Organizational Behaviour Research in Rural Producers’ Cooperatives

Cooperatives are important organizational forms helping millions of people, particularly in rural areas, to improve their socio-economic conditions. They are also unique in that they are member-centric business organizations with democratic control, where the shareholders are also users of their services. In this article, first, I discuss the importance of cooperatives as organizational forms, particularly the rural producers’ cooperatives (RPCs); second, analyze the research trends within the organizational behaviour (OB) area in the last one-and-half decade on RPCs; third, chart out directions for future research. The analysis suggests that cooperatives as organizational forms throw up special challenges to the OB researchers, as they are special types of organizations that incorporate business-like features of the investor-owned firms as well as the voluntary nature of nonprofits, thereby increasing the complexity of the context to make it an interesting area of research. For future research, OB researchers will have to go beyond the employee-centric research to include cooperative members as important constituent of the organization, specifically focussing on trust, commitment, organizational citizenship behaviour and leadership behaviour. The article identifies certain roadblocks in getting the attention of the researchers in the OB area and suggests certain ways to overcome these roadblocks.