Current Issues in Management
Introduction
Improvement and change are two of the important concepts of management in an organization. Naturally, these two significant concept allow organization perform effectively and provide the expected outputs. In order to do these, the cooperation and contribution of the employees must be present. However, without the provision of due support from the management, the employees may not be directed towards the achievement of the company’s objectives. It is then essential that the managers employ the appropriate instruments that will encourage the employees to perform at their best. In turn, this will promote the achievement of continuous change and improvement within the organization. This paper then aims to identify the different issues and trends in management.
Current Issues in Management
Corporate Social Responsibility
Business culture has turned its focus when the businesses penetrate globally. There had been dispute, argument, confusion and debate towards the subject “social responsibility” in business arena. Many believed that it is a tool to change the business set up to promote a more well working environment. However, there are also cynical about the existence of social responsibility and its role in managing the business. Even so in history, the topic of social responsibility has received so much attention when it first came into popularity in the developed world. It became controversial because of its inconsistencies with the free enterprise system. However, whenever we view today’s scenario, there are indications that social responsibility has become an obligation for any business, and that it is permanent fixture on the corporate business scene ( 1999).
Along with this is the question: Has social responsibility shows significance in managing today’s organization than ever? The term corporate social responsibility becomes an increasingly important issue especially to U.S. businesses that it has become so prevalent as to have become almost devoid of meaning (2000).
In the recent years, many academic paraphernalia have recognized business to be socially responsible. These books educate us that changing societal expectations demand an increased level of participation by business in the social arena. We read and teach about the good, “interactive,” and “proactive,” companies that influence their external environments in positive ways, and how these companies do better than the bad “inactive” or “passive” companies. This concept is similar to teaching “leadership” which is also currently in vogue on many campuses. There is a growing consensus that business schools must teach more of the traditionally “soft” skills, and less of the more concrete courses associated with business (2002).
According to (1999), both scholars and corporate stakeholders have expressed uncertainty and hesitant set of attitudes over the question of effectiveness of business entities meeting their social responsibilities. Corporate stakeholders have considerably shown mixed attitudes towards the issue. At times, they expressed respect toward corporations and their top executives while at other, they felt disappointment and criticisms. With the fast growing private sectors in many developed nations led by the United States, several writings praised the skills, decision-making and even values of corporate leaders. And yet as the year drew close to 90s, the public was experiencing largely negative attitudes towards corporations and the handling of their social responsibilities, whether toward their stockholders or their inner and outer communities ( 1999). A good example has been provided by Boiral (2003) in the case of Starbucks outlets in the United States. Starbucks, a specialty coffee built up its image and competitiveness around “corporate social responsibility activities.” However, it has recently come under attack by NGOs for failing to open up its social responsibility programmes to independent verification.
Over the years, in an effort to explain the complexity of social responsibility, businesses and academic researchers alike have displayed increased levels of enthusiasm for corporate social responsibility (CSR). Essentially, they contend that CSR may be the excellent instrument to enhance the legitimacy of the firm among stakeholders and develop positive social responsibility images.
Other studies attested to the relevance of social responsibility in managing business. In a study conducted by and (2002) on sustainable development, 95% percent of the respondents recognized that sustainable development was important to their business. When the respondents were asked about the changes their company has to undertake in order to attain sustainable development, they aligned that corporate social responsibility is the big factor that is the most important in their organizations. The researchers conclude that there is a significant opportunity to connect business needs of sustainability to corporate social responsibility.
To explore more about the issue social responsibility, (2002) compared insights of businesses in U.S. and Europe towards the issue of responsibility. Based on their findings, it clearly show that companies based in different countries hold substantially different perspectives on how important it is to publicly perceived as socially responsible and which issues of social responsibility are more important to emphasize.
In this respect, it is illustrated that businesses from different countries do not show the same level of dedication to being perceived as socially responsible.
Moreover, it is also attested that firms across countries have variety of principles, processes and stakeholder issues to express that they are responsibly committed.
People expect firms not only to perform the traditional function of providing goods and services to all citizens who are willing to pay for them, but also to help society solve its problems. If these things are generally seen as desirable, and the firm does them, then it is socially responsible. If the firm does not, then some people may feel it is irresponsible.
What is a proper foundation for social responsibility? According to texts, the proper foundation of social responsibility generally lies to the fact that social responsibility involves questions of ethics, legality, economic costs, and management judgement. In general, a company that is ethical will be socially responsible. But, the core of the problem for teachers of social responsibility lies with the question, “can there be ethical behavior without a pure motive?” Can social responsibility be divorced from ethics? Can social responsibility be employed as a cynical device, a mere marketing tool? Obviously, the answer is that it can. Some authors of business texts admit that there can be no ethical conduct without intent to do right ().
