Causal Models in Organizational Behavior Research: From Path Analysis to LISREL and Beyond

Researchers in the field of organizational behavior (OB) have shown a long-standing interest in testing causal hypotheses with correlational data. In the early 1970s, a practice was established of representing these hypotheses graphically and referring to the figure as a "causal model," because paths represented in the figure were presumed to represent influences between variables that were consistent with causal effects.