Organisational Behaviour in the Era of Social Media

Organisational Behaviour is a broad area of management that studies how people act in organisations. Managers can use theories and knowledge of organisational behaviour to improve management practices for effectively working with and influencing employees to attain organisational goals. The field of organisational behaviour has evolved from the scientific study of management during the industrial era, administrative theories of the manager’s role, principles of bureaucracy, and human relations studies of employees ‘needs (Scott, 1992)

As the pace of globalisation and social change quickens, there is a tremendous impact on the internal structure of organisations. While workers are becoming more and more mobile and entrepreneurial, traditional organisation are becoming less appealing. Organisations and leaders of today are focusing on designing environments and systems for work that inspire individuals by taking advantage of the new social, mobile and digital technologies at work. Successful organisations are in constant state of flux in response to their environment, organisations are forced to look at social media technologies as way to market their products and learn about their competitors. The advent of social media has considerably reduced the cost of content creation, distribution and discovery methods. Companies today realise the importance of how social media has changed the way the world communicates.

Organisations are compelled to keep up with the changes that social media has brought on the internal structure of the organisations. Employees are talking online to customers, colleagues and suppliers through various social networks. Experiences, impressions and expectations regarding job, organisation are being shared, liked and commented upon. The speed at which the information gets to transgress the boundaries of the organisation are beyond the control of the organisation.

Social commerce is the new platform for doing business. The future of business is moving towards a direction that explores customer and employee centricity. Driven by technology, mobile and social media it represents an era of transformation. Organisations and its stakeholders have no choice but to take notice and adapt to become socially connected enterprises. Leadership and management need to embrace the change in order to succeed. New policies are needed to guide employees and management on social media best practices. “The Reuters news organization observed that “the distinction between the private and the professional has largely broken down online and you should assume that your professional and personal social media activity will be treated as one, no matter how hard you try to keep them separate”.

The challenge lies though in the ability to link business objectives, social media strategies, and results that tie to the bottom line. It is the only way to harness the power of social commerce and uncover opportunities to help the organization prosper in the digital era.

Take a look at GE Social Story !!!

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.