Challenges and Opportunities of Organizational Behavior

The following are some of the significant problems:

• Improving People Skills
• Improving Quality and Productivity
• Managing Workforce Diversity
• Responding to Globalization
• Empowering People
• Coping with Temporariness
• Stimulating Innovation and Change
• Emergence of the e-organization
• Improving Ethical Behavior

Improving People Skills:

Technological changes, structural changes, environmental changes are accelerated at a faster rate in business field. Unless employees and executives are equipped to possess the required skills to adapt those changes, the achievement of the targeted goals cannot be achieved in time. There two different categories of skills – managerial skills and technical skills. Some of the managerial skills include listening skills, motivating skills, planning and organizing skills, leading skills, problem solving skill, decision making skills etc.

These skills can be enhanced by organizing a series of training and development programmes, career development programmes, induction and socialization etc.

Implications for Managers: Designing an effective performance appraisal system with built-in training facilities will help upgrade the skills of the employees to cope up the demands of the external environment. The lower level cadre in management is required to possess more of technical skills. As they move towards upward direction, their roles will be remarkably changed and expected to have more of human relations and conceptual skills.

Improving Quality and Productivity:

Quality is the extent to which the customers or users believe the product or service surpasses their needs and expectations. For example, a customer who purchases an automobile has certain expectation, one of which is that the automobile engine will start when it is turned on. If the engine fails to start, the customer’s expectations will not have been met and the customer will perceive the quality of the car as poor. Deming defined quality as a predictable degree of uniformity and dependability, at low cost and suited to the market. Juran defined it as fitness for use. The key dimensions of quality as follows.

• Performance: Primary operating characteristics of a product such as signal coverage, audio quality, display quality etc.
• Features: Secondary characteristics, added features, such as calculators, and alarm clock features in hand phone
• Conformance: Meeting specifications or industry standards, workmanship of the degree to which a product’s design or operating characteristics match preestablished standards
• Reliability: The probability of a product’s failing within t a specified period of time
• Durability: It is a measure of product’s life having both economic and technical dimension
• Services: Resolution of problem and complaints, ease of repair
• Response: Human to human interface, such as the courtesy of the dealer
• Aesthetics: Sensory characteristics such exterior finish
• Reputations: Past performance and other intangibles, such as being ranked first.

More and more managers are confronting to meet the challenges to fulfill the specific requirements of customers. In order to improve quality and productivity, they are implementing programs like total quality management and reengineering programs that require extensive employee involvement.

Total Quality Management (TQM): It is a philosophy of management that is driven by the constant attainment of customer satisfaction through the continuous improvement of all organizational process. The component of TQM are (a) intense focus of the customer

(b) concern for continual improvement (c) improvement in the quality of everything the organization does (d) accurate measurement and (e) empowerment of employees.

Reengineering: This refers to discrete initiatives that are intended to achieve radically redesigned and improved work process in a bounded time frame. Business Process Reengineering employees a structural methodology that reduces work process to their essential composite activist and provides cost performance matrices to facilitate a business case for dramatic improvements. Both functional and cross-functional processes are evaluated through workflow analysis and activity based costing. In many cases, the application of new technology and industries best practices will enable quantum improvement in an organization’s cost and performance.

Implications for Managers: Today’s managers understand that any efforts to improve quality and productivity must influence their employees. These employees will not only be a major force in carrying out changes, but increasingly will participate actively in planning those changes. Managers will put maximum effort in meeting the customer’s requirements by involving everyone from all the levels and across all functions. Regular communications (both formally and informally) with all the staff at all levels is must.

Two way communications at all levels must be promoted. Identifying training needs and relating them with individual capabilities and requirements is must. Top management’s participation and commitment and a culture of continuous improvement must be established.

