Reflection Essay on Organizational Behavior

The study of organizational behavior is importance in order to have a successful work performance. By most estimates, organizational emerged as a distinct field around the 1940s. However, its origins can be traced much further back in time. The Greek philosopher Plato wrote about the essence of leadership. Aristotle, another respected philosopher, addressed the topic of persuasive communication. The writings of sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli laid the foundation for contemporary work on organizational power and politics.

In 1776, Adam Smith advocated a new form of organizational structure based of the division of labor. One hundred years later, German sociologist Max Weber wrote about rational organizations and initiated discussion of charismatic leadership. Soon after, Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the systematic use of goal setting and rewards to motivate employees. In the 1920s, Elton Mayo and his colleagues conducted productivity studies at Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant. They reported that an informal organization; employees casually interacting with others; operated alongside the formal organization.

Organizational behavior has been around for a long time; it just was not organized into a unified discipline until after World War II. Organizational Behavior and New Trends It is related with interpersonal processes between people in an organization. It is not just to the manager itself, but to the whole people in that organization. Organizational behavior is the study of the many factors that have an impact on how people and groups act, think, feel and respond to work and organizations. It also an impact on how organizations respond to their environments.

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Particularly, it is important to managers, who are responsible for supervising the activities of one of more employees. This report examined how there are numerous trends that can be evaluated that impact organizational behavior. It looks at how these trends can affect the organization’s behavior as whole or at the employee level. In particular, it shows how the behavior within an organization can be affected by the following trends; globalization, workforce diversity and employment relationship. The study of Organizational Behavior (OB) is very interesting and challenging too.

Organizational Behavior means the study of what people think, feel, and do in and around the organization. It is includes systematically studying individual, team, and structural characteristics that influence behavior within organizations. It is important in an organization to ensure successful. It is interesting because the main reason for studying organizational behavior is to fulfill the need to understand, predict and influence the behavior of others in organizational setting. The study becomes more challenging when situational factors interact.

The study of organizational behavior relates to the expected behavior of an individual in the organization. There is no two individuals are likely to behave in the same manner in a particular work situation. Human factor is the contributory to the productivity hence the study of human behavior is essential. The vital individual is responsible in an organization is the manager. Manager must understand the identification of an individual, his background, social framework, educational update, impact of social groups and other situational factors on behavior.

It is the predictability of a manager about the expected behavior of an individual. The manager under whom an individual is working should be able to explain, predict, evaluate and modify human behavior that will largely depend upon knowledge, skill and experience of the manager in handling large group of people in the diverse situations. Defensive actions need to be taken for human behavior forecasting. Moreover, the value system, emotional intelligence, organizational culture, job design and the work environment are also important causal agents in determining human behavior.

Cause and effect relationship plays an important role in how an individual is likely to behave in a particular situation and its impact on productivity. Beside, understanding organizational behavior is important for everyone involved in an organization, not just the leadership and management teams. By gaining and understanding this knowledge each employee should be able to realize how their individual actions contribute to the big picture of the company. In fact, organizational behavior is for everyone. Everyone is a manager. Everyone is responsible for job own.

Indeed, as organizations reduce layers of management and delegate more responsibilities to the rest of employees, the concepts described will become increasingly important for anyone who works in and around organizations. More important, many employees are now expected to manage themselves. Incidentally, by having this delegation of job tasks, managers have superfluous time to think and generate new ideas in meeting the changing of work conditions. Nowadays, organizations have new trends which emerged in organizational behavior.

The new trends present affect in globalization, workforce diversity and employment relationship in the organizational behavior. Moreover, it is one of the challenges in effectively managing organization behavior. Ordinarily, the organization is a principle source for human interaction. In essence, organizational behavior have been highly interested in how the specific relationship created by the organization can impact the overall behavior of its employees becomes an issue of dominant concern. Organizations that are able to influence individual behavior toward the objectives of the company are able to maximize the utility of human capital.

The examining toward effectively control the behavior of the employees, it would achieve successful toward the strategic goals utilize negative paradigms that impact employee behavior. In other words, given the behavior in the organization can be motivated by a wide range of variables for organizations to drive behavior. For instance; adequate pay, benefits and incentive plans as important to employee motivation. Furthermore, these can give a positive impact on internal relationships that enable the employees to grow and develop internally on organizational behavior. Similarly, as trends grow, internal customers demand increases.

