communication technology can affect organizational behavior

3 ways that communication technology can affect organizational behavior

Due to the ability of employees to interact effectively and receive prompt feedback on pressing issues, communication technology enables flexible working schedules. Technology that facilitates effective communication improves management of personnel, lowering interactions between the workforce and supervisors during events like teleconferencing. Finally, the use of communication technologies can encourage quick responses to tasks with a short deadline (Zhou, 2011,p.67-81).

The difference between a team or group’s “task” and “maintenance” functions should be described and explained.

The task functions specify how the team interprets the aims and objectives of the task at hand and detail the actions will implement in order to realize these goals. On the other hand, maintenance functions are concerned with the regulation of factors that influence the performance of tasks, thus acting as a method of propulsion to the realization of task goals and purpose. Task functions involve how to implement the obligations in order to obtain the purpose while maintenance functions act as “watchdogs” for successful implementation of group tasks (Muchiri et al., 2011,p.295-302).

2.1 Decision Making between Mayor and City Council

As a mediator, I will allow the city council to make the decision on such a contentious issue. The decision on where to locate the construction of a new community center should be exercised with impartiality. The city council is a team of qualified employees with relevant skills to run surveys and interviews in the community in order to obtain concrete information from the people on their views about the upcoming project. Conversely, if this decision-making is left to the Mayor, a single person, he might be deficient in time to gather relevant and adequate information from the people in the respective community.

Otherwise, the City council is likely to make decisions based on consideration of people’s views and facts while Mayor’s decision is likely to be out of intuition and personal views. Moreover, the city council protects the rights of the community in that there is assurance of transparency due to impartiality in decision-making. On the contrary, personal interests and corruption from different sources may influence the mayor’s decision.

However, the limitation of letting the City council make the decision is that there is no particular individual to hold responsible for performance or failure of the project. Moreover, in this context, there is limited time to gather concrete information from the community and consultations that are prone to possible resistance (Hwang, 2012).

2.2 Recent job design approaches in U.S., Japan, and Germany and their impact on Organizational Behavior

To begin with, United States is one of the best performing developed nation in the global economy. In regards to that, the country is focusing on improving the living standards of all the employees and maintaining high standards of living through job enrichment and job enlargement. Private corporations dominate the United States economy and individual employees are striving to make a way out to bigger jobs that can sustain them in such a huge economy. On the other hand, Japanese job design approaches are more of job rotation and scientific management.

Perhaps the phenomenon is inclined to industrial nature of the country’s economy and a relatively high population that discourages job enrichment practices. Japanese industrial economy faces a lot of competition from counterparts such as China and some Europeans countries thus limiting her job design to job rotations in order to improve employee productivity, rather than endow them with new tasks.

Lastly, Germany is another developed nation with an optimum population base. Her economy allows application of three types of job design, that encompass job rotation, enlargement, and scientific management. Job enrichment and enlargement in practices in this country, however, face difficulties due to reducing the workforce to work under new bosses. This forces the employers to outsource and recruit foreign taskforce.

There is a similarity in all the countries on wide range application of scientific management of their job designs in order to ensure employee satisfaction in their respective workplaces. Using these various approaches suits the organization structure in the respective nations thus fostering motivation among the employees. This phenomenon is associable to their prowess in economic growth and development (Kliff, 2010,p.309-318).

References

Hwang, C. L., & Lin, M. J. (2012). Group decision making under multiple criteria: methods and applications (Vol. 281). Springer Science & Business Media.

Kilduff, M., & Brass, D. J. (2010). Job design: A social network perspective. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 31(2‐3), 309-318.

Zhou, T. (2011). Understanding online community user participation: a social influence perspective. Internet research, 21(1), 67-81.