Behavioral Model For Organizational Efficiency - Research Paper Example

Behavioral Model For Organizational Efficiency Table of contents Behavioral Model For Organizational Efficiency 1 Behavioral model for organizational efficiency 2 Current trends and its influence on organizational behavior 4 Business issues affecting IBM today 5 Organizational Culture of IBM 6 Outcomes occurring in IBM 8 Recommendations for change 10 Conclusion 11 Bibliography 12 Introduction of organizational behavior Organizational behavior can be defined as the systematic study and application of knowledge about how groups and individuals act within the organization where they work. Organizational behavior helps to become a more engaged member of organization. Organizational behavior addresses towards getting a great job, getting along with others, making more effective decisions, lowering the stress level and effective working within a team1. The management and controlling interest of a company should consider the fact that the business is a breathing and living entity. Certain companies have created an organizational architecture and model of business behavior which seems innovative in its design and is unparalleled in business. IBM is one such company. The business of IBM has over performed for over 100 years. The critical success of IBM is found in the development of its core business through decision making, organizational culture and organizational structure. Organizational behavior is a field of study investigating the impact that organizational structure, groups and individuals have on behavior within the organization with an objective of applying such knowledge towards improving the effectiveness of an organization2. The organizational behavior involves integration of studies which are undertaken in relation to the behavioral sciences like anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, political science and social psychology. So, organizational behavior provides a comprehensive field of study where the organizational structure, individual and group is studied in an environment where there is a greater impact of modern technology in relation to the culture and growth of organization. The purpose of the study is to ensure that the contribution of human behavior is towards the organizational growth which enables to achieve greater efficiency. Behavioral model for organizational efficiency Various models and concepts in the field of organizational behavior identify not only the human behavior but also makes modification of their attitude and promotion of their skill to let them act more effectively3. The models and knowledge are applied practically to groups, workers and structure of organization which provides tools for dynamics of relationship and improved behavior. The organizational behavior provides various models and systems for international relationship applicable to organizations. Leader should have the ability to describe, understand, predict and control the individual behavior in organization. A manager should be able to describe each individual’s behavior under his command, identify attitude and should pinpoint his behavior to keep the situation of organization under control. Leaders should understand the behavior of human in a particular manner and the reasons behind such behavior to take corrective actions. Through closer interaction, a leader can identify the nature of workers. Some are productive whereas some are disruptive. In such circumstances, a leader should handle each individual differently to channelize their action to higher productivity. The managers should bring control measures to divert the energy of workers towards organizational objectives4. Communication should be used for ensuring the control of individual’s behavior. Appropriate internal environment can help organization in building favorable work environment to help the groups and individuals within the organization for working effectively contributing to higher productivity. The components of organization to be managed are people, structure, technology, jobs, processes and external environment. Current trends and its influence on organizational behavior Information technology is a major force now-a-days which is driving change. The rapid integration of information is experienced across everywhere in all industries, still it is the people who direct, invent, manage and guide change in their own careers and in boundary less organization. A major factor of competitive advantage is the business and the speed of thought. Another factors contributing to competitive advantage are the development and sustainment of world class products and services with internet speed and exceeding and meeting the demand the demand of customer5. Organizations are adapting by reinventing, reengineering, rethinking the structures and strategies, restructuring and expertise around internet integrated processes of business. The information based organization has specialist knowledge workers who resist the procedures of control and command based on military model. Responsibility is taken by everyone in these workplaces. It makes flatter structures and requires simple, clear and common objectives. The changing vision unified at the managerial level in organization should be accompanied with devising a structure of management for task forces together with ensuring the preparation, supply and testing of people of top management6. Due to the activities of merger and acquisition and internationalization of business, the post-entrepreneurial aspect of managerial work is revised as it involves the application of entrepreneurial creativity and flexibility to established businesses. The modern era is accompanying boundary less corporation. So, the emphasis is put to develop cooperative relationships among external, internal and virtual teams who are the part of expanding economic enterprise. The empowered individuals are accompanied with the high performance teams to work creatively for adding value to their company and to their units. Knowledge on organizational behavior and skills of people are required in building and sustaining virtual and face to face relationships. Business issues affecting IBM today In the techno centric business world, where the problems are solved with scientific