Thepurpose of this empirical essay is to be provocative. This paper is empirical in that it surveys leading
organizational hehavior (GB) scholars to identify which topics they believed are currently important
in the field and which should be important in an ‘ideal’ world and we compared their responses to
an archival analysis of papers published in leading GB journals over a 10 year period. However, the
paper is an essay because it is less like a traditional theory-building or theory-testing study, and more
like an empirically grounded opinion piece. We use the empirical evidence as a springboard to raise
questions about the boundaries andtrajectory of research in GB, andto highlight areas of the field that
may deserve more attention in the future. We explore three potential definitions of organizational behavior,
and we argue that the empirical results suggest some provocative, but useful, answers to the question:
‘What should organizational behavior be?’