Staff Retention and Knowledge Management
Knowledge has always been an intangible concept. We know that it is the pillar of strength of every individual as well as the core of every political society. It is a complex concept that all activities and every human development are attributed to it. Even the vastness of scientific fields is rooted to the concept of basic human knowledge.
In the past centuries, people have recognized the indispensability of knowledge. We even accepted the principle that knowledge itself is power. It is the fuel, which runs the engine of human interaction and organization ( 2001). However, intangible as it is, it was considered as a mere idea that exists like the air that we breathe. Humans deemed it to be always there when the need arises, thus, notwithstanding its importance; it was never a subject of a closer scrutiny as compared to the attention given to the sciences that emanated from it.
During the turn of the millennium and the emergence of the global economy, organizations, especially the financial institutions, have formulated a systematic manner of handling this knowledge power. Knowledge remains to be the primary asset of companies- a leading indicator is the extent to which they invest on human capital development ( 2002). Contemporary corporate management specifically, the financial sector had been increasingly aware of the future benefits of organizing ideas to have a aggressive advantage over others. All its elements, such as the ideas, advanced technology, modern machinery as well as the human minds, have been pooled altogether to form a scientific scheme now commonly known as KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT is the collection of processes that govern the conception, distribution, and consumption of knowledge. In one form or another, knowledge management has been around for a very long time. Practitioners have included philosophers, priests, teachers, politicians, scribes, librarians, etc.
In business terms, knowledge management is a discipline best described as a continuing process that focuses on the creation of business performance enhancements–focused on people and not technology ( 2001). While technology enhances the feasibility of transferring knowledge between people, knowledge management includes creating and sharing knowledge as an organizational asset to drive the business. (1999), on the other hand did not center his definition on any aspect. (1999) defined knowledge management as comprising of any process or practice of creating, acquiring, capturing, sharing and using knowledge, wherever it resides, to enhance the learning and performing in organizations. Moreover, the value proposition of knowledge management states that there are fundamental business reasons and expected benefits for pursuing this process approach. There are gains the organization can achieve by using knowledge management to measure results, such as creating an Intranet and knowledge repositories (2001).
In the past, knowledge management among organizations/companies is being practiced through organizational libraries, formal training and education programs, mentoring and apprenticeship systems ( 19940 These are evidences proving the fact that organizations have been doing different means to manage knowledge and provide for its transfer among the workforce. Since then several developments concerning the approach to knowledge management has been developed. These approaches are a product of a considerable number and time of researches done.
Over the years, the extensive research on knowledge management identified a lot of different approaches to the practice of knowledge management. In fact these researches were able to determine which particular approach is compatible for a specific organization ( 1994). This proves the fact that the actual way that knowledge management is implemented in an organization varies widely according to the types of organization, its industry and culture. Some o the most common approaches to knowledge management includes; approach through innovation, quality control, knowledge technology, human resource management, intellectual capital, strategic approach, network approach, learning organization approach, and Information and Communication Technology approach.
Knowledge management can be approached from the perspective of innovation. This perspective has an emphasis on research and development and marketing (2001). More specifically the approach manages knowledge related to the acquirement of new products and services. The approach through innovation is particularly applicable to the recently popular software industry. For this industry, it is very important that new innovations are acquired as well as preserved in the organization since there is a very strict competition among companies in this industry. Furthermore, the modern consumers are increasingly demanding for innovative products and services necessary for the modern world.
An approach through quality control is basically aimed at the improvement of the quality of the products of a particular organization by means of quality safeguarding systems (1994). This approach is applicable to organizations involved in the manufacturing industry. The learning organization approach as well as the organizational approach is more general compared to the approach from the perspective of quality control. These two focuses on the whole organization, in other words knowledge management is aimed at organizational development.
Knowledge management approached from the point of view of knowledge technology has an emphasis on the transfer of knowledge. Transfer of knowledge in this scenario is made explicit in knowledge systems (2001). This approach is similar to the network approach. Like the former approach, the network approach is centered on knowledge sharing or the transfer of knowledge within the organization. In the network approach, knowledge is shared through an intensified collaboration agreements and alliances. A more advanced and comprehensive approach in terms of knowledge transfer is the information and communication technology approach. The ICT approach emphasizes on the contribution of information and communication technology to the co-ordination, communication and sharing of knowledge. This approach is also in a larger scale compared to the other two. That is, the ICT approach maximizes the use of the Internet and all the available resources of the advanced technology in knowledge management. This is particularly applicable to organizations operating internationally.
