Managing People and Organizations - Essay Example

There is still some disagreement over the topics that contribute to the composition of the framework for organizational behavior but most people agree that the core topics, part of it would include motivation, leader behavior, leadership power, interpersonal communication, attitude development and perception, learning, group structure and processes, work stress, change processes and conflict management (Robbins, 2004). Now incase of Organizational Behavior, diversity usually refers to workforce diversity.

Workforce diversity refers to the increasing heterogeneity of organizations with the inclusion of workers from different groups. These groups may be created on the basis of ethnicity, age, gender, marital status, immigrants, etc. The key, however, to managing workforce diversity is to bring about flexibility in the organization's culture (Robbins, 2004). The organization might need to come up with better work schedules, compensation plans, physical and work settings, benefits and employees' other varied needs, such as offering child and elder care, job sharing, flexibility in work hours, etc.

Communication, in general, can be defined as the transfer and understanding of meaning or ideas or information (Griffin, Moorehead, 2009). This is basically how information and ideas can be conveyed and hold due relevance for an organization. As the world has globalized, information has become an organization's most vital resource, and organizations are willing to invest heavily in ensuring the secure and efficient flow of information from one part of the organization to another.Perfect communication, if such a thing were to exist, would only be achieved if an idea or message was transmitted in such a manner that the picture perceived by the receiver would exactly be the same as envisioned by the sender (Robbins, 2004).

The organization, in general, is composed of people, i.e. individuals. So, one way of looking at an organization's effectiveness and efficiency would be to look at aggregating the efficiency and effectiveness of all the individuals who are part of the organization. So, Organizational Behavior would tend to focus on factors that may impact the efficiency and effectiveness of an employee. Now there can be a variety of aspects of the organization's culture or the work environment that may negatively impact an individual's effectiveness and efficiency, which may ultimately hurt the organization in the long run.

So, the idea is to tweak and change the work environment, so as to raise the level of effectiveness and efficiency of the organization. Factors such as employee morale, compensation, the flexibility of the work environment and leadership play a very vital role in it (Griffin, Moorhead, 2009). These factors result in defining the commitment levels of the individual and ultimately the entire organization.The concept of a learning organization was something managers and organization theorists came up with in response to the growing interdependence of organizations in times of globalization and change.

In simple terms, a learning organization is one that has the capacity to continuously adapt and change given the dynamic nature of the macro or external environment.Just as individuals learn, so do organizations, i.e. all organizations learn whether they consciously choose to or not, in order for their sustained existence learning is a basic requirement.