Emerging Challenges in the Field of OB

Organisations are deeply affected by the external environment. Organisations need to maintain, monitor and adjust to changes in accordance to the environment in which it functions. External environment keeps changing continuously over the years, however the changes in the past decade and the decades to come, are more profound than others. These changes would require corporate leader and all employees to adjust to new challenges. 

1. Workforce Diversity:

               Diversity includes differences in the psychological characteristics of employees, including personalities, beliefs, values and attitudes.This deep-level diversity Differences in the psychological characteristics of employees, including personalities, beliefs, values and attitudes. isn't as visible as surface-level diversity, but it is evident in a person's decisions, statements and actions.Diversity if managed positively enhances creativity and innovation in organization as well as ensures better decision–making by providing different perspectives on problems. When not managed, diversity leads to increased turnover, heightened inter-personal conflict and more strained communication.Managers must learn to respect diversity and live with diverse behaviours. 

2. Changed Employee Expectation:

               Traditional allurements such as job security, attractive remuneration housing does not attract, retain and motivate today’s workforce. Employees demand empowerment and expect equality of status with the management. Empowerment results in redefining jobs, both from the shop floor as well as the boardrooms. Expectations of equality break up the traditional relationship between employer and employee – top to bottom.

3. Globalization:

             Globalisation Economic, social and cultural connectivity with people in other parts of the world. Growing internationalization of business has its impact on people management.Although businesses have traded goods across borders for centuries, the degree of globalisation today is unprecedented because information technology and transportation systems allow a much more intense level of connectivity and interdependence across the planet. 

          Globalisation offers numerous benefits to organisations in terms of larger markets, lower costs, and greater access to knowledge and innovation. At the same time, there is considerable debate about whether globalisation benefits developing nations, and whether it is primarily responsible for increasing work intensification, as well as reducing job security and work–life balance in developed countries. To face this challenge the management must be flexible and pro-active. 

4. Improving Productivity and Quality:

               As organizations are exposed to competition, managers are seriously thinking of improving quality and productivity. In this context managers are implementing programmes like TQM (Total Quality Management) and Re-engineering programmes that requires employee involvement. TQM is a philosophy of management that is inspired by constant attainment of customer satisfaction of all organizational process.

               Re-engineering means radically re-building and redesigning those processes by which we create value for customers.

5. Changing Demographics Of Workforce:

               Combine globalisation with emerging workforce diversity, and add in new information technology. This lead to incredible changes in employment relationships.A few decades ago, most (although not all) employees in India and Pakistan and similar cultures would finish their workday after eight or nine hours and could separate their personal time from the workday.There were no smart phones and no internet connections to keep staff tethered to work on a 24/7 schedule.Most competitors were located in the same country, so they had similar work practices and labour costs. Today, work hours are longer employees experience more work-related stress, and there is growing evidence that family and personal relations are suffering. The emerging issues of this new century is for more work–life balance;- The degree to which a person minimises conflict between work and nonwork demands. Another employment relationship trend brought by means of information technology is virtual work, in which employees use information technology to perform their jobs away from the traditional physical workplace.

Emergence of E-Organization

E- Commerce: It refers to the business operations involving electronic mode of transactions. It encompasses presenting products on websites and filling order. The vast majority of articles and media attention given to using the Internet in business are directed at on-line shopping. In this process, the marketing and selling of goods and services are being carried out over the Internet. In e-commerce, the following activities are being taken place quite often - the tremendous numbers of people who are shopping on the Internet, business houses are setting up websites where they can sell goods, conducting the following transactions such as getting paid and fulfilling orders. It is a dramatic change in the way a company relates to its customers. At present e-commerce is exploding.

E-business: It refers to the full breadth of activities included in a successful Internet based enterprise. As such, e-commerce is a subset of e-business. E-business includes developing strategies for running Internet-based companies, creating integrated supply chains, collaborating with partners to electronically coordinate design and production, identifying a different kind of leader to run a ‘virtual’ business, finding skilled people to build and operate intranets and websites, and running the back room or the administrative side. E-business includes the creation of new markets and customers, but it’s also concerned with the optimum ways to combine Computers, the Web and Application Software. A sizeable number of multinational corporations are selling goods and services via the Internet.

Growth rate of e-business: The application of Internet operations are initially covers a small part of the business. At this point, their e-commerce operations are secondary to their traditional business. An increasingly popular application of e-business is merely using the Internet to better manage an ongoing business. Later, there are millions of firms that are now selling anything over the Internet, but they are using e-business applications to improve communications with internal and external stakeholders and to better perform traditional business functions. Some companies are putting maximum effort in improving its internal efficiency and providing support to its wide-reaching dealer network and to on-line sellers by crating a shared and integrated network. The companies wanted to make creasing

E-Organizations: This embraces e-commerce and e-business. State and central governments, municipal corporations are using the Internet for extending all the public utility services more efficiently through internet.

The growing use of the Internet, tablet devices, and smart phones coupled with larger consumer confidence will see that eCommerce will continue to evolve and expand.