Challenges and Opportunities

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Challenges and Opportunities

Published by: Zaya

Published date: 22 Jun 2021

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Challenges and Opportunities for OB

Critical Behavioural Issues Confronting the Managers (Challenges and Opportunities for OB):

Challenges and opportunities are two sides of the same coin. The business world is facing a lot of challenges and opportunities in organizational behavior. The world is always dynamic so managers always get the challenges and opportunities for organizational behavior and those who can balance both sides of this disequilibrium, then the company will be boosted.

The world has changed a lot in the past few decades. Today's managers are facing several behavioral issues and challenges in their organizations. Some important changes in workplaces recently seen are fast-changing employee expectations; declining loyalty towards working organizations; an increasing number of women, old aged employees, and minorities among others.

In short, there are a lot of challenges and opportunities today for managers to use OB concepts. In this section, we review some of the more critical issues confronting managers for which OB offers solutions or at least some meaningful insights toward solutions.

Challenges:

  1. Globalization
  2. Workforce diversity(heterogeneity)
  3. Quality and productivity
  4. Improving people skills
  5. Empowerment of employees
  6. Managerial organization change
  7. Improving Ethical behavior

a. Globalization:

Globalization is defined as the immense process of interaction and integration of organizational influence at the international level. This is the age of globalization. It occurs when the organization extends its activities to other parts of the world, actively participates in other markets, and competes against organizations located in other countries.

Challenges

Managing a global company possesses many different challenges and opportunities. For our purposes, a very important consideration is hon behavioral processes differ widely across cultural and national boundaries

They are:
• Values, symbols, and beliefs differ sharply among cultures,
• Different work norms and the role work plays in a person's life influence patterns of both work-related behavior and attitudes toward work,
• They also affect the nature of supervisory relationships, decision-making, styles and processes, and organizational configurations/employers,
• Group and intergroup processes, responses to stress, and the nature of political behaviors also differ from culture to culture, etc.

The challenges in front of managers are:

  • How to manage growing dissatisfaction?
    How to design motivational packages?
    How to learn and develop managerial abilities?
    How to deal with cross-cultural differences?

and Opportunities

  • Globalization has also opened new avenues (ways) of opportunities if managed properly.
  • Some of them are expanded market and revenue, opportunity to learn new things, better care opportunities for employees among others. Therefore, managers need to improve their practices to face the challenges before them

b. Workforce Diversity (Heterogeneity)

The second important challenge today is the management of diversity. The term diversity refers to differences among people. Diversity may be reflected along numerous dimensions, but most managers tend to focus on age, gender ethnicity, and physical abilities, and disabilities.

Diversity trends in organizations are:

  • The average ages of workers in many countries are gradually increasing because of declining birth rates and people are living and working longer.
  •  An increasing number of women workers, foreigners, migrants, refugee black employees, disabled retirees, and so on.

Opportunities and Challenges

The challenge for organizations is to make them accommodating to diverse groups of people at work by addressing their different lifestyle cultural factors, family needs, and work styles. Managing people through the melting pot assumption was a fact till the other day.

Now, it is being replaced by one that recognizes the value differences among workers in organizations. If diversity is managed properly, it can increase creativity and innovation. On the contrary, diversity, if not managed properly, can result in higher turnover, increased inter-personal conflict, and ineffective communication 

There are two categories: primary and secondary categories.

PRIMARY CATEGORIES

  • Age
  • Race
  • Ethnicity
  • Gender
  • Physical abilities and qualities
  • Sexual and affectional orientation

SECONDARY CATEGORIES

  • Education
  • Income
  • Work experience
  • Marital status
  • Religious beliefs
  • Geographic location
  • Parental status
  • Behavioral style
  • Other

c. Quality and Productivity

Another competitive challenge that has attracted much attention is quality and productivity. Quality is an important issue for several reasons. They are:

  • First, more and more organizations are using quality as a basis for competition.
  • Second, increasing quality tends to increase productivity because making higher quality products generally result in less waste and rework.
  • Third, enhancing quality lowers costs.

The ever-increasing concern for quality products and services has given birth to today's buzzword "Total Quality Management - TQM'. Similarly, the delivery of quality services in the ever-exploding service sector has become very critical. The challenge for managers across the world is, therefore, to have human resources to deliver quality products and services to the customers and clients.

Globalization has increased the degree of concern towards quality and productivity because it has given birth to tough competition. The implications for organizational behavior are obvious: The more closely people work together, the more important it is to understand behavioral processes and concepts. Motivating employees to get involved in quality improvement efforts, increasing the level of participation throughout the organization, and rewarding people based on a contribution to quality are common suggestions and all rely on human behavior.

d. Improving People Skills (Skill Deficiencies)

Previously, the world economy was based on agriculture and then moved towards Industry based. Today, most of the developed countries economy is based on knowledge and service sectors. This trend has brought back managerial ranks, decentralized decision-making, inferences responsibility to the employees, participation, teamwork, increased automation, and so on Increased competition and quality awareness have demanded high levels of skills and knowledge. Employers must train and re-educate their less-skilled employees. Moreover, managers must become more responsive to the needs of their skilled employees to keep them from going to work for a competitor.

e. Empowerment of Employees

Previously, people worked under the tight control of their bosses, supervisors, or managers. Today, managers are bound to work as coaches, advisors, facilitators, or as team leaders to compete in the marketplace and satisfy employee demands. The following Chinese proverb illustrates the importance of empowerment.

"Give a person a fish, and you feed that person for a day; teach a person to fish, and you feed that person for life."

In many organizations, employees have become associates or teammates. And there is a blushing (fusion) between the role of managers and workers. Decision-making is being pushed down to the operating level, where workers are given the freedom to make choices about schedules, procedures, and solving work-related problems. 

The trend is towards the use of self-managed work teams, quality circles, job enrichment, self-appraisal, MBO, etc. What's going on is that managers are empowering employees. They are putting employees in charge of what they do. And doing so, managers have to learn how to give up control and employees have to learn how to take responsibility for their work and make appropriate decisions

f. Managing Organizational Change

It has been said that nothing is certain in the world except the change managers must be prepared to introduce organizational change - a compulsion, not a choice. This has always been a concern, but the rapid, constant environmental change faced by businesses today has made change management even more critical.

Organizations have adopted many different programs like the reorganization of departments, disposal of poor-performing units, downsizing, employee outsourcing, and the like.

Managers and employees must prepare themselves to be flexible enough to cope with the change. The study of OB can provide important insights into helping you better understand a work-world of continual change, how to overcome resistance to change, how best to create an organizational culture that thrives on change

g. Improving Ethical Behaviour

Another important challenge facing managers in the workplace is ethics. It is the individual's personal beliefs regarding what is right and wrong or good and bad. Members of organizations are increasingly finding themselves facing ethical dilemmas (contradiction), situations in which they are required to define right and wrong conduct. What is ethical in one organization, time or place may not be so in another organization, time, or place.

What constitutes good ethical behavior has never been clearly defined. To solve this problem, managers are writing and distributing codes of ethics to guide employees through ethical confusions. They are offering seminars, workshops, and similar training programs to try to improve ethical behaviors.