Discipline of Management - Essay Example

The workplace of the 21st century is quite different from the workplace of the mid-20th century. There has occurred a lot of technological advancement ever since which has had a revolutionary effect on business practices as a result of which, “[t]he discipline of Management is on the threshold of radical rethinking” (Srinivasan and Dani, 2011). In addition to technological advancement, society as a whole has also undergone numerous changes that include but are not limited to cultural diversity, population growth rate, opportunities for education and employment, and traditional practices. Managers of the 21st-centuryst century workplace face new kinds of challenges that include employee retention, the flexibility of working hours, and interpersonal conflicts in the culturally diverse workplace, which were hardly ever experienced by managers of the mid-20th century.

One challenge that managers commonly face in motivating employees today is employee retention when the opportunities out there are rampant for the employees. Employees in the present age are constantly in search of better opportunities for employment where they can get better salaries and more flexibility in working hours. The Internet has increased the availability of such opportunities to the employees manifolds because of which managers face the risk of losing the employees at any time.

 Another challenge that managers face in motivating employees today is the conflict between the managerial and employee perception with respect to working hours. While in most companies, managers think that employees have to stay in the office from the start till the break-off time, employees particularly the young employees hold a different perspective; they think that they have to produce the work required of them and it should not matter whether they stay in the office to achieve that goal or elsewhere. When managers make the employees stay in the office against their will, employees’ level of motivation comes down and managers have to take additional measures to raise it back to the original level or higher.

The third challenge that managers commonly face in motivating employees today is cultural diversity. “…managing organizational behavior during changing times is challenging” (Nelson, Campbell, and Nelson, 2013, p. 12). Over the past few decades, society has become increasingly multicultural as a result of the rapid inflow of immigrants from advanced countries from developing and underdeveloped countries. As a consequence of this, the workplace has become quite diverse in all ways including the culture, gender, religion, and ethnicity of the employees. In such a culturally diverse workplace, the likelihood of interpersonal conflicts among the employees is great because of the conflicting values, beliefs, and practices of the employees. Managers find it hard to motivate employees to optimize on their potential to work hard in such an environment.

The challenges discussed in this paper i.e. employee retention, the flexibility of working hours, and interpersonal conflicts among culturally diverse employees have grown because of the modern lifestyle and the various internal and external factors affecting organizations that were inexistent 50 years ago. Therefore, managers in the contemporary workplace have to take extra pains to keep the workforce motivated.