Organizational Behavior at Colleges and Student Outcomes: A New Perspective on College Impact

Studies investigating organizational behavior as a source of influence on student outcomes rarely consider individual students as the unit of analysis or as the appropriate source of data collection. Instead, these studies tend to concentrate on changes in student outcomes at the institutional level through the use of aggregated student scores. This problem has been compounded in many studies of organizational effectiveness by the use of administrator and faculty perceptions of student outcomes rather than the use of actual measures of student perceptions and behavior. As a result, we have some knowledge about how organizational behavior affects students as a group at particular institutions, but we have limited understanding about how organizational behavior at a college affects different students within the same organizational environment