solutions, equations and algorithms, the concept of corporate culture is relegated to the status of soft value. It is difficult to measure, quantify or act directly on the culture. Though culture is considered as an important component of business, many companies are uncertain about addressing the problems when they arise. IBM also views culture as a powerful asset propelling the organization towards success. However, the workers of IBM suffer changes in culture as the jobs go global. Most people who work at IBM today do not expect long careers and the IBM school for training its staff was also shuttered long ago. Workers now have to keep up their own education to constantly compete within the organization and to reinvent themselves for maintaining their positions. Even the workers getting good performance reviews can also find themselves on street if they are deemed no longer necessary. IBM has changed in major ways mostly to the detriment of its long-time employees. In order to match lower cost rivals and to prop up its profits, the company is in a drive for curbing benefits and reducing its North American workforce by replacing thousands of US staffers with low paid hires in Brazil, India and other countries. The US workforce of IBM has reduced in the past decade and its Indian workforce has grown. There was a dramatic change at IBM. In the early 20th century, IBM treats its employees like family members with dignity by giving the company the reputation of the most progressive employers of the nation. Its workers are still among the best paid in country. However, most of the technologies invented by IBM has made it possible for people or machines to do jobs by being practically anywhere in the world. Organizational Culture of IBM IBM is an international organization headquartered at the United States and is operating in greater than one hundred and sixty countries in far-away places like Thailand, Brazil, Singapore, Hungary and Israel. The organizational culture of IBM does not exist as regional, national, cultural and linguistic variables abound. Certain key characteristics of organizational culture of IBM have been described as under. In today’s high tech world, IBM encourages and recognizes risk taking and innovation. The high tech innovation is specifically the prime reason for the dominant position of IBM in market place. Such high tech innovation is risky in terms of tremendous cost of research and development. This risk taking and innovation has benefitted IBM. IBM has granted more patents than any other company or individual. IBM has also held the number one position for patent awards. This risk taking and innovation has generated more than $1billion in licensing royalties and one third of the granted patents are in marketplace. There is a high probability of mistakes in this type of environment. Original mistakes are considered as a learning experience and expectation is made for earlier admitting the mistake early and not to repeat the same. Another characteristic is detailed attention. Management demands the employees to display expert precision, detail and analysis. This also conflicts directly with the desire of management for development time, minimal costs and other financial related matters. This has not been overcome in IBM and is a source of heated discussion. The attention to detail is still dominating and various policies have been implemented to reduce costs. One of them is a web accessible database to quantify, track, correlate, qualify and analyze all changes in production, making experiment of production and failure analysis. The next characteristic constitutes outcome orientation. The big picture or vision, outcome is regularly stressed in the department meetings held monthly. The big picture within IBM is to deliver a quality product on time, at cost and responsiveness to the needs of customers. The detail oftenly dominate most of the meetings and work time though the rate of outcome is high. A task force is in place developing the second and third generation of product. The task force has clearly defined goals to be reached. These goals are the desired outcome which should be fulfilled to have a successful outcome. Team orientation and people orientation are the next characteristics. Management is highly committed to both team and people. The informal discussions by sitting down one on one are common which regularly occurs. These discussions on one on one basis are designed for every employee with their first line manager for developing personal as well as professional relationship. The employee may discuss concerns related to work; goals and feedback of solicit performance. These meetings are held behind closed doors, no phone calls are answered and pagers are turned off. High promotion is made towards team work and the norm is to have cross functional teams. The different departments are required to work together focusing towards a common goal and meetings which can include conference calls with important sites or individuals. Aggressiveness is ranked from moderate to high. Employees are expected to be competitive and aggressive but not towards each other. Employees are expected to be aggressive towards accomplishing their goals, assignments and duties and competitive against the market or business competitors. Working time of forty five hours per week is considered the norm and many people can be found working on weekends. Management is sensitive to these extended working hours and lunch is provided free of charge for working on weekends. Stability is quite low in IBM. The managerial and personnel changes are constant. The last first line manager had held that position for less than one year before being assigned to a second line position in different program. Also within IBM, five non managerial positions have been filled this year and two more positions are available. In addition, personnel from one department are loaned to other projects or departments in the situation of assistance or crisis. These loans can last for several months, aggravating the stability further. It is relatively easy to find the help required to overcome most obstacles as the management is aware of the issues of stability. Outcomes occurring in IBM The current financial pressure had forced the business unit to discontinue funding