Challenges and Opportunities for OB

A. Introduction Notes:

1. There are many challenges and opportunities today for

managers to use OB concepts.

B. Responding to Globalization

1. Organizations are no longer constrained by national

borders.
2. Globalization affects a manager’s people skills in at
least two ways.
 First, if you are a manager, you are increasingly likely
to find yourself in a foreign assignment.
 Second, even in your own country, you are going to
find yourself working with bosses, peers, and other
employees who were born and raised in different
cultures.

C. Managing Workforce Diversity

1. Workforce diversity is one of the most important and

broad-based challenges currently facing organizations.
2. While globalization focuses on differences between
people from different countries, workforce diversity
addresses differences among people within given
countries.
3. Workforce diversity means that organizations are
becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender, race,
and ethnicity. It is an issue in Canada, Australia, South
Africa, Japan, and Europe as well as the United States.
4. A melting-pot approach assumed people who were
different would automatically assimilate.
5. Employees do n ot set aside their cultural values and
lifestyle preferences when they come to work.
 Notes:
C. Managing Workforce Diversity (cont.)

6. The melting pot assumption is replaced by one that

recognizes and values differences.
7. Members of diverse groups were a small percentage of
the workforce and were, for the most part, ignored by
large organizations (pe-1980s); now:
 47 percent of the U.S. labor force are women
 Minorities and immigrants make up 23 percent
 More workers than ever are unmarried with no
children.
8. Workforce diversity has important implications for
management practice.
 Shift to recognizing differences and responding to
those differences
 Providing diversity training and revamping benefit
programs to accommodate the different needs of
employees

D. Improving Quality and Productivity Notes:

1. Total quality management (TQM) is a philosophy of

management that is driven by the constant attainment of
customer satisfaction through the continuous
improvement of all organizational processes.
2. Implementing quality programs requires extensive
employee involvement (Exhibit 1-4).
3. Process reengineering asks the question: “How would
we do things around here if we were starting over from
scratch?”
 Every process is evaluated in terms of contribution to
goals
 Rather than make incremental changes, often old
systems are eliminated entirely and replaced with
new systems
4. To improve productivity and quality, managers must
include employees.

E. Responding to the Labor Shortage

1. If trends continue as expected, the U.S. will have a labor

shortage for the next 10-15 years (particularly in skilled
positions).
2. The labor shortage is a function of low birth rates and
labor participation rates (immigration does little to solve
the problem).
3. Wages and benefits are not enough to keep talented
workers. Managers must understand human behavior
and respond accordingly.

F. Improving Customer Service and People Skills

1. The majority of employees in developed countries work

in service jobs—jobs that require substantive interaction
with the firm’s customers. For example, 80 percent of
U.S. workers are employed in service industries.
2. Employee attitudes and behavior are directly related to
customer satisfaction requiring management to create a
customer responsive culture.
3. People skills are essential to managerial effectiveness.
4. OB provides the concepts and theories that allow
managers to predict employee behavior in given
situations.
G. Empowering People

1. Today managers are being called coaches, advisers,

sponsors, or facilitators, and in many organizations,
employees are now called associates.
2. There is a blurring between the roles of managers and
workers; decision making is being pushed down to the
operating level, where workers are being given the
freedom to make choices about schedules and
procedures and to solve work-related problems.

3. Managers are empowering employees.

 They are putting employees in charge of what they
do.
 Managers have to learn how to give up control.
 Employees have to learn how to take responsibility
for their work and make appropriate decisions.

H. Coping with “Temporariness”

1. Managers have always been concerned with change:

 What is different today is the length of time
between changes
 Change is an ongoing activity for most managers.
The concept of continuous improvement, for
instance, implies constant change
 In the past, managing could be characterized by
long periods of stability, interrupted occasionally by
short periods of change.
 Today, long periods of ongoing change are
interrupted occasionally by short periods of stability!
2. Permanent “temporariness”:
 Both managers and employees must learn to live
with flexibility, spontaneity, and unpredictability
 The 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.
3. Work groups are also increasingly in a state of flux.
 Predictability has been replaced by temporary
work groups, teams that include members from
different departments and whose members change
all the time, and the increased use of employee
rotation to fill constantly changing work assignments.
4. Organizations themselves are in a state of flux.
 They reorganize their various divisions, sell off
poor-performing businesses, downsize operations,
subcontract non-critical services and operations to
other organizations, and replace permanent
employees with temporaries.

I. Stimulating Innovation and Change

1. Successful organizations must foster innovation and the

art of change.
2. Companies that maintain flexibility, continually improve
quality, and beat their competition to the marketplace
with innovative products and services will be tomorrow’s
winners.
3. Employees are critical to an organization’s ability to
change and innovate.
J. Helping Employees Balance Work-Life Conflicts N
o
t
e
s
:
1. The creation of the global workforce means work no longer sleeps. Workers
are on-call 24-hours a day or working non-traditional shifts.
2. Communication technology has provided a vehicle for working at any time or
any place.
3. Employees are working longer hours per week—from 43 to 47 hours per
week since 1977.
4. The lifestyles of families have changes creating conflict: more dual career
couples and single parents find it hard to fulfill commitments to home,
children, spouse, parents, and friends.
5. Employees want jobs that allow flexibility and provide time for a “life.”