Challenges and opportunities for Organizational Behaviour

How to use Organizational Behavior concepts effectively?

Understanding organizational behavior has never been more important for managers. A quick look at a few of the dramatic changes now taking place in organizations.

For instance, the typical employee is getting older; more and more women and people of color are in the workplace; corporate downsizing and the heavy use of temporary workers are severing the bonds of loyalty that historically toed many employees to their employers; and global competition is requiring employees to become more flexible and to learn to cope with rapid changes. The war on terror has brought to the forefront the challenges of working with and managing people during uncertain times.

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

Responding to Globalization: Organizations are no longer constrained by national borders. Burger King is owned by a British, and McDonald’s sells hamburgers in Moscow. Exxon Mobil, a so called American company receives almost 75 percent of its revenues from sales outside the United States. New employees at Finland based Nokia are increasingly being recruited from India, China, and other developing countries with non-Finns now out numbering Finns at Nokia’s renowned research center in Helsinki. And all major automobile manufacturers now build cars outside their borders; for instance, Honda builds cars in Ohio; Ford in Brazil; Volkswagen in Mexico; and both Mercedes and BMW in South Africa. These examples illustrate that the world has become a global village. In the process, the manager’s job is changing.

Increased Foreign Assignments: If you’re a manager, you are increasingly likely to find yourself in a foreign assignment transferred to your employer’s operating division or subsidiary in another country. Once there, you’ll have to manage a workforce that is likely to be very different in needs, aspiration, and attitudes from those you were used to back home.

Working with people from Different Cultures: Even in your own country, you’re going to find yourself working with bosses, peers, and other employees who were born and raised in different cultures. What motivates you, may not motivate them. Or your style of communication may be straightforward and open, but they may find this approach uncomfortable and threatening. To work effectively with people from different cultures, you need to understand how their culture geography, and religion have shaped them, and how to adapt your management style to their differences.

Coping with Anti-capitalism Backlash: Capitalism’s focus on efficiency, growth, and profits may be generally accepted in the United States, Australia and Hong Kong, but these capitalistic values aren’t nearly as popular in places like France, the Middle East, and the Scandinavian countries. For instance, because Finland’s egalitarian values have created a “soak the rich” mentality among politicians, traffic fines are based on the offender’s income rather than the severity of the offence. So, when one of Finland’s richest men (he is heir to a sausage fortune), who was making close to $9 million a year, was ticketed for doing 80 kilometers per hour through a 40-kilometer zone in central Helsinki, the Finnish court hit him with a fine of $217,000.

Managers at global companies like McDonald’s Disney, and Coca-Cola have come to realize that economic values are not universally transferable. Management practices need to be modified to reflect the values of the different countries in which an organization operates.

Organizational Behaviour Concept, read here

How to Hire the Perfect Intern

Interns can be valuable resources for all employers. Don’t think that aspiring college and graduate students only flock to large employers when they’re looking for experience. If you have a project or well defined task, there’s an intern out there eager to tackle the assignment and bring enthusiasm and energy to the role.

Hiring interns is also a great way to find future employees. Whether or not the intern returns full-time, they can spread the word on campus to potential employees that you provide a great place to work.

But before you call the nearest college campuses, identify the work that needs to be done and the skills candidates will need. Specific tasks and types of companies are best suited for these short-term assignments. Research, systems, and project-management departments, tasks involving organization, and companies in the start-up phase or doing product launches all create good intern opportunities.

Decide who will manage the intern. This should be someone who can devote the time and patience to someone with potentially limited work experience.

The assignment and requirements are the starting point. Now you can use those for finding schools, or departments within a school, for recruiting. College guides will be useful in locating programs with specific majors that suit your needs. Alumni in your workplace can also be a great connection to the schools they attended.

Local institutions may be a logical starting point, but don’t think you have to stop there. Students from your neighborhood may be pursuing the major best suited for your needs at a school hundreds of miles away. The human resources intern for you is studying right now at Cornell ILR! There are limited internship opportunities for that budding HR specialist in Ithaca, New York.

Some schools have internship offices; others will refer you to career placement departments or specific faculty members. If the student is at a local school they may be available throughout the year. If an internship will be a break from a regular campus routine, ask about semester calendars. Don’t overlook high schools that have magnet programs in areas such as business, finance or healthcare with students eager to perform routine tasks to get a taste of the real world.

Many employers pay interns and some do not. Ask about wages paid by other employers who hire interns. If you are not prepared to provide payment or will be paying lower wages, the school will be able to tell you if this will keep applicants away. Creative additions to compensation will be welcome by students. As a college student I earned lunch and subway fare during a part time summer research project for a non-profit.

Find out if the student will be earning credit for the work experience. You may be asked to complete evaluations or follow up with professors. If you are using college interns to fill in regular spots, beyond project work, don’t flout wage and hour regulations by expecting them to work for free.

With the success of one intern, you will be able to build on the program to include interns as an asset and important part of your company culture.

Ref: Rebecca Mazin

The worker as a Resource

If we look at the worker as a resource, comparable to all other resources but for the fact that it is human, we have to find out how best to utilize him in the same way in which we look at copper or at water power as specific resources. This is an engineering approach. It considers what the human being is best and least capable of. Its result will be the organization of work so as to fit best the qualities and the limitations of this specific resource, the human being at work. And the human being has one set of qualities possessed by no other resource: It has ability to co-ordinate, to integrate to judge and to imagine. In fact, this is its only specific superiority; in every other respect whether it be physical strength, manual skill or sensory perception machines can do much better job.

But we must also consider man at work as a human being. We must, in other words, also put the emphasis on “human.” This approach focuses on man as a moral and a social creature, and asks how work should be organized to fit qualities as a person. As a resource man can be “utilized”. A person however, can only utilize himself. This is the great and ultimate distinction.

