. Speakers at the 1977 meeting included the following:

Alderfer	Studying inter-groups in organizations
Blood	Helping persons with their nose to the grindstone pat themselves on the back
Graen	Open-systems research design
Guion	Applications of latent trait theory in industrial and organizational psychology
Brett (Herman)	Stress and job transfer: An attempt at model building
Hulin and Roberts	Aggregation and other things
Landy	Developmental motivation theory
Latham	Operant conditioning in industry
Locke	(No Title)
Mitchell	The causes and consequences of uncertainty in decision making
Nebeker	A longitudinal look at using expectancy theory as the basis for making organizational changes
Schmidt	A suggested solution for statistical and measurement problems in theory construction in organizational psychology
Schneider	Relationships between employee and customer perceptions of service in bank branches
Scott	On the nature and significance of ‘p-p’ correlations
Terborg	Individual and group behavior in response to external organizational stress
Wanous	Job survival of low wage workers—An organizational entry view

Kavanagh (1978) reported that a big topic of discussion at this meeting was the study of job-related stress. He suggested that this was perhaps a reflection of I-O psychologists’ increasing concern with health-related research.

Attendees described early meetings of S.O.B. as dynamic and humor-filled. Milton Blood recalled:

One event stands out head-and-shoulders above all of the SOB interactions. In one session George Graen was presenting new developments in his work with dyadic relationships. He presented several new hypotheses in the process and got this question from one of the members, “George, what data would convince you that these hypotheses are true?” Without hesitation, George responded “I’m already convinced that they’re true; I only collect the data for you guys!” That was such a clear statement of a usually unspoken point that it brought down the house.

Early attendees reported lively discussions and sometimes arguments that spilled past the question-and-answer periods into the social hours. The earliest members of S.O.B. are presented in Table 1.

Table 1.
Earliest Members of the Society of Organizational Behavior (S.O.B.)
______________________________________________________________________

Clayton Alderfer Milton Blood Terry Dickinson Fred Fiedler Robert Guion Jeanne (Herman) Brett Daniel Ilgen Abraham Korman Edwin Locke Greg Oldham Robert Pritchard Benjamin Schneider John Slocum Jr. Victor Vroom Howard Weiss

Richard Arvey  Larry Cummings Marvin Dunnette Paul Goodman Milton Hakel Robert House Michael Kavanagh Frank Landy Terence Mitchell Charles O’Reilly III Karlene Roberts Donald Schwab Patricia Cain Smith John Wanous Kenneth Wexley

Alan Bass Peter Dachler Hillel Einhorn George Graen Richard Hackman Charles Hulin Richard Klimoski Gary Latham James Naylor  Louis Pondy  Frank Schmidt William Scott James Terborg Karl Weick Gary Yukl

______________________________________________________________________
Note: These people attended at least one of the first two meetings in 1976 and 1977.



The meetings continued on in subsequent years, as new members came and old members went. Nevertheless, the Society maintained its 50-member size. As Naylor recalled, “you really didn’t get invited unless someone in the organization strongly promoted you.” Although Naylor’s recollections emphasized selectivity, Pritchard and Ilgen noted that the major thrust was that you couldn’t have a good discussion of new ideas if the group was too big. They also observed that 50 represented a far greater proportion of the active scholars in the field than it would today. Regardless, S.O.B. members generally regarded it as an honor to be included in this communication network, which served an important information-sharing function in the pre-SIOP period of I-O psychology.

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Jesse Erdheim, for assisting me in the early stages of this project. I am very grateful to Jim Naylor who shared all of his early S.O.B. files with me and graciously consented to an interview in 2002. I am also grateful to the following people who, in October and November of 2003, shared their recollections of the early meetings: Rich Arvey, Alan Bass, Milton Blood, Don Davis, Paul Goodman, Richard Hackman, and Ed Locke. Finally, many thanks to Milt Hakel, Dan Ilgen, and Bob Pritchard for commenting on an earlier draft of this essay.

References

     Benjamin, L. T. (1977, July). The psychological round table: Revolution of 1936. American Psychologist, 542–549.
     Kavanagh, M. (1978, February). Second annual S.O.B. meetings. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 15(2), 10.
     Naylor, J. C. (1977, October). Some recollections on the formation of the Society of Organizational Behavior. Unpublished manuscript. Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH.

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