Emerging Trends and Challenges

Emerging Trends and Challenges are just opposite in a way that company have to go through challenges accepting emerging trends. Emerging trends means the advanced and essential approach to build the mutual understanding and perfect workplace for employee. Challenges are those problems which comes through the process of running business.

Emerging trends:

It means the recent trends occurring in business world as they have come from good to the best optimized changes in the system.

From	To
Closed system	Open system
Materialistic orientation	Human orientation
Extrinsic motivation	Intrinsic motivation
Negative attitude	Positive attitude about people
Focus on organizational needs	Balanced focus on employee and organizational needs
Imposed discipline	Self-discipline
Authoritative managerial	Managerial role of leadership and team support

and 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

1. Globalization

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 in a global company has got many different challenges and opportunities. For our purposes, a very important consideration is how behavioral processes differ widely through cultural and national boundaries.

They are:

•  Values, symbols, and belief differ sharply among cultures,
•  Different work norms and the role work plays in a persons life patterns of both work related behavior and attitudes toward work
•  Group and inter-group processes, responses to stress and the nature of political behaviors also differ from culture to culture,

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?

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 cared opportunities for employees among others. Therefore, managers need to improve their practices to face the challenges before them.

2. 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:

• Average ages of workers in many countries are gradually increasing because of declining birth rate and people are living and working longer.
• Increasing number of women workers, foreigners, migrants, refugee black employees, disables retirees and so on.

Opportunities and Challenges

The challenge for organization is to make them accommodating to divers groups of people at work place by addressing their different lifestyle cultural factors, family needs, and work styles. Managing people through 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 innovations. On the contrary, diversity, if not managed properly, car
result in higher turnover, increased inter-personal conflict, and ineffective communication.

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

3. 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 results 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 organization, and rewarding people on the basis of contribution to quality are common suggestions and all rely on human behavior.

4. Improving People Skills (Skill Deficiencies)

Previously, 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 sector. This trend has brought out back managerial ranks, decentralized decision-making, increased responsibility to the employees, participation, team work, increased automation and so on.

Increased competition and quality awareness have demanded high level of soils 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.

5. Empowerment of Employees

Previously, people worked under tight control of their bosses, supervisors, or managers. Today, managers are bound to work as coaches, advisors, facilitators or as team leaders so as to compete in the market place 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 team-mates. 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.

6. Managing Organization 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 reorganization of departments, disposal of poor performing units, downsizing, employee outsourcing and the like. Managers and employees must prepare themselves 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

7. Improving Ethical Behavior

Another important challenge facing managers in 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.

Emerging Trends in OB:

Don’t treat others on you would want to be treated-treat them as they want to be treated.

The new workplaces have managers, not bosses, who use feedback and support, not commands or wage reductions, as a way to achieve ends. By most estimates, OB emerged as a distant field around the 1940s However, its origin can be traced/drawn much further back in time.

OB has been around for a long time; it just wasn’t organized into a unified discipline until World War II. During the passage of time, over the years, managers have adopted different practices (models of OB) to manage the behavior of people in organizations. Models are frameworks for possible explanations why people do as they do at work. All the models of organizational behavior are broadly.

You may also like Introduction to Organizational Behavior.

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