The qualities of the person are specific and unique. The human being, unlike any other resource, has absolute control over whether he works at all. Dictatorships tend to forget this; but shooting people does not get the work done. The human resource must therefore always be motivated to work.

Nothing brought this out better than the reports of the teams of European technicians and managers who came to this country under the Marshall Plan to study the causes of American productivity. These teams and there wee several hundred expected to find the causes in machines, tools or techniques, but soon found out that these elements have little to do with our productivity are indeed in themselves a result of the real cause: the basic attitudes of managers and worker. Productivity is an attitude was their unanimous conclusion. In other words, it is workers’ motivation that controls workers’ output.

This is particularly in industry today. For fear, the traditional motivation of the industrial worker has largely disappeared in the modern west. To eliminate it has been the main result of the increased wealth produced by industrialization. In a society rich enough to provide subsistence even to the unemployed, fear has lost its motivating power. And to deprive management of the weapon of fear has also been the main aim of unionism; indeed, the workers’ rebellion against these weapons and its use is among the main driving forces behind the union movement.

That fear has gone as the major motivation on is all to the good. It is too potent to be relied upon except for emergencies Above all we used the wrong kind of fear. Fear of a threat to the community unities; there is no greater stymies to effort than the common peril. But fear of someone within the community divides and corrodes. It corrupts both him who uses fear and him who fear. That we have got rid of fear as motivation to work so therefore a major achievement. Otherwise managing the worker in industrial society would not be possible.

But, contrary to what some human relations experts assert, to remove fear does not by itself motivate. All it creates is a vacuum. We cannot sit back and expect worker motivation to arise spontaneously, now that fear is gone. We must create a positive motivation to take its place. This is one of the central, one of the most difficult, one of the urgent facing management.

The human being also has control over how well he works and how much he works, over the quality and quantity of production. He participates in the process actively unlike all other resources which participate only passively by giving preconditioned response to a predetermined impulse.

In the most completely machine paced operation, the speed and quality of which appear to be completely determined by the machine, the worker still retains decisive control. It may be almost impossible to find out how he manages to beat the machine; but as the old Latin proverb has it, human nature asserts itself even if thrown out with a pitchfork or with a conveyor belt. And in any operation which is not the tending of semi-automatic machinery by semi-skilled operators, that is, in all work of a clerical, skilled, ethnical, professional or managerial nature, this control is practically absolute.

Ethical Behavior at work

Whether or not a person acts ethically at work is usually not a result of any one thing. For example, it’s not just the employee’s ethical tendencies, since even ethical employees can have their action influenced by organizational factors. So, the manager’s first task is to understand what shapes ethical behavior and then to take concrete steps to ensure that employees make ethical choices. Let’s look first at the factors that shape ethical behavior.

Individual Factors:

Because people bring to their jobs their own ideas of what is morally right and wrong, the individual must shoulder much of the credit (or blame) for the ethical choices he or she makes. One survey of CEOs of manufacturing firms explored their intention to engage (or to not engage) in two questionable business practices: soliciting a competitor’s technological secrets and making payments to foreign government officials to secure business. The researchers conclude that personal predispositions more strongly affected decisions than did environmental pressures organizational characteristics.

In any case, honesty testing shows that some people are more inclined toward making the wrong ethical choice. How could you rate your own ethics?
Organizational Factors :

WorldCom’s former CFO, pleaded guilty to helping the firm’s former chairman in masking WorldCom’s deteriorating financial situation. Among other things, the government accused him of instructing underlings to fraudulently book accounting entries, and of filing false statements with the SEC. Why, as a star CFO and someone trained to protect the interests of his shareholders, would the CFO do such thing? The CFO said that he took these actions, knowing they were wrong, in a misguided attempt to preserve the company to allow it to withstand what the CFO believed were temporary financial difficulties.

The scary thing about unethical behavior at work is that it’s usually not driven by personal interest. The results of one survey of the principal causes of ethical lapses, as reported by six levels of employees and managers. As you can see, being under the gun to meet scheduling pressures was the number-one factor in causing ethical lapses or most of these employees meeting overly aggressive financial or business objectives and helping the company survive were the two other top causes. Advancing my own career or financial interests ranked toward the bottom of the list. Thus at least in the case most ethical occurred because employees felt pressured to do what they thought was best to help their companies. Several years ago, three former CUC International executives pleaded guilty to federal charges. Authorities then called it the largest and longest accounting fraud in history. The former executive said they had done it to keep the price of the company stock high.

Having rules of the books forbidding this sort of thing does not, by itself seem to work. For example, in 2002 New York’s attorney general filed charges against Merrill Lynch, alleging that several of its analysts had issued optimistic rating on stocks, while privately expressing concerns about those same stocks. The allegations was that they did so (in violation of company rules) to aid and support Merrill Lynch’s investment banking relationships with these companies.

The boss’s Influence:

The boss sets the tone, and by his or her actions sends signals about what is right or wrong. Coring to one report for instance, the level of misconduct at work dropped dramatically when employees said their supervisors exhibited ethical behavior. Only 25% of employees who agreed that their supervisors set a good example of ethical business behavior, said that they had observed his conduct in the last year, compared with 72% of these who did not feel that their supervisors set good ethical examples.

A study by the America Society of Chartered life Underwriters found that 56% of all workers felt some pressure to act unethically or illegally and that the problem seems to be getting worse. Here are examples of how supervisors knowingly (or unknowingly) lead subordinates astray:

1.Tell staffers to do whatever is necessary to achieve results.
2.Over load top performers to ensure that work gets done.
3.Look the other way when wrongdoing occurs
4.Take credit for others work or shift blame. —