Therefore, there must attain the satisfaction level remain priority. Comparatively, external customers also play important roles in order to enhance the increasingly of trends in organizational behavior. The demanding of the new products, they need some co-production of the products, improving of customer services remain good relationship both internal and external sides, and so forth. In addition, both external and internal customers are also demanding in improving technological usage and technology worldwide. The manager should sense the precise way on how to make their required need come true.

For instance; one example superior way is look and follow a successful organization as the benchmark. The following report may explain more about this idea. Perhaps the most significant source of change impacting many organizations today is the increasing globalization of organizations and management. Of course, globalization occurs when an organization extends its activities to other parts of the world, actively participates in other markets, and competes against organizations located in other countries. For this reason, the organizations become worldwide by joining business with other countries.

Additionally, there will have a positive competition among themselves. Moreover, all people over the world become closer than ever before. Goods and services that appear in a country will be immediately promoted in the others. International transfer and communication are more common. This phenomenon affects the economic business and applies a wide influence on society at that. The growth of the developing countries is the main cause of globalization and it brings both opportunities and disadvantages to them. For instance; globalization creates an aggressive competition in industry.

In addition, with these advantages, governments have a basic background to build the country and escape from any consequences. On the other hand, the spread of globalization makes industrialization with fewer countries cooperate with more developing countries to get new technology or instruct employees to know some modern method. In addition, globalization has given the developing countries many opportunities to increase the standard of living, economy and industry. In other words, the people in the poor country may increase their standard of living and get acquainted with new civilization.

In the same way, globalization causes a lot of risk to the countries indeed. By doing low the prices, increasing money in advertising so the smaller ones cannot compete with the bigger ones and that will lead them to the bankruptcy. It may cause uncomfortable condition. The most serious problem of the world is unemployment, which leads to poverty, social crime, illiteracy, can be easily compressed as most of the labors in developing countries are very cheap so the multinational companies always employ the worker in host countries.

Moreover, when the multinational companies cooperate with a country, there also bring together the religion, culture and life style. In advance, there will be job insecurity. Earlier people had stable and permanent jobs. Now, in globalization era; people live in constant dread of losing their jobs to competition. Generally, globalization is a tool that should benefit all sections of mankind. One cannot ignore its negative effects. These must be addressed for the world’s peace and prosperity.

There should be responsibilities by the manager to belief the ability of the employees in handling the outsider as well as to share useful knowledge to the acquire workers. That is, companies have still got to be globally efficient and competitive by integrating activities and coordinating resources across national border. For instance, according to the previous section, everyone in the companies is manager. At the same time, they also need to be sensitive and responsive to national differences in consumer tastes and government requirement.

In fact, there is an essential of three strategic imperative which has become increasingly important in recent years. Today, global managers need to see the world not just as a collection of national marketplaces, but also as a source of scarce information, knowledge, and expertise; which the key resources required in the development and diffusion of innovation worldwide. Additionally, this increasingly important capability really is about using one’s global presence to promote worldwide innovation and learning.

Moreover, these three strategic imperatives have to be reflected in the multinational company’s organizational capability. On the other hand, managers need a perspective that allows them to look across the world and recognize opportunities for economies. In contrast, managers should empower the job tasks. Moreover, empowerment is driving more strategic decisions down to people who are closed to the customers, competitors and technology changes. It may create an environment in which these people can negotiate the best solution for the organization.

That is, there is one example of organization which had meeting globally in Malaysia as well can be as a benchmark. The mentioned organization is Automobile Association of Malaysia. The brief introduction about the company; also known as AAM, is a non-profit organization established in 1932. AAM is recognized under the Federal Law as the National Motoring Authority. The AAM is affiliated with International Motoring Organizations, the Alliance Internationale Tourism (AIT), the Federation Internatiionale De L’automobile (FIA) and the Federation Internationale De Motocyclisme (FIM).

