Forces Reshaping the Process of Management

Forces Reshaping the Process of Management

An understanding of organizational behavior is important to managers, who have the responsibility of

improving organizational effectiveness, the ability of an organization to achieve goals. A goal is a desired

future outcome that an organization seeks to achieve.

In the last 10 years, the challenges facing managers in effectively utilizing human resources and managing

organizational behavior have increased. These challenges stem from changing forces in the technological,

global, and social or cultural environments.

Organizations can obtain a competitive advantage, a way of outperforming other organizations providing

similar goods and services. They can pursue any or all of the following goals: increase efficiency, increase

quality; increase innovation and creativity; and increase responsiveness to customers.

Organizational efficiency is increased by reducing the amount of resources, such as people or raw materials,

needed to produce a quantity of goods or services. Organizations try to find better ways to utilize and increase

the skills and abilities of their workforce. Cross training workers to perform different tasks and finding new

ways of organizing workers to use their skills more efficiently improve efficiency. The global competitive

challenge facing organizations is to invest in the skills of the workers because better-trained workers make

better use of technology. Increased competition has also put pressure on companies to increase the quality of

the goods and services they provide. One approach to increasing quality is called Total Quality Management

(TQM), a technique borrowed from the Japanese. TQM involves a whole new philosophy of managing behavior

in organizations and includes elements like giving workers the responsibility for finding ways to do their

jobs more efficiently and ways to improve quality.

An organization’s ethics are rules, beliefs, and values that outline ways in which managers and workers should
behave when confronted with a situation that may help or harm other people inside or outside an organization.
Ethical behavior enhances the well-being (the happiness, health, and prosperity) of individuals, groups,
organizations, and the organizational environment. Ethics establish the goals and behaviors appropriate to the
organization. Many organizations have the goal of making a profit, to be able to pay workers, suppliers, and
shareholders. Ethics specifies what actions an organization should take to make a profit and what limits should
be put on organizations and their managers to prevent harm.
The challenge of managing a diverse workforce increases as organizations expand their operations
internationally. There are several issues that arise in the international arena. First, managers must understand
cultural differences to interact with workers and associates in foreign countries. Understanding the differences
between national cultures is important in any attempt to manage behavior in global organizations to increase
performance.
Second, the management functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling become more complex in
a global environment. Planning requires coordination between managers in the home country and those
abroad. Organizing, the allocation of decision-making authority and responsibility between headquarters and
the foreign country is a significant function of global managers. Leading requires managers to tailor their
leadership styles to suit differences in the attitudes and values of foreign workers. Controlling involves
establishing the evaluation, reward, and promotion policies of the organization and training and developing a
globally diverse workforce.