21st Century Organizational Trends

Summary

There are five keys which Stephen P. Borgatti identifies for the 21st century organizational trends:

• Globalization: nowadays organizations want to extend their business to other or all parts of the globe to increase more chances of sales and demand. Therefore, globalization could help organizations enhance their competition and encourage competitive attitudes of employees in the workplace. On the other hand, it can also reduce costs and improve the quality of international transportation and communication, search for unsaturated markets, and exploit regional costs and differences in expertise.

• Diversity: because of the internationalization of business, the workforce is getting more heterogeneous sexually, racially, culturally, and individually in the 21st century; the conflict and communication problems in an organization have become more complicated than before. Therefore, both organizations and employees need to possess intercultural competence to cope with different styles of interaction.

• Flexible: today, a lot of consumers want customized products, so organizations have to find a way to satisfy each customer’s needs individually. Therefore, they need to increase diversity in the workplace, increase the pace of change in technology and markets, and increase the job ability of employees.

• Flat: the structure of organizations is now becoming flatter than before. They change their organization’s structure into fewer levels of management and more empowered employees in order to make decisions quickly. They need to handle complex environments to follow the trend and satisfy customers’ needs. Consequently, the result of flat structures increase more face to face interaction and much better interaction chances among colleagues.

• Networked: because the technologies developed very fast and well, the networked organizations can have more benefits than the organizations that are not networked. They can save more time because network systems could cross unit and firm boundaries, ignoring chains of command, directly communicating with each unit; sharing information more quickly by the open computer system; increasing opportunities of outsourcing and downsizing; timely decentralizing responses to different needs in different countries…etc.

Here is a diagram linking up all the concepts above.
(Click image for larger version)
















(The dashed arrows with blue heads mean "creates the need for", while the solid arrows with black heads mean "causes" or "enables".)

Example and Self-Experience

Here is an example of the changing structure of organizations: The film industry may stand as an early adopter of new organizational forms. During the studio era of the 1920s through 1940s, for example, the industry was organized much like the vertically-integrated, mass production enterprises established in the manufacturing sector during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With the decline of the studios in the 1950s, however, came the arrival of a new system, in which the large entertainment conglomerates' role was reduced to finance and distribution, and responsibility for production shifted to a number of small firms organized on an ad hoc basis. On large projects in the film industry today, hundreds or even thousands of individuals and small entities each contribute their part to the completion of a multi-million dollar production. During the post-studio period, the power of the talent agencies, which played an important role as deal brokers, increased significantly. With the recent growth in the number and importance of films produced independently with private capital, and the fragmentation of the distribution system to accommodate this new type of picture, the industry may be entering yet another new stage.

I think the best example of 21st century trends is the environment that I study in here; the time is flexible, and I can work with people from different countries in the class; it is good to have more private time and a chance to experience different cultures' characteristics and manners.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://www.professorcezar.adm.br/Textos/21st%20Century%20Organizational%20Trends.pdf

http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP001.html