Every era laments about daunting challenges. However, even previous generations would probably agree that effectively managing today’s organizations is very difficult. Ask anyone today—management professors, practitioners, or students—what the major challenges are in today’s environment, and the answer will be fairly consistent: A turbulent economy and dangerous geopolitics preoccupy everyone’s concerns. However, at the organization level, understanding global competition and diversity, and trying to solve ethical problems and dilemmas come to the fore. These are unquestionably major issues facing contempory organizations and are given major attention in this text. However, the basic premise and assumptions of the field of organizational behavior in general, and of this text in particular, are that managing the people—the human resources of an organization—have been, are, and will continue to be, the major challenge and critical competitive advantage.