Session-4

OB- Challenges and Opportunities

UPO-Session 4- L. Gandhi,
SDMIMD
 Responding to Economic
pressures

• Recession in US- 2008

• Behavior of managers

UPO-Session 4- L. Gandhi,
SDMIMD
• Managing at good times
• Managing at bad times
• Survival vs failure
• TATA steel Talbort plant
Responding to Globalization (1991)

• Increased foreign assignments

UPO-Session 4- L. Gandhi, SDMIMD

• Working with people from different
cultures

• Overseeing movement of jobs to

countries with low-cost labor
Infosys- 2014
• Total employees- 1.6 lakh

• 34.7 % female workers

• People represent 98 nationalities

UPO-Session 4- L. Gandhi,
SDMIMD
• Working from 32 countries
Workforce Diversity

• Organizations are becoming more

UPO-Session 4- L. Gandhi, SDMIMD

heterogenous in terms of gender, age,
race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and
inclusion of other diverse groups
Levels of diversity
• Surface-level diversity

• Differences in easily perceived characteristics such as gender,

race, ethnicity, age or disability that do not reflect in the ways

UPO-Session 4- L. Gandhi,
SDMIMD
people think or feel, but they may activate certain stereotypes

• Deep-level diversity

• Differences in values, personality and work preferences that

become progressively more important for determining
similarity as people get to know one another better
Improving people skills
• Motivation
• Listening skills
• Team building

UPO-Session 4- L. Gandhi,
SDMIMD
Improving Customer Service

• Increased expectation of service quality (CExM)

UPO-Session 4- L. Gandhi, SDMIMD

• Customer-responsive cultures

• OB can provide considerable guidance in helping managers create such

cultures
• In which employees friendly and courteous

• Accessible, knowledgeable

• Prompt in responding to customers

• Willing to do what is necessary to please the customers

Working in networked organizations
• Non office works
(Examples)
• Software programmers
• Graphic designers

UPO-Session 4- L. Gandhi,
SDMIMD
• System analysts
• Technical writers
• Photo researchers
• Book and media editors
• Medical transcribers
Outsourcing HR activities
• Moving internal activities/responsibilities to external service providers

• Reasons for outsourcing

• Focus on core competency

• Create competitive advantage

• What can be outsourced?

• Worth of outsourcing

• $ 100 billion

• P&G singed a 10-year contract of $400 million with IBM for employee services
96,000 employees
80 countries
payroll processing, benefits
administration, compensation,
expatriates relocation services
travel management
Ethical HR
• Ethical hiring
• Environment to support ethics
• HR Managers need to practice ethics
• HR Mangers regrettably accept bribe
• Dishonest Managers can only make others
dishonest