Challenges & Opportunities of Organisational Behavior

Responding to globalization:

* Increased foreign assignments.
* Working with people from different cultures.
* Coping with anti-capitalism backlash.
* Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low – cost labour.

Managing workforce diversity:

* Embracing diversity.
* Whereas globalization focuses on differences among people from different countries, workforce diversity addresses differences among people within given countries. * Implications of managers.

* Recognising and responding to differences.

Improving quality and productivity:

a) Total Quality Management (TQM):
A philosophy of management that is driven by the constant attainment of customer satisfaction through the continuous improvement of all organizational processes.

1. Intense focus on the customer.
2. Concern for continuous improvement.
3. Improvement in the quality of everything the organization does. 4. Accurate measurement.
5. Empowerment of employees.

b) Reengineering :
Reconsiders how work would be done and the organization structured if they were being created from scratch. “It asks managers to reconsider how work would be done and their organization structured if they were starting over”

Responding to the labour shortage:

* Changing workforce demographics.
* Fewer skilled labourers.
* Early retirements and older workers.

Improving customer service:

* Increased expectation of service quality.
* Customer-responsive cultures.

Empowering people:
Putting employees in charge of what they do. 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.

Coping with temporariness:

Today’s managers and employees must learn to cope with temporariness. They have to learn to live with flexibility, spontaneity, and unpredictability. 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, and how best to create an organizational culture that thrives on change.

Stimulating Innovation and Change:
Today’s successful organizations must foster innovation and master the art of change or they’ll become candidates for extinction. An organization’s employees can be the impetus for innovation and change or they can be a major stumbling block. The challenge for managers is to stimulate employee creativity and tolerance for change. The field of OB provides a wealth of ideas and techniques to aid in realizing these goals.

Improving Ethical Behavior:
Members of organizations are increasingly finding themselves facing ethical dilemmas, situations in which they are required to define right and wrong conduct”. “Managers and their organizations are responding to this problem from a number of directions. They’re writing and distributing codes of ethics to guide employees through ethical dilemmas. They’re offering seminars, workshops, and similar training programs to try to improve ethical behaviors. They’re providing in-house advisers who can be contacted, in many cases anonymously, for assistance in dealing with ethical issues.

CONCLUSION:
Thus a methodical approach is needed to tackle with the challenges and opportunities in organisational behaviour which will eventually help in improving the organisation’s effectiveness.