Organizational Behavior: Foundations, Realities, and Challenges - Essay Example

Contemporary Issues in OB Paper Affiliation: Describe your topic and its currentimportance and relevance for practicing managers and consultants. The topic is contemporary issues that face organizational behavior in organizations. This topic addresses the current problems the office managers maybe facing with their employees and which may be affecting their work negatively and hence need to be addressed immediately. It is important for the managers to find out which issues are being discussed and how they have affected the overall performance in the organization or continue to affect it and what can be done to rectify the matter. Organizations in this day and era are into research and making changes based on the recommendations of the research. Some of these changes that are meant to improve the performance and communication at work end up leading to negative effects. It is important for the managers and consultants to closely examine the changes being made and whether the intended effect is what is actually being provided (Nelson & Quick, 2006). If not, then further research is necessary in order to ensure the employees are not only comfortable in their workplace but they communicate frequently as well as this equates to increased performance in the long run. 2. Critique this topic a) What is the story the article is telling? The article by Bernstein, (2015) is explaining how the transparency in the office space which is meant to encourage accountability, openness as well as facilitate sharing of knowledge and information may not be working. This transparency has led to productivity problems instead, such as reduced overall communication amongst employees as well as affects negatively creative team performance. People are much more distracted than they originally were which means less work is being carried out than before the openness and transparency in the office. The article is further discussing how employees’ performance is suffering as a result of the increase in evaluation of their performance. Evaluation of performance is a good thing but when there is too much evaluation, then it hinders the ability of the employees to concentrate on their work as they are constantly worried about the evaluation. The evaluation tendencies miss the whole point of just giving feedback and become much more intense eventually destroying the very performance they aim to examine and improve. Lastly, there is discussion about how transparency leads to less sharing of ideas and criticisms due to the open that has no restraints at all. When there is a little privacy amongst the employees, it means that whatever work the employees are carrying out will be theirs privately and hence they will work effectively on it without fear of competition. People openly sharing their ideas and especially in a brainstorming session leads to the less courageous or smart to cower away and clamp down on their ideas fearing they do not match. If this was however to be done in privacy without much audience, it might be easier on these employees to present their ideas and actually improve performance of the organization. b) What evidence is the article based on? The discussion described above is based on research from various organizations and institutions in different industries. This is meant to indicate that the problems of transparency do not only affect small but global companies as well. They also cut across all the industries and hence providing a reason for these transparency issues to be addressed immediately. An example of the loss in communication with the open space office redesign was based on a global company where the communication among team members reduced by almost half affecting their interaction and team performance. There was evidence from the hospital about a doctor’s privacy being necessary during examination of a patient. The privacy in this case positively affects the feedback provided by doctors to the relatives of the patient. If the space was open and numerous evaluations keep on being thrown at the doctor, it would interfere with his work hindering performance and actually causing more damage. The presence of too much transparency impedes performance as people get nervous to perform effectively as the example of a jazz player is provided as reference. The anxiety caused by imagining the number of people watching the performance and the feedback they will provide impedes performance more than enhance it. If the individual however practices in private, they are bound to gather confidence to perform publicly (Bernstein, 2015). c) What implicit assumptions underlie the story? The article makes an implicit assumption that transparency in an office through office redesign to be much more open is a contemporary issue in each and every organization and hence the dire need to be addressed. This is a huge assumption and especially because it lacks substantial statistical evidence of the number of organizations being affected by the transparency problem. The other assumption made in the article is that a little privacy in the office will positively rectify the problems of transparency and automatically improve the performance amongst the employees of the organization. These issues are not as black and white as the article tries to make them. The issues of communication for example maybe much deeper than made to believe and hence need much more research of their root causes rather than just attempt to fix with privacy. If communication is hindered by other things, then the solutions mentioned above will not solve the problem or improve the communication and might even make the issue worse than it already was. The assumption that each and every employee with a record of being an underachiever or not as smart will have his performance improve with less evaluations and more privacy through boosting of his confidence is a huge assumption. There are individuals whose have weak personalities and hence no matter what cannot compete with those with stronger personalities no matter what is done. 3. What are the implications for organizational research and practice? Do article findings lead to further questions? The article findings lead to more questions being asked and which demand for more research and especially on the implicit assumptions discussed above. The findings of the article indicate that each organization is different and may therefore have different impact to the organizational research and their practice and hence this should be considered in the next researches as well. The other implication is that the individuals in the organization rather than the organizational and research issues maybe the problem hindering performance and hence need to be studied on their own first. References Bernstein, E. (2015, February 22nd). The Smart Way to Create a Transparent Workplace. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-smart-way-to- create-a-transparent-workplace-1424664611 Nelson, T. & Quick, J. (2006). Organizational behavior: foundations, realities & challenges. New York: Thomas South-Western. Read More