Emerging Trends in Organizational Behavior

EMERGING TRENDS IN ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

A. Globalization

1. Definition

a. Occurs when an organization extends its activities to other parts of the world, actively participates in other markets, and competes against organizations located in other countries.

2. Implications for organizational behavior

a. Requires new structures and different forms of communication to assist the organization's global reach.

b. Creates new career opportunities and potentially brings in new knowledge to improve the organization's competitive advantage.

c. Emphasizes the need to recognize the contingencies of effective OB practices in different cultures.

B. The Changing Work Force

1. Trends

a. Increase of minorities in the workforce.

b. Increase of a multicultural workforce due to an increasing demographic diversity.

c. Greater difficulty in discussing ethic differences as inter-racial marriages increase.

d. Increasing representation of women in the workforce.

e. More job security expected by baby boomers-people born between 1946 and 1964.

f. Less loyalty to one organization expressed by Gen-Xers-people born between 1964 and 1977.

g. Impact of how Generation-Y employees -those born in the decade or so since 1979-affect the workplace.

2. How diversity impacts organizational behavior

a. Can lead to a competitive advantage by improving decision-making and team performance on complex tasks.

b. Can present new challenges for companies to overcome.

C. Emerging Employment Relationships

1. Employability: employees perform a variety of work activities rather than hold specific jobs, and they are expected to continuously learn skills that will keep them employed.

2. Contingent work: any job in which the individual does not have an explicit or implicit contract for long-term employment, or one in which the minimum hours of work can vary in a nonsystematic way.

3. Telecommuting: working from home usually with a computer connection to the office.

4. Virtual teams: cross-functional groups that operate across space, time, and organizational boundaries with members who communicate mainly through