The Enterprise of Work

Using narrative case studies drawn from Star Trek to illustrate core concepts, The Enterprise of Work offers an engaging and innovative textbook that demonstrates how psychology can be applied to the workplace. For over six decades, Star Trek has offered one of the most enduring cultural explorations of leadership, teamwork, ethics, and institutional design. The franchise presents organizations as systems structured around purpose, cooperation, and collective responsibility, making it an ideal analytical framework for understanding Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behaviour. Each chapter is built around a fully developed narrative case that requires students to diagnose workplace problems, apply theory to ambiguous situations, and justify decisions using evidence. It allows students to engage with recurring characters, roles, and organizational structures across multiple scenarios, and treats concepts as embedded within evolving organizational contexts to show how leadership decisions, team dynamics, and psychological processes unfold over time. Engaging and pedagogically rich, this is the ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate-level Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behaviour courses.