The approach to knowledge management from the perspective of the human resource management can be considered as the universal approach. That is, this can be applied to any industry, organization and company. Knowledge management through the human resources managers deals with self-governing teams, co-operation, motivation and stimulation of (natural) leadership to learn people in organizations to adjust and to change. In this approach, the human resource managers who are the most experienced when it comes to managing people are the major players. Since the people involved in the organization determine knowledge, it is a good practice that knowledge management is practiced together with human resources management (1994).
Organizations may choose to adopt any one of these approaches or combine several approaches that are applicable for their company. Organizations and companies of today are being confronted with a lot of different choices concerning knowledge management. Of all these approaches, however, three general approaches stand out (2002):
Team Building
Teams are valued in large part for their outcomes whether the team won the basketball tournament, whether the army won the battle and so forth. However, such outcome often contains variance attributable to factors other than teamwork. Team process measures may give people a true picture of team functioning than do outcome measures. Over the past decades, much research has been devoted to the investigation of team leadership and performance (2000) as the communication involves the active exchange of information between more members of the teams providing information to others in the appropriate manner.
Team leadership is includes the direction and structure provided by formal leaders as well as by other members (1998)). Team leadership implies that planning and organizing activities have enabled team members to respond as a function of the behaviors of others. Monitoring team performance is a crucial component (1999) which refers to the observation and awareness of activities and performance of other team members and that team members are competent in their individual tasks and have a substantive understanding of the tasks of other members.
Therefore, before a group of individuals can function effectively as a team, the members must have the technical knowledge and skills to perform their own tasks ( 1997). In the workforce managers wants his team members to have positive attitudes toward the team and its task and support for accomplishing team goals and knows their own tasks and those of other members with whom they interact with as it allows the team members to coordinate their activities by monitoring the performance of other members, communicating with them and providing assistance when needed and then the team leaders and its members focus their attention and concern on improving teamwork rather than on individual success and performance.
Members of highly interdependent teams experience to receive more training in order to assure development of shared cognitive models (2003) Basically, teams have been most effective when the leaders are directive and the team members are open and not afraid to speak up (1999) as these traits may influence the leader’s and members’ abilities of how to interact with team members, thereby affecting positively on team leadership and performance. If a team member believes for the lacking of certain team performance it will alter the individual’s cognitive model negatively affecting its performance.
A condition of leadership teams is that the individual leaders form a coordinated and cohesive authority and decision-making structure presenting a unified front to the subordinate group. In particular, confusion over role definition and scope of responsibility between leaders can lead to an overlap of functions, lack of mutual trust and tension between the leaders (1982). In addition, because of absences during work, leaders must be able to step smoothly into higher level roles as well as trust and respect that leaders’ exhibit that could be crucial for such continuity of better leadership and performance in teams.
Many business organizations are concerned about team leadership and performance of their employees that deepens the skills and competencies of their leaders. Most organizations recognize that effective team leadership is one of the most powerful competitive advantages an organization can have which leads one to believe that few organizations are evaluating the effectiveness of their team development programs that will result in improved team skills (1999). Companies as of today are facing a multitude of outcome-based demands regarding their team performance from a variety of driving forces including increased competition and national standards.
There are challenges that confront managers to varying degrees in each of the team structures. These challenges include: (1971).
Ø Power struggles as boundaries of authority and responsibility overlap
Ø Conflict with respect to the use of shared resources
Ø The integration required to coordinate work across projects
Ø The challenge of securing team member motivation and commitment to such outcomes
Many of the increased demands of managing a full complement of dedicated team members’ attention to team selection become more important. Working in a team with dedicated teammates increases the opportunity for role conflicts as well as interpersonal conflicts. Furthermore, team priorities may become unclear as the team members impose priorities based on personal interests as influenced by the priorities of certain functional discipline. Selecting collaborative team members appears to be particularly important for the teams because the team members and the manager will work together almost constantly for the duration of the business project.
Analysis and Conclusion
Even though the issues in management are tackled in its complexity, it is no doubt that corporate social responsibility, staff retention and Knowledge management and team building play a great role in developing today’s business world. They may either contribute to efficiency, effectiveness, success or failure. What is important is that we are becoming more aware each day. No doubt that in this era, social responsibility should become every business’ obligation.
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