Organizational behavior : science or scientism?

The belief that OB is more than a set of applied techniques and claims to it being a science rest primarily on the validity of the explanatory mechanisms used to explain how personal and situational factors influence outcomes of interest in organizations, such as job performance and citizenship. Within OB, explanatory mechanisms are typically referred to as mediators and are tested using mediation analysis. A review of mediation analyses over the past 25 years revealed the state of knowledge does not support claims to scientific status by OB. We argue that if OB is to achieve the scientific goal of understanding it needs to improve the validity of inferences about its explanatory mechanisms. We provide recommendations for achieving this aim.