Organizational Behavior Trends

Organizational Behavior Trends

The current business environment poses many challenges to the organizations today. Numerous trends greatly affect organization's behavioral patterns and beliefs. They impact the way decisions are made and the employees' performances. Nowadays, decisions are based not only on step-by-step coherent choices but also on ethical foundations. Changes and trends affect the organizational behavior including management response to the needs of its employees. Innovations and technology changes how work is done and how fast it is accomplished. However, along with its advantages, the new technology can also negatively affect the organization. It is a great challenge for management to implement decisions that will recognize both the ethics and the organization's position; and the technology's effect on employees' productivity and performance. So how do managers plan and make ethical decisions? What major impact technology has on organization as a whole?

Decision making is defined as "the process of choosing a course of action for dealing with a problem or opportunity" (Hunt, Osborn and Schermerhorn, 2005). In order to arrive at a decision, one should first recognize and define the problem or opportunity, identify and carefully analyze the courses of actions and its possible effects on the person of organization. Then, a course of action must be selected for implementation and evaluation of results. These steps are known to be the fundamentals of decision making. Said steps can be appropriate for routine problems that an organization encounters. Management can easily recognize the problem and make decisions based on their past experiences and proven method. However, there are situations that can be relatively new and the above steps will not be applicable. Non-routine problems usually require the management's creative thinking and problem solving skills. Because decision making plays a major role in the success of an organization, various theories were developed. They intend to provide a clear understanding on how organization based and used their problem solving skills in arriving to an effective decision. A manager may base a decision on careful analysis of the problem, solutions with the supplied information. However, organizational realities show that decisions made are not always based on a step-by-step process. Information may not be fully supplied, creative thinking and fast action is necessary. Unfortunately, managers work at a chaotic setting and may not have enough quiet time to go through every decision that needs to be made. Decisions are often made by intuitions combined with the analytical approaches. The current workplace trends display more complex problems that organizations face, putting more pressure on decision makers. Changes in the workplace produce different stresses and strains that greatly affect the productivity and opportunities at work. Technology, organizational culture and ethics became the major issues in the decision making process (Hunt, Osborn and Schermerhorn, 2005).

The expansion of technology including the computers, cellular phones, internet and the like caused increased pressure on the workers as they are expected to work more efficiently and with greater speed and accuracy. Working with machineries requires every worker to be constantly in alert that cause mental stress. Technological breakthrough obligates employees to educate themselves with the new soft wares. They cause problems and worries on the employees. Whether or not the employee desire to cope up with the information technology, they are left without a choice but to go with the trend in order to face the challenge in their workplace. Information technology increases job demands, forces employees to adjust and adapt to change and burdens them by supplying more information they