People working individually and together are what should come to mind when looking at the beautiful hands on the cover and throughout this book. They are not just artistic expressions; they symbolize a basic fact of organizations and careers-people do the work of our society and its organizations. The lesson for students of organizational behavior is an important one: in your hands anything and everything is possible. Our job, as educators, is to bring to them the great power of knowledge, understanding, and inquiry that characterizes our discipline and its commitment to understanding human behavior in organizations.

Organizational Behavior, Ninth Edition, deals with the opportunities and challenges faced by those who must help themselves and their organizations meet the demanding tests of new and sometimes very difficult times. While retaining an emphasis on the fundamentals of organizational behavior, the theme for the new edition is one of personal and organizational tranformation. It recognizes that today's students must build career success in an ever-changing environment and that they must do so while achieving a positive balance between work and personal lives and goals. We all live, work, and learn in a society that excepts high performance and high quality of work of life to go hand in hand, that consoders ethics and social responsibility paramount measures of individual and organizational performance, that respects the talents of workforces increasingly rich in demographic and cultural diversity, and that knows the imprint of globalization.