8 Challenges and Opportunities of Organizational Behavior

Challenges and Opportunities of Organizational Behavior (OB)

Organizational behavior (OB) simply is understanding the behavior of people in the workplace. It is OB that helps managers to predict, understand, and control employees’ behavior within the workplace. However, applying practices of organizational behavior the manager is not far from its emerging challenges.

Due to the unpredictable and ever-growing changes in management practices, today managers are knowingly or unknowingly facing behavioral challenges and issues in their organizations. These concerns made them how to embrace these challenges and grab positive aspects from them.

These concerns have both challenges and opportunities for the managers and here we discuss how organizational behavior offers to solve them.

Globalization

Globalization is the economic integration of a country’s economy at the global level. Globalization assumes all businesses operate in a single place i.e. global village.

Globalization has enabled the availability of all types and all countries’ products in a single place. Availability of international products in the domestic market and expansion of domestic products at the international level has achieved through globalization.

Globalization has both challenges and opportunities for organizational behavior. Challenges such as it have negatively impacted the market of local business, difficult for managers to cope with international norms, values, and cultures, ever-growing competition, advancement of technology, etc.

It also provides opportunities such as a domestic product getting international customers, a place in the international market, extended market, revenue, new investment opportunities, and better career perspectives.

Managing Workforce Diversity

Workforce diversity means differences in people working in the organization such as in terms of age, race, culture, gender, values, education, geography, income, and so forth. It is obvious that an organization consists of diverse groups of people having different backgrounds.

The differences in people should be taken into consideration by the managers. The managers should understand the backgrounds of their employees, plan accordingly, and develop teamwork and harmony in the organization.

If done so, workforce diversity provides benefits such as group work, mutual understanding among employees, increased creativity, productivity, and proper use of different talents. If not done so, inter-personal conflicts, dissatisfaction, and turnover go on increasing.

Quality and Productivity

Quality is having a degree of excellence as compared to others and productivity means producing maximum out of minimum input and cost.

Due to globalization, the demand of customers is ever-changing, they do not demand only products/services rather they demand quality products/services.

Thus it is a growing concern for managers to give quality services/prodcuts and motivate employees so that productivity can be achieved from employee’s best (100%) contribution.

Increasing quality and productivity in an organization helps managers to gain customers who last longer, create a brand, a unique position in the market, and ignoring it organizations lose customers’ interest.

Improving Employees Skills

Today one thing is clear today’s business world is not the same as it was. Most businesses have moved to the service and knowledge base sector and uncertainties are ever-increasing.

Changes in management practices, increasing competition, teamwork, decentralization, and quality awareness have demanded a high level of skills and knowledge.

Thus managers are forced to improve their employee’s skills. For this, managers must train and re-educate employees, less skilled employees must be trained, and skilled employees also should be trained to be even better and adaptable. Managers should be responsive to employees’ skills and make them able to compete with competitors.

Empowerment of Employees

“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.” This line best describes the importance of empowering employees.

Today managers are not just managers they are leaders, coaches, and advisors to make employees compete and satisfy them. Giving required decision-making powers and freedom to lower levels make them discharge duties based on their competency.

Self-managed teamwork, self-appraisal, job enrichment, etc. are effective means a manager can empower employees. It makes managers loose duties and employees get opportunities to apply their knowledge and learn how to take responsibility and make the right decisions based on situations.

By doing so managers’ workloads are reduced and employees get freedom, feel motivated and discharge duties as they want.

Managing Organizational Change

Change is important but not easy.

Today organizations are forced to change, and the unchanged organization does not seem to have progress. Due to rapid change in environmental variables organization needs to assume change, change in structure, change in culture, re-organization departments, underperforming units, and so on.

The study of organizational behavior helps to effectively cope with such challenges such as it helps to understanding the cause and effect of change, how to react and initiate change, how to cope with change, how to reduce resistance to change in the workplace, etc.

Moreover, managers and employees should be always prepared to adapt to change and thrive in such environments.

Maintain Ethical Behavior

Ethics means knowing what is right and what is wrong. A manager should maintain and improve the ethical behavior of employees.

The manager should ensure that employees are positive about the organization’s rules, regulations, and policies. If not, he should find the causes and develops rules that best with employees’ ethics and the organization’s ethics.

Since organizational ethics are different in different organizations, a manager must consider making policies acceptable to employees. This increases satisfaction among employees and later improves productivity.

During the work time employees may get into some dilemmas where they might not be able to differentiate what is wrong and what is right, at this time manager’s prime duty is to get rid of such dilemmas. Misuse of power and insider practices should be avoided in organizational settings.

In addition, managers should organize various workshops, seminars & training programs so that the ethical behavior of employees will be maintained and improved.

The Emergence of Information Technology

The stake of information technology growing day by day for OB. The evolution of IT has moved OB’s practice from manual to automatic, now different information is handled by computers, customers services improved, digitalization is achieved, customers are getting information in real-time, and so on.

Now the manager’s task is to train employees on how to best use information technologies such as computers and get productivity and customer satisfaction.