chapter - Pearson
chapter - Pearson
chapter - Pearson
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Chapter 1<br />
Organizational Behavior and Management<br />
Increasing Responsiveness to Customers<br />
21<br />
Because organizations compete for customers, training workers to be responsive to<br />
customer needs is important for all organizations but particularly for service organizations.<br />
Organizations such as retail stores, banks, and hospitals depend entirely on<br />
their employees’ performing behaviors that result in high-quality service at reasonable<br />
cost. As the United States has moved to a service-based economy (in part<br />
because of the loss of manufacturing jobs abroad), managing behavior in service<br />
organizations has become an increasingly important area of study. 24<br />
Reengineering<br />
A complete rethinking and<br />
redesign of business processes to<br />
increase efficiency, quality, innovation,<br />
or responsiveness to customers.<br />
Restructuring<br />
Altering an organization’s structure<br />
by such actions as eliminating a<br />
department.<br />
Outsourcing<br />
Acquiring goods or services from<br />
sources outside the organization.<br />
Freelancers<br />
Independent individuals who contract<br />
with an organization to perform<br />
specific services.<br />
New Ways to Increase Performance<br />
Investing in employee skills and abilities to increase organizational performance is<br />
not the only way U.S corporations have responded to an increasingly competitive<br />
global environment. To reduce costs and increase efficiency, some companies have<br />
responded by reengineering and restructuring their organizations. Reengineering<br />
involves a complete rethinking and redesign of business processes to increase efficiency,<br />
quality, innovation, or responsiveness to customers. A company that engages<br />
in reengineering examines the business processes it uses to produce goods and services<br />
(such as the way it organizes its manufacturing, sales, or inventory), and the way<br />
its business processes interact and overlap, to see whether a better way of performing<br />
a task can be found. 25 Today, the use of new information technology plays a major<br />
part in most reengineering efforts. 26<br />
A company that engages in restructuring makes a major change in an organization’s<br />
structure, such as eliminating a department or reducing the number of layers<br />
of management, to streamline the organization’s operations and reduce costs.<br />
Restructuring and reengineering often result in many workers’ being laid off. The<br />
smaller workforces that remain are retrained to increase efficiency; once again using<br />
new information technology, they learn how to perform at a higher level, and they<br />
learn new skills. Organizational behavior researchers have been interested in the<br />
effects of layoffs not only on workers who lose their jobs but also on employees who<br />
remain in the organization. General Motors and IBM are among the organizations<br />
that have laid off hundreds of thousands of employees in their efforts to increase<br />
organizational performance.<br />
To reduce costs, many organizations do not rehire laid-off workers as full-time<br />
employees even when demand for their products picks up; instead, they employ parttime<br />
workers, who can be given lower wages and fewer benefits. It has been estimated<br />
that 20 percent of the U.S workforce today consists of part-time employees<br />
who work by the day, week, month, or even year for their former employers. Parttime<br />
workers pose a new challenge for managers’ human skills because part-time<br />
workers cannot be motivated by the prospect of rewards such as job security, promotion,<br />
or a career within an organization.<br />
Organizations are also engaging in an increasing amount of outsourcing.<br />
Many organizational tasks are performed not within the organization but on the outside,<br />
by freelancers. Freelancers are independent individuals who contract with an<br />
organization to perform specific services; they often work from their homes and are<br />
connected to an organization by computer, phone, fax, and express package delivery.<br />
Because freelancing is expected to increase as organizations outsource more and<br />
more of their tasks to reduce costs, managers will face new kinds of problems in their<br />
efforts to manage organizational behavior.<br />
Reengineering, restructuring, downsizing, hiring part-time workers, and outsourcing<br />
are just a few of the many new ways in which organizations are utilizing human<br />
resources to reduce costs and compete effectively against domestic and global competi-