Importance, Challenges and Opportunities of OB

Importance of Organizational Behavior

1. It builds better relationship by achieving people’s, organizational, and social objectives.
2. It covers a wide array of human resource like behavior, training and development, change management, leadership, teams etc.
3. It brings coordination which is the essence of management.
4. It improves goodwill of the organization.
5. It helps to achieve objectives quickly.
6. It makes optimum utilization of resources.
7. It facilitates motivation.
8. It leads to higher efficiency.
9. It improves relations in the organization.
10. It is multidisciplinary, in the sense that applies different techniques, methods, and theories to evaluate the performances.

Challenges and Opportunities of Organizational Behavior

Challenges and opportunities of organizational behavior are massive and rapidly changing for improving productivity and meeting business goals.

Although the problems with organizations and the solutions over the ages have not really changed, the emphasis and surrounding environmental context certainly have changed.

Although the resulting lean and mean organizations offered some short-run benefits in terms of lowered costs and improved productivity, if they continued to do business, as usual, they would not be able to meet current or future challenges.

Main challenges and opportunities of organizational behavior are;

1. Improving Peoples’ Skills

Technological changes, structural changes, environmental changes are accelerated at a faster rate in the business field.

Unless employees and executives are equipped to possess the required skills to adapt those changes, the targeted goals cannot be achieved in time. These two different categories of skills – managerial skills and technical skills.

Some of the managerial skills include listening skills, motivating skills, planning and organizing skills, leading skills, problem-solving skill, decision-making skills etc.

These skills can be enhanced by organizing a series of training and development programs, career development programs, induction, and socialization etc.

2. Improving Quality and Productivity

Organizational Behavior Opportunities for Improving Quality and Productivity

Quality is the extent to which the customers or users believe the product or service surpasses their needs and expectations.

For example, a customer who purchases an automobile has a certain expectation, one of which is that the automobile engine will start when it is turned on.

3. Total Quality Management (TQM)

It is a philosophy of management that is driven by the constant attainment of customer satisfaction through the continuous improvement of all organizational process.

The components of TQM are;

(a) An intense focus on the customer,

(b) Concern for continual improvement,

(c) Improvement in the quality of everything the organization does,

(d) Accurate measurement and,

(e) Empowerment of employees.

4. Managing Workforce Diversity

This refers to employing different categories of employees who are heterogeneous in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, relation, community, physically disadvantaged, elderly people etc.

The primary reason to employ heterogeneous category of employees is to tap the talents and potentialities, harnessing the innovativeness, obtaining synergetic effect among the divorce workforce.

In general, employees wanted to retain their individual and cultural identity, values and life styles even though they are working in the same organization with common rules and regulations.

The major challenge for organizations is to become more accommodating to diverse groups of people by addressing their different life styles, family needs, and work styles.

5. Responding to Globalization

Today’s business is mostly market driven; wherever the demands exist irrespective of distance, locations, climatic Conditions, the business

Operations are expanded to gain their market share and to remain in the top rank etc. Business operations are no longer restricted to a particular locality or region.

Company’s products or services are spreading across the nations using mass communication, the internet, faster transportation etc. More than 95% of Nokia (Now Microsoft) hand phones are being sold outside of their home country Finland.

Japanese cars are being sold in different parts of the globe. Sri Lankan tea is exported to many cities around the globe

Garment products of Bangladesh are exporting in USA and EU countries. Executives of Multinational Corporation are very mobile and move from one subsidiary to another more frequently.

6. Empowering People

The main issue is delegating more power and responsibility to the lower level cadre of employees and assigning more freedom to make choices about their schedules, operations, procedures and the method of solving their work-related problems.

Encouraging the employees to participate in work related decision will sizable enhance their commitment to work.

Empowerment is defined as putting employees in charge of what they do by eliciting some sort of ownership in them.

Managers are doing considerably further by allowing employees full control of their work.

Due to the implementation of empowerment concepts across all the levels, the relationship between managers and the employees is reshaped.

Managers will act as coaches, advisors, sponsors, facilitators and help their subordinates to do their task with minimal guidance.

7. Coping with Temporariness

In recent times, the product life cycles are slimming, the methods of operations are improving, and fashions are changing very fast. In those days, the managers needed to introduce major change programs once or twice a decade.

Today, change is an ongoing activity for most managers.

The concept of continuous improvement implies constant change.

In yesteryears, there used to be a long period of stability and occasionally interrupted by a short period of change, but at present, the change process is an ongoing activity due to competitiveness in developing new products and services with better features.

Everyone in the organization faces today is one of permanent temporariness. The actual jobs that workers perform are in a permanent state of flux.

So, workers need to continually update their knowledge and skills to perform new job requirements.

8. Stimulating Innovation and Change

Today’s successful organizations must foster innovation and be proficient in the art of change; otherwise, they will become candidates for extinction in due course of time and vanished from their field of business.

Victory will go to those organizations that maintain flexibility, continually improve their quality, and beat the competition to the market place with a constant stream of innovative products and services.

For example, Compaq succeeded by creating more powerful personal computers for the same or less money than EBNM or Apple, and by putting their products to market quicker than the bigger competitors.

Amazon.com is putting a lot of independent bookstores out of business as it proves you can successfully sell books from an Internet website.

9. Emergence of E-Organization & E-Commerce

It refers to the business operations involving the electronic mode of transactions. It encompasses presenting products on websites and filling the order.

The vast majority of articles and media attention given to using the Internet in business are directed at online 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. Globally, e-commerce spending was increasing at a tremendous rate.

10. Improving Ethical Behavior

The complexity in business operations is forcing the workforce to face ethical dilemmas, where they are required to define right and wrong conduct in order to complete their assigned activities.

For example,

• Should the employees of chemical company blow the whistle if they uncover the discharging its untreated effluents into the river are polluting its water resources?
• Do managers give an inflated performance evaluation to an employee they like, knowing that such an evaluation could save that employee’s job?

11. Improving Customer Service

OB can contribute to improving an organizational performance by showing drat how employees’ attitude and behavior are associated with customer satisfaction.

In that case, service should be the first production oriented by using technological opportunities like a computer, the internet etc.

To improve the customer service need to provide sales service and also the after sales service.