chapter - Pearson
chapter - Pearson
chapter - Pearson
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20<br />
Chapter 1 Organizational Behavior and Management<br />
Many organizations also need to increase their efficiency to survive against<br />
low-cost competition from factories in countries like Mexico or Malaysia, where<br />
workers are paid only $5 a day. Many jobs have already been lost to low-cost nations,<br />
and if further job losses are to be prevented, new ways must be found to encourage<br />
workers to increase efficiency. In this as in many other areas, pressures from the<br />
global environment have increased the pressure on organizations in the United<br />
States to find new ways to increase efficiency.<br />
Cross-functional teams<br />
Teams consisting of workers from<br />
different functions who pool their<br />
skills and knowledge to produce<br />
high-quality goods and services.<br />
Increasing Quality<br />
The challenge from global organizations such as Japanese car manufacturers and<br />
garment factories in Malaysia and Mexico has also increased pressure on U.S. companies<br />
to improve the skills of their workforces so that they can increase the quality<br />
of the goods and services they provide. One major trend in the attempt to increase<br />
quality has been the introduction and expansion in the United States of the total<br />
quality management (TQM) techniques developed in Japan. In an organization dedicated<br />
to TQM, for example, workers are often organized into teams or quality control<br />
circles that are given the responsibility to continually find new and better ways<br />
to perform their jobs and to monitor and evaluate the quality of the goods they produce<br />
(just as in the NUMMI plant). 21 Many organizations pursuing TQM have also<br />
sought to improve product quality by forming cross-functional teams in which<br />
workers from different functions such as manufacturing, sales, and purchasing pool<br />
their skills and knowledge to find better ways to produce high-quality goods and services.<br />
22 Total quality management involves a whole new philosophy of managing<br />
behavior in organizations, and we discuss this approach in detail in Chapter 19 when<br />
we discuss organizational change and development.<br />
Increasing Innovation<br />
U.S. companies are among the most innovative companies in the world, and innovation<br />
is the direct result or outcome of the level of creativity and organizational learning,<br />
as discussed above. Innovation has been<br />
defined as “the process of bringing any new<br />
problem-solving ideas into use. Ideas for<br />
reorganizing, cutting costs, putting in new<br />
budgeting systems, improving communications,<br />
or assembling products in teams are<br />
also innovations.” 23 Typically, innovation<br />
takes place in small groups or teams—real or<br />
virtual—and to encourage it, an organization<br />
and its managers give control over work<br />
activities to team members and create an<br />
organizational setting and culture that<br />
reward risk taking. Understanding how to<br />
manage innovation and creativity is one of<br />
the most difficult challenges that managers<br />
face. It especially taxes managers’ human<br />
skills, because creative people tend to be<br />
Teamwork led to innovation at Davidson Interiors, a division of Textron. One<br />
team innovated a new product called Flexible Bright, a coating that makes plastic<br />
look exactly like chrome, but does not rust or scratch. Here, the members of<br />
the team are shown holding grills coated with the new product, which Ford uses<br />
in many of its cars.<br />
among the most difficult to manage. One<br />
reason that Euan Baird leads Schlumberger<br />
is that he has a strong track record in using<br />
IT to speed the innovation process.