Through these international organizations, AAM provides its member with access to similar services on a reciprocal basis with 130 affiliates in 98 countries. Over the past 75 years, AAM has kept its pledge to deliver first-class service to its members throughout country. Today, as embark on a new millennium with its unique challenges and opportunities, AAM is proud that sill considered as the No. 1 Motoring Friend. Diversity means differences, difference of age, sex, race, religion and culture. People with different demographic differences working in the organization makes diverse workforce.

And it is becoming more important for the organizations to know about these differences and how to manage it. Diversity is also the common issue in the workforce environment, in some companies employees often get discriminated or misunderstood because of the diverse features. So, it is important for the companies to manage the diversity workforce to value best performance. Most important aspect these days is to train the managers to handle the diverse workforce. Many organizations are engaging in activities to manage their employees of different genders, ages, race, sexual orientations, etc.

When demographic diversity is valued, all employees, even the non-traditional are encouraged to participate fully develop their unique skills and perspectives. Diversity is increasing everyday in everyday in every organization. In fact, organizations are getting more concerned of developing the diverse workforce over the years to attain better result and competitiveness. Organizations have been advised to attract, develop and retain males and females of all ages, skin colors, cultural backgrounds and physical capacities to remain competitive.

Moreover, today managers are voicing a second belief as well. A more diverse workforce will increase organizational effectiveness. It will raise morale, bring greater access to new segments of the marketplace, and enhance productivity. In short, they claim, diversity will be good for business. Furthermore, the diversity principles aim to use people’s differences to improve business outcomes and achieving goals. Workplace diversity enhances business outcomes as much as it enhances social justice outcomes.

The benefits that flow from a successful workplace diversity plan include; improved customer service through greater understanding of their diversity and needs, improved recruitment outcomes through being a manager of choice, higher retention rates of employees, reduced training costs due to less staff turnover, improved workplace relations and morale, increased productivity and access to a broader range of ideas and approaches. Generally, manager is responsible for recognizing and supporting the commitment.

Each manager is responsible for practicing and promoting behavior consistent with Code of Conduct, incorporating workplace diversity principles into their team and management practices, identifying, using and developing the diverse skill and knowledge of employees as well as supporting employees who require reasonable adjustment in the workplace. Apart from these, the responsible also include supporting employees who seek flexible work arrangements subject to business needs, resolving workplace issues quickly, sensitively and effectively wherever possible as well as maintaining a workplace that is free from discrimination and harassment.

In contrast, each individual also is responsible for behaving in a way that is consistent with the Code of Conduct, respecting different ways of thinking and working, maintaining a workplace that is free from discrimination and harassment as well as supporting employees who access reasonable adjustment and flexible work arrangements. Basically, workforce diversity may result to any discrimination in pay and promotion in nature. The issue of pay and promotion discrimination addresses the fact that women and minorities do not receive pay and promotion opportunities on par with men.

According to the article by Majumdar, Shyamal, a team labor researcher did a survey of women workers in industry in three prominent industrial belts on India (Bangalore, Delhi-Faridabad and Pune). The survey covered diverse industries from manufacturing to services, both in organized and unorganized sectors, aim was to examine; the working conditions for women in industry and analyze possible discrimination against them from four perspectives; the woman workers, male workers, union leaders’ and the management.

The survey found that discrimination against women was found to assume multiple forms. These included wage and non wage discrimination as well as qualitative differences in the nature of work offered to women. Comparing men and women, more women never promoted and in general men receive more promotions. For women promotions only meant increased responsibility and higher workload. For men, the nature of their jobs often changed with these promotions, unlike women. In fact, changing in workforce relate to the condition that is happen based on above example.

For instance, the trends are spreading in increasing of minorities in workforce, such as women are more likely to have their own title of job; which represent the status nowadays. Apart from this, there is increasing of a multicultural workforce due to an increasing demographic diversity. In addition, there is shown in greater difficulty in discussing ethnic differences as inter-racial marriages increase. Furthermore, people born between 1946 and 1964; also known as baby boomers were expected more job security in workplace.