of a promising new initiative. A study conducted by the strategy group of IBM has documented how the company had failed to capture its value from separate technologies and businesses that have been developed by the company but failed to commercialize. For example, the first commercial router was developed by IBM but its market was dominated by Cisco. Technologies had been developed by IBM for accelerating the performance of web but Akamai had the vision of capturing its market. Speech recognition software has been developed by IBM but Nuance eclipsed it. Business intelligence, technologies in RFID, pervasive computing and e-sourcing, all represented disturbing examples of missed opportunities for company. In each instance, it can be concluded that IBM had the potential to win in these markets but failed to take advantage of the opportunity. A detailed analysis of the reasons of missing these market opportunities and new technologies by IBM revealed six major reasons: Execution was rewarded by the existing management system which was directed at short term results and which does not value building of strategic business. Rewarding of dominant leadership style within the company was to make execution of immediate opportunities flawlessly without pioneering into new area. The company is pre occupied with existing offerings and current served markets. Processes were designed to listen intently to existing customers and to focus on traditional markets. This makes IBM slow to recognize the new markets and recognize the disruptive technologies. The business model emphasized on sustained profit and improvement in EPS rather than action oriented towards higher earnings or price. The emphasis was to improve the profitability of stable portfolio of business rather than accelerating innovation. The approach of the firm to using and gathering market insight is inadequate for embryonic markets. The insistence on fact based financial analysis hinders the ability of IBM to generate market intelligence for ambiguous and new markets. Market insights lacking this analysis are dismissed or ignored. There was lack of established disciplines for experimenting, selecting, terminating and funding businesses of new growth. Even after identifying the business opportunities for new growth, the existing management system of IBM fail to provide funding and the ability for developing creative new businesses was restricted. Many new ventures were failed in execution. There was absence of entrepreneurial leadership skills towards designing new models of business and building growth businesses. The persistence and patience required for new start ups was also absent. Recommendations for change The analysis and discussion generated a series of recommendation among senior management to permit the company to succeed at exploration in growth areas and exploitation in mature markets. These decisions led to the development of emerging business organization (EBO) initiative. This process enabled the company to exploit and explore, i.e., to remain competitive in mature ones and to enter into new businesses. The chronic failure of IBM was explicitly addressed by the EBO project team to successfully and rapidly pursue new opportunities in market. A foundational insight of the team was the recognition that the business portfolio of company could be divided into three horizons, current core businesses, growth businesses and future growth businesses, each type of business having unique challenges and requiring different organizational architecture. It was recommended by the team to have an explicit system providing development, founding and leadership of businesses of new growth. Moreover, an explicit and replicable process with clear senior executive ownership was needed to generate new processes and businesses permitting the company to systematically explore new opportunities of growth. A candidate for an EBO requires the business to represent a potential for revenue growth of $1B, providing cross-IBM leverage, sustained profit and market leadership and offering new source of customer value. Each EBO leader is required to report to a head of business unit like software, hardware or global services and should also report to the senior executive responsible for new growth opportunities. This dual reporting will ensure the fulfillment of milestone and allocation of resources with its collaboration across businesses and the opportunity to resolve the issues quickly. Conclusion The culture of IBM is successful as it focuses to bring up the employees from within. It creates an unyielding culture emphasizing on customer satisfaction forming most important part of its business. Overall, the organizational culture in IBM United States contributes to a pleasant and healthy job experience. There exists a shared meaning as each organization has a wide expanse of control, empowered employees and talented cross-functional teams. Moreover, entry socialization for new hires tends to be somewhat collective, informal, serial and more fixed than variable. This culture is a recent development and developed in response to tremendous downsizing IBM which went through in eighties in addition to new business development of nineties. While behaving out of norm, not many employees show outrageous behavior. Everyone tend to be groomed well with business casual dress and act professionally. In closing, the organizational culture of IBM provides a supportive framework which is technologically innovative and encourages empowerment of employee. Bibliography Cole, G. Organisational Behaviour. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1995. Print. Parikh, M, and R, Gupta. Organisational Behaviour. New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill Education Private Limited, 2010. Print. Fox, W. Managing Organisational Behaviour. South Africa: Juta & Co, 2006. Print. Griffin, R, and G, Moorehead. Organisational Behaviour: Managing People and Organizations. 10th edition. USA: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2008. Print. Murray, P, et al. Contemporary Issues in Management and Organisational Behaviour. Australia: Cengage Learning, 2006. Print. Robbins, S, et al. Organisational Behaviour. United States: Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2012. Print. Read More