Effect of Globalisation on Organisational Behaviour

Organization behavior is a subject that analyzes the behavior of people in group and attempt
to create efficient and effective business environment.

Globalization is the process that improves the interaction through integration of society,
culture, politics and business across the world. Globalization is the integration of any market
with the global economy.

In short, Globalization refers to the complex economic networks of international competition,

resource suppliers, and product markets.

As globalization has fostered the thought of multiculturalism, the relationship between culture and
organizational behavior has become increasingly valued.

Today organizations become more global; workforce of an organization made up of people

belongs to different nation and different culture. This diversity in workforce has created a
large shift in organization behavior. Global organizations bring diverse people together. These
diverse persons have different values, beliefs, and ethics. Besides, there are gender, age, race,
ethnicity differences among them. Management of diverse people gives new roles to the
leaders in the organizations.

Cultural diversity is geared toward having a deep respect and understanding of the various
people in the organization. This aspect of the organization is strengthened by having
feedback, teamwork, team-building activities and interpersonal communication. During such
engagements, individuals are able to interact and appreciate each other’s culture;
consequently, an accommodating culture and organizational behavior is established within
the organization.

Globalization and Leadership: Leadership might be universal in terms of a kind of social

process but that the content of leadership was affected by the culture. Different cultures
would lead to different contents, styles and effectiveness of leadership. In most situations,
leadership styles might not reveal leaders’ personal will, but reflect the culture and tradition
of the societies they are in. Moreover, the effectiveness of leadership would also be
influenced by local social context. For example: Defining, measuring and rewarding
performance in the same way does not work well across functions, business units and
occupations (See “Rewarding Performance: Guiding Principles; Custom Strategies”). In a
diversified workforce employees have varied beliefs, ethics, values, priorities and perception.
So, to keep that diversified workforce as a whole unit, compatible with the overall
organizational strategy is huge challenge for leaders. Today in a globalized scenario cross-
cultural management must give more emphasis on 3R rule-

▪ Recognize cultural difference.

▪ Respect people’s right to differ.
▪ Reconcile the issues differences create.
Multi-cultural Team: Multicultural team can provide strategic advancement for an
organization. However, some researchers argued that transnational team (cultural difference,
electronic communication, lack of monitoring etc.) reduces the salience of team identity
which leads to team-withholding behavior. However culturally diverse team, work as or more
effectively as a homogeneous team when leadership helps to prevent communication
breakdown. In fact, global virtual teams are more effective when they impose formal
temporal coordinating mechanism and develop norms for meaningful participation. However,
there is a high chance that identities become salient in a multicultural team when either most
or very few of their fellow members belongs to a particular country of origin. But highly
heterogeneous teams sometimes outperform moderately heterogeneous team because they
avert subgroup fictionalisation and faultiness.

The patterns of behavior in the organization are influenced by the nature of interactions and
degree of diversity within the organization. The business, therefore, should seek to create an
organizational culture that not only enhances the diversity of its workforce composition but
also boosts individual performance. The positive influences of cultural diversity not only
enable the organization to increase the scope of its reach — the business also receives
favorable exposure from every sector of the population due to its multicultural approach.

The modern world is smaller yet global market that undergoes rapid change. Today, we are
confronted with the scenario of a changing workforce that is multicultural and diverse in
beliefs, ethnicities and behaviours. For instance, in the United States one-quarter of the
American workforce is represented by minorities with this figure expected to grow in the
future. Also, women account for fifty percent of the paid workforce in the United States.