Additionally, people born between 1964 and 1977; also known as Gen-Xers were expressed in less loyalty to one organization. They want to find the suit job that is comfortable with their needs. They also represent not fear in risks by changing jobs in every company. But, people born in decade or so since 1979; also known as Generation-Y are affected the workplace. There are both loyal with secure and also need maintain prominence in the job condition. To conclude, with having more diverse work environment organization can produce better performance.

It is important for the companies to know diversity and how to handle the issues relating to it. Beside, the need of the diverse workforce is getting more not only because types there are different people but also because they van produce better results with having different types of people working. Leaders in the organizations should learn diversity; which differences of gender, age, sex and religion in their work environment and also to communicate will between them; and how to manage it effectively. A final significant area of environmental changes that is particularly relevant for businesses today is new employment relationships.

In fact, today we are living in a transition period of a new age defined by global competition, faster flow of information and communication, increasing business complexity and pervasive globalization. With these rapid changes, new dimensions in business space are constantly created, while some are destroyed. As a consequence of the pace and the nature of changes and evolutions in the economic and social environment in which organizations operate, the nature of the employment relationship in undergoing fundamental changes.

Moreover, changing technologies, reengineering, shifting markets, global expansion, downsizing and many other factors have contributed to rapid changes in existing jobs and the creation of new ones. These changes have implications in human resource management, both for the organization as well as for the employees. Additionally, companies no longer assure lifetime employment to their employees; neither do employees recognize complete loyalty to the employer. In this context, expected growth in profitability and in opportunities is stimulate that feed the deal that managers might be able to offer employees.

Yet recent economic downturns have evidenced the fact that growth may not be uninterrupted or steady and managing of human resources may have to re-adjust to satisfy other stakeholders, particularly shareholders by cutting down on promises made earlier. As a consequence, the nature of relationships between the employee and manager is impacted. In this scenario, managing changing manager and employee relationships has become one of the critical challenges facing organizations. There are several changing in employment relationships; like employability, contingent work, and telecommuting and virtual teams.

These changing may meet the globally nowadays. Employability skills are not job specific, but are skills which cut horizontally across all industries and vertically across all jobs from entry level to chief executive officer. In fact, employees perform a variety of work activities rather than hold specific jobs and they are expected to continuously learn skills that will keep them employed. Additionally, employment relations play a vital role. The key to this advantage is partnership. Partnership is not an easy option.

In addition, partnership can be a positive force for generating ideas, reacting quickly and making optimum use of the skill and knowledge of workforce and management alike. Hence, people must be able to balance the different pressures in lives and ensuring that diversity issues are high on the employment relations agenda. Apart from this, there did not used to be such a thing as workforce management. A company had employees, supervisors managed them and strategic planning had to do with revenue generation and market positioning. But time truly has changed.

Recently, the company which already had begun to redefine the way in managed the contingent workers. In fact, contingent work sometimes known as casual work is a neologism which describes a type of employment relationship between a manager and employee. There is no universally agreed consensus on what type of working arrangement constitutes contingent work, but it is generally considered to be any one or combination of work which is temporary or lacks job security or work which is part time or work which is paid on a piece work basis.

However, contingent work is usually not considered to be a career or part of a career. One of the features of contingent work is that it usually offers little or no opportunity for career development. If a job is full time, permanent and either pays a regular salary or a fixed wage for regular hours, then it is usually not considered to be contingent work. In other words, contingent work is any job in which the individual does not have an explicit or implicit contract for long-term employment or one in which the minimum hours of work can vary in a non-systematic way.

Mainly, globalization had a large impact on the growth in using contingent labor. Globalization contributes to rapid growth in industries, increased outsourcing and a need for flexibility and agility to remain competitive. In fact, manager may engage contract workers, which are able to be agile and save costs. The contingent workforce acts as a variable workforce for managers to select from to perform specific projects or complete specialized projects. Beside, managers need to make efforts to be more agile and quickly respond to change in order to hire the professionals and experts.

By doing this, organizations may see the opportunity to reduce benefits and retirement costs. However, there is risk involved in avoiding these costs if an employee is improperly classified as a contingent worker. In contrast, using the contingent workforce is also cost-effective which allows for adjustments to employment levels and employment costs depending on what kind of expertise and labor is need and at what time it is needed. All in all, the ease of changing jobs has increased and has made working as a contingent worker more attractive.

