Genetics and Organizational Behavior

Abstract

Articles on the genetics of complex human behaviors and psychological traits provided in past volumes of journals published by Annual Reviews tended to adopt a pathological perspective and focused heavily on the disorders of human affect and behaviors. In our review, we expand our focus to the more general, nonclinical population, and in particular on the advances in the understanding of the genetics of attitudes and behaviors in work settings. We review the recent and emerging literature using a behavioral genetics approach to examine the influence of genetics on a wide array of important constructs in organizational behavior (OB) research and provide unique theoretical insights offered by this approach. We discuss practical implications and future research directions from a broad person-environment interactionist perspective by taking a genetics approach.