This concentration, known by the acronym OBIR, is designed to provide Ph.D. students with an interdisciplinary, research-oriented program focused on understanding formal organizations and industrial relations. Most students eventually specialize in one area or the other, although the study of organizational behavior benefits from an understanding of collective bargaining and labor markets, and issues in labor-management relations and labor economics are better understood using theories and methods from the organizational behavior literature.

Within organizational behavior, faculty research interests span a considerable breadth. Topics of current faculty research include organizational communication, job satisfaction, and job design; organizational design and development; organizational cultures; organizational adaptation to external forces; organizational ecology, change, growth, and decline; negotiations and conflict resolution; power and influence processes; groups and teams; administrative intensity, technology, and strategy; and methods for analyzing interaction structures in organizations. The faculty are trained and active in the related disciplines of economics, sociology, and psychology as well as management.

Students in OBIR are expected to take the Ph.D. course sequence PHDBA 259A-D. Subjects rotate between micro-organizational behavior, and macro-organizational behavior. In addition to achieving competence in an outside discipline by completing at least a two-course sequence, students are encouraged to take courses in education, public policy, political science, sociology, psychology, and public health.