What Are the Challenges Faced by Organizational Behavior?

Organizational behavior is the manner in which individuals and groups act and relate with each other in the workplace. Various factors influence these acts and relations, such as leadership, organizational culture, and the personal objectives of individuals within the organization. Organizational behavior influences the way managers approach the task of managing personnel in the workplace. Various challenges confront managers and the entire organization within the context of the company’s organizational behavior.

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Organizational behavior challenges require managers to implement changes to diversity, ethics, technology and globalization.

The workplace is an increasingly diverse space. There are people of different races, cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations and ages. The challenge facing managers from an organizational behavior point of view is how to manage this diversity in a way that will positively impact the organization. Managers have to move away from treating everyone alike while at the same time valuing every individual employee’s contribution to the growth of the organization so as to maintain its valuable employees. Proper HR training can help ensure that this occurs on all levels of the organization.

Corporate scandals involving unethical behavior can be made public within a short time. Organizations often have policies that facilitate ethical behavior within the workplace. The challenge for managers is to promote an ethical organizational behavior and culture such that employees will not put their individual interests ahead of organizational interests. Personal interest is an aspect of organizational behavior and managers face the task of encouraging group interest over personal interest so as to preserve ethical values.

Through globalization, organizations that were once local become global. Managers have to manage international personnel with different cultural backgrounds, work ethics and values. As such, managers have the challenge of understanding the organizational behavior of the personnel in the company's subsidiary organizations. The global manager uses this information to improve those subsidiaries' organizational behavior to tally with the overall organizational culture of the company. Resistance by the subsidiaries to this improvement is an eminent possibility.

Information technology plays an integral role in workplace communication. Additionally, workplace communication also influences how people and groups behave in the organization. Although technology brings with it efficiency in collating and disseminating knowledge, it can also alienate individuals such as the elderly within the organization. The challenge here is in finding ways in which technology promotes organizational communication and inclusion rather than exclusion and discrimination.