Managing Workforce Diversity:

This refers to employing different categories of employees who are heterogeneous in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, relation, community, physically disadvantaged, homosexuals, elderly people etc. The primary reason to employ heterogeneous category of employees is to tap the talents and potentialities, harnessing the innovativeness, obtaining synergetic effect among the divorce workforce. In general, employees wanted to retain their individual and cultural identity, values and life styles even though they are working in the same organization with common rules and regulations. The major challenge for organizations is to become more accommodating to diverse groups of people by addressing their different life styles, family needs and work styles.

Implications for Managers: Managers have to shift their philosophy from treating everyone alike to recognizing individual differences and responding to those differences in ways that will ensure employee retention and greater productivity while, at the same time not discriminating. If work force diversity is managed more effectively, the management is likely to acquire more benefits such as creativity and innovation as well as improving decision making skills by providing different perspectives on problems. If diversity is not managed properly and showed biases to favor only a few categories of employees, there is potential for higher turnover, more difficulty in communicating and more interpersonal conflicts.

Responding to Globalization:

Today’s business is mostly market driven; wherever the demands exist irrespective of distance, locations, climatic conditions, the business operations are expanded to gain their market share and to remain in the top rank etc. Business operations are no longer restricted to a particular locality or region. Company’s products or services are spreading across the nations using mass communication, internet, faster transportation etc. An Australian wine producer now sells more wine through the Internet than through outlets across the country. More than 95% of Nokia hand phones are being sold outside of their home country Finland. Japanese cars are being sold in different parts of globe. Sri Lankan tea is exported to many cities across the globe. Executives of Multinational Corporation are very mobile and move from one subsidiary to another more frequently.

Implications for Managers: Globalization affects a managerial skills in at least two ways: i) an Expatriate manager have to manage a workforce that is likely to have very different needs, aspirations and attitudes from the ones that they are used to manage in their home countries. ii) Understanding the culture of local people and how it has shaped them and accordingly learn to adapt ones management style to these differences is very critical for the success of business operations. One of the main personality traits required for expatriate managers is to have sensitivity to understand the individual differences among people and exhibit tolerance to it.

Empowering People

The main issue is delegating more power and responsibility to the lower level cadre of employees and assigning more freedom to make choices about their schedules, operations, procedures and the method of solving their work-related problems. Encouraging the employees to participate in work related decision will sizably enhance their commitment at work. Empowerment is defined as putting employees in charge of what they do by eliciting some sort of ownership in them. Managers are doing considerably further by allowing employees full control of their work. An increasing number of organizations are using self-managed teams, where workers operate largely without boss. Due to the implementation of empowerment concepts across all the levels, the relationship between managers and the employees is reshaped. Managers will act as coaches, advisors, sponsors, facilitators and help their subordinates to do their task with minimal guidance.

Implications for Manager: The executive must learn to delegate their tasks to the subordinates and make them more responsible in their work. And in so doing, managers have to learn how to give up control and employees have to learn how to take responsibility for their work and make appropriate decision. If all the employees are empowered, it drastically changes the type of leadership styles, power relationships, the way work is designed and the way organizations are structured.

Coping with ‘Temporariness”

In recent times, the Product life cycles are slimming, the methods of operations are improving, and fashions are changing very fast. In those days, the managers needed to introduce major change programs once or twice a decade. Today, change is an ongoing activity for most managers. The concept of continuous improvement implies constant change. In yester years, there used to be a long period of stability and occasionally interrupted by short period of change, but at present the change process is an ongoing activity due to competitiveness in developing new products and services with better features. Everyone in the organization faces today is one of permanent temporariness. The actual jobs that workers perform are in a permanent state of flux. So, workers need to continually update their knowledge and skills to perform new job requirements.

Implications for Manager: Managers and employees must learn to cope with temporariness. They have to learn to live with flexibility, spontaneity, and unpredictability. The knowledge of Organizational Behavior will help understand better the current state of a work world of continual change, the methods of overcoming resistance to change process, the ways of creating a better organizational culture that facilitates change process etc.

