Organizational Environments in the 21st Century, Essay Example

The 21^st century is all of thirteen years old. Historian Eric Hobsbawm proposed that the twentieth century did not begin until 1914, so it may be that the 21^st century has not yet actually started yet. In this paper, therefore, organizational change will be viewed as a continuum. The “21^st century” is just a term for today’s date. Still too new, it lacks any real historical depth.

For managers today, the latest innovations that are now driving organizational change are well in place: the Web, social media, and the general drive to decentralize, be it in the form of emerging decentralized currencies to working at home to Bring Your Own Device, (termed BYOD). Such factors can go under the single heading entitled “Networks” (Preece, McLoughlin, & Dawson, 2000). A somewhat broader heading has also been claimed: “Work in the 21^st Century” (May). Work is what organizations are all about. What is so unique about their environments today and the role that managers play within it?

Scholar.google.com brings many treatises, most behind paywalls and most beyond the scope of this paper. One cannot imagine Gates, Jobs, Brin, Page, and Zuckerberg having spent time on their like. However, their Human Resources (HR) departments might. HR departments are all about work environments, and are increasingly seen in some fields as proactive players in recruitment and training, being more and more data driven (Garvin, 2013). This is new.

In the title of this paper, if one replaces Changing with Responding, things are seen more clearly. Managers must respond. If they don’t, they fail. This is why governments and their service organizations have a much harder time changing: they feel less of a need to change when their funding is protected politically. Postal systems exemplify this (Biggart, 1977). Many recent commercial enterprises have come about due to a response to something — an innovative idea using presently available technology, examples being Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Older companies exploit the ongoing development of new microchip technology, examples being Intel, Apple, and Microsoft. The managerial environment of all such companies is one of fast response.

One can also replace Changing in the title with Unchanging. Ultimately, as young companies grow, they quickly loose their initial creativity and must buy it from others. That is why Microsoft bought PowerPoint, Google bought YouTube, Facebook bought Instagram, and Twitter bought TweetDeck. In each case, managers were unable to incentivize creativity or hire the personnel needed for project success. From creation to predation is the arc that many companies will follow. That will not be changing because it is a successful model of adaptation.

Companies that are not particularly new are also changing fundamentally to survive, and not merely by acquisition. Consider enterprises in such established fields as basic electronics and electronic appliances, packaging, household products, retail, entertainment, and the travel and hotel industries. Whether they are long-established or new, they have a common range of organizational and managerial environments. In what way are they changing today? Perhaps Yochai Benkler of the Yale Law School said it best: “The economic role of social behavior is increasing” (Axelrod, 2006). But then the economic value of social behavior always increases when it is allowed to earn a reward. From northern Italy — identified in 1984 as a hotbed of innovation — to Silicon Valley, clusters of entrepreneurs living and working closely together borrow and exchange ideas and people (Piore & Sabel, 1984). Such companies are increasingly making themselves the product. Managers are doing this by maintaining a unique, core ideology that their companies revolve around. This can lead to a benign sort of cult mentality centered on customer service and even environmental awareness. Examples range from older firms like Home Depot and Disney and Patagonia to Zappos (now — true to form — a part of Amazon).

Increasingly, effective managers are identifying their own goals with their employers’.

References

Axelrod, V. G. (2006). Emerging 21st Century Organization Models and Methods. New York: Milano: The New School for Management and Urban Policy.

Biggart, N. W. (1977). Process of Organizational Change: The Case of the Post Office. Administrative Science Quarterly, 410-426.

Eden, L., & Molot, M. A. (1996). Made in America? The US Auto Industry, 1955-95. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons. Retrieved from http://www.voxprof.com/eden/Publications/madeinustheusautoindustry.pdf

Garvin, D. A. (2013, December). How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management/ar/1

May, K. E. (n.d.). Work in the 21st Century: Implications for Selection. Retrieved from Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology: http://www.siop.org/tip/backissues/TIPDec95/may.aspx

Piore, M. J., & Sabel, C. F. (1984). The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York : Basic Books.

Preece, D., McLoughlin, I., & Dawson, P. (2000). Technology, Organizations and Innovation: Towards ‘real virtuality’? London: Routledge.