Principles and Practices of Management and Organizational Behaviour

This book is entertaining if nothing else. It is difficult to decide which is more comical: the fact that it obviously wasn't reviewed by an editor before going to print, or the shameless attempts to make it an Indian textbook by inserting Indian historical figures and examples that are irrelevant to the subject matter.This text is painful to read if bad writing makes you cringe. A native English speaker with a university education and a box of red pens could spend hours going through these pages and correcting the grammatical errors.More puzzling than cringeworthy is the authors' effort to give the history of management science an Indian spin. Take Chapter 2 as an example. The chapter begins with an anecdote about Chandragupta Maurya, an ancient ruler, and his minister, Kautiltya, who the authors suggest was the inspiration for Peter Drucker, the late Austrian-American management guru. Later in the chapter, the authors cite the Indian-born C.K. Pralahad. Dr. Pralahad's writings on the "bottom of the pyramid" are widely read and respected, but bear little relation to the work of F.W. Taylor, Henry Gantt, Max Weber, and other management scholars whose contributions are described in the preceding pages. It is impossible to know the authors' motivations here. Perhaps it's pure nationalism, or maybe this what one must do to sell textbooks in Bengalore. To the authors' credit, they do not overlook the significant work of Western researchers and theorists; to do so would be revisionist. My guess is that they're simply proud scholars from a still-developing country that came late to the Industrial Revolution and they're merely flying the flag with creative writing. (It is less ridiculous than, say, reading an Iraqi history book about Saddam Hussein's victory in the First Gulf War or, fifty years from now, reading in a Mandarin-language textbook about China's early leadership in space exploration.)Curiously, the authors skip over the details in a number of places. The following passage is the only sentence in the subsection titled Criticisms in the section, Operational Approach to Management. "In this approach, there is no universal acceptance of management functions, expressions used are not usually shared, and every approach has some shortcoming or the other." Wow, that is a sharp analysis! "...some shortcoming or the other." This is the kind of empty line you write at 11:54 P.M. as you're frantically trying to finish a paper before the deadline. The book is full of these.Other than the linguistic goofs, obscure references, and vague generalizations, it's not an altogether terrible book. It gets the job done as an introductory text for university and high school students. If this book is assigned for your course, buy it and enjoy it for the quirks. If it's not assigned and you have a choice, look for a more scholarly text if it is within your budget.

Poor grammar and quality. There are many other high quality Organizational Behavior and Management texts, please pick one. Barely readable and not college level, grammar problems to the point where the message is often unclear. Avoid.