Stimulating Innovation and Change

Today’s successful organizations must foster innovation and be proficient in the art of change; otherwise they will become candidates for extinction in due course of time and vanished from their field of business. Victory will go to those organizations that maintain flexibility, continually improve their quality, and beat the competition to the market place with a constant stream of innovative products and services. For example, Compaq succeeded by creating more powerful personal computers for the same or less money than IBNM or Apple, and by putting their products to market quicker than the bigger competitors. Amazon.com is putting a lot of independent bookstores out of business as it proves you can successfully sell books from an Internet website.

Implications for Managers: Some of the basic functions of business are being displaced due to the advent of a new systems and procedures. For example – books are being sold only through internet. Internet selling an organization’s employees can be the impetus for innovation and change; otherwise they can be a major hindrance. The challenge for managers is to stimulate employee creativity and tolerance for change.

Emergence of E-Organization

E- Commerce: It refers to the business operations involving electronic mode of transactions. It encompasses presenting products on websites and filling order. The vast majority of articles and media attention given to using the Internet in business are directed at on-line shopping. In this process, the marketing and selling of goods and services are being carried out over the Internet. In e-commerce, the following activities are being taken place quite often - the tremendous numbers of people who are shopping on the Internet, business houses are setting up websites where they can sell goods, conducting the following transactions such as getting paid and fulfilling orders. It is a dramatic change in the way a company relates to its customers. At present e-commerce is exploding. Globally, e-commerce spending was increasing at a tremendous rate from US$ 111 billion in 1999 to US$ 1.3 trillion by 2003.

E-business: It refers to the full breadth of activities included in a successful Internet based enterprise. As such, e-commerce is a subset of e-business. E-business includes developing strategies for running Internet-based companies, creating integrated supply chains, collaborating with partners to electronically coordinate design and production, identifying a different kind of leader to run a ‘virtual’ business, finding skilled people to build and operate intranets and websites, and running the back room or the administrative side. E-business includes the creation of new markets and customers, but it’s also concerned with the optimum ways to combine Computers, the Web and Application Software. A sizable number of multinational corporations are selling goods and services via the Internet.

Growth rate of e-business: The application of Internet operations are initially covers a small part of the business. At this point, their e-commerce operations are secondary to their traditional business. An increasingly popular application of e-business is merely using the Internet to better manage an ongoing business. Later, there are millions of firms that are now selling anything over the Internet, but they are using e-business applications to improve communications with internal and external stakeholders and to better perform traditional business functions. Some companies are putting maximum effort in improving its internal efficiency and providing support to its wide-reaching dealer network and to on-line sellers by crating a shared and integrated network. The companies wanted to make creasing

E-Organizations: This embraces e-commerce and e-business. State and central governments, municipal corporations are using the Internet for extending all the public utility services more efficiently through internet.

Implications for Managers: The employees must acquire skills, knowledge, attitudes in learning new technology, overcoming any resistance

Improving Ethical behavior:

The complexity in business operations is forcing the workforce to face ethical dilemmas, where they are required to define right and wrong conduct in order to complete their assigned activities. For example, Should the employees of chemical company blow the whistle if they uncover the discharging its untreated effluents into the river are polluting its water resources? Do managers give an inflated performance evaluation to an employee they like, knowing that such an evaluation could save that employee’s job? The ground rules governing the constituents of good ethical behavior has not been clearly defined. Differentiating right things from wrong behavior has become more blurred. Following unethical practices have become a common practice such as successful executives who use insider information for personal financial gain, employees in competitor business participating in massive cover-ups of defective products etc.

Implications for Managers: Managers must evolve code of ethics to guide employees through ethical dilemmas. Organizing seminars, workshops, training programs will help improve ethical behavior of employees. Retaining consultants, lawyers, voluntary service organizations to assist the company in dealing with ethical issues will ensure positive ethical behavior. Managers need to create an ethically healthy climate for his employees where they can do their work productively and confront a minimal degree of ambiguity regarding what constitutes right and wrong behavior.