Moreover, there is increased popularity of applying for jobs on-line as well as an increased need for specialists make becoming a contingent worker a possibility for more individuals. Another part of emerging employment relationship is telecommuting. Telecommuting can be defined as working from home usually with a computer connection to the office. In fact, the world of work is changing rapidly. Managers and employees are seeking greater flexibility in their working relationships. One outgrowth of these efforts is an increased use of telecommuters; which referring to people whom works from home.

Furthermore, telecommuting has received a great deal of attention in the past few years. And no wonder it may give benefits to both managers and employees can be tremendous. For instance, managers may reduce overhead costs and increased productivity of the organization. In contrast, employees can achieve greater flexibility and balance between their work and home lives. In most cases, telecommuting equipment is provided by the company, though it is up to the teleworker to provide an office space free of distraction. There would be some implications in telecommuting.

For instance, by missing out on the office gossip and small company meetings, one can also miss out on vital pieces of information. Even though most telecommuters enjoy working without a micromanaging manager looking over their shoulders, they also admit it is difficult for them to get a proper review when their managers cannot see them on a day-to-day basis. Additionally, telecommuting not only enables an employee the convenience of working at home, it also allows the manager to save money on certain overhead expenses such as utilities.

In addition, since telecommuters are happier, they are often more productive; they may spend more time working than their office working counterparts who tend to spend more time on lunch breaks or chit-chatting around the coffee maker. Beside, absenteeism is down among telecommuters because sick workers still work at home and they put in longer hours because they never leave their office. In fact, to be a good telecommuter, an employee must be a self-motivated and do not need constant supervision; it can provide an excellent opportunity.

Moreover, the used of connection through network accessibility. For instance; the connection may via electronic mail, internet as well as also via phone and facsimile machine. Sometimes, telecommuters may use a daily progress sheet at the end of their work period. This sheet may contain schedule information, accomplishments, problems, and plans. The manager then must respond before the end of the next work period, giving both positive and negative feedback. The last part of emerging employment relationship is virtual teams.

Leaders in the age of virtual work require an understanding of how this affects their employees’ relations with management. Beside, virtual work arrangements have become pervasive across organizations, but the effect of these arrangements on the important relationship between manager and employee has received insufficient attention. For instance, cohesiveness and team identification are lower and performance evaluations among team members are based more on actual contributions in virtual teams as compared to in conventional teams.

Additionally, virtual employees tend to feel less connected to their organization than do conventional employees. In fact, if virtual contexts also affect the quality of manager; which employee relationships, leaders who fail to recognize and adapt to these differences risk alienating a growing segment of the workforce. Hence, to consider the effects of virtual work arrangements on manager with employee relationships, one must first identify and define the nature of virtual employment relationships. Similar trends are seen throughout much of the developed world.

Categorizing virtual employees by regular versus free-agent status is a start, but identifying more specific distinguishing characteristics of virtual employment relationships is necessary if one hopes to assess patterns in virtual employee behavior or attitudes and ultimately determine best management practices for virtual contexts. Beside, with a comprehensive definition of virtual status established, employee-manager relationships are profiled to flesh out distinct virtual characteristics for the two types of virtual employment relationships described above and contrasting characteristics for conventional employment relationships.

Finally, these groups are further discriminated by employee trust in manager and perceived managerial support. The focus on the connection virtual employees have with their direct manager; instead of organization, co-worker or some other organization member because the relationship between employees and their manager has been identifies as critical to the success of working in virtual contexts. Thus, managers directly influence the satisfaction and productivity of virtual employees through support and cooperation, which is not dissimilar from the influence managers have in conventional employment contexts.

Furthermore, virtual worker perceptions of mutual trust between themselves and the manager and organizational peers played an important role in the worker’s adjustment to virtual work in that greater perceptions of mutual trust were related to higher levels of adjustment to virtual work. To sum up, virtual teams are cross-functional groups that operate across space, time and organizational boundaries with members who communicate mainly through electronic technology.

Reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisational_studies

http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/apr/06guest3.htm

http://rtc.umn.edu/docs/2_18_Gen_diff_workplace.pdf

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