Emerging Management Concepts
1. Workforce Diversity
These are the major characteristics of modern organizations and an egressing concept of management. The number of workers at the workplace, who are different by physical and mental ability, gender orientation, social, religious, and cultural background is called workforce diversity. According to Samuel C. Certo, “Diversity is the degree of basic human differences among a given population.”
Ann Morrison, the author of ‘The New Leaders: Guidelines on Leadership Diversity in America’ has outlined the several advantages of diversity in organizations such as; gaining and keeping market share, Cost savings, Increased productivity and Innovation, and better quality management. Besides the managers also confront difiérent challenges managing workforce diversity like; sexual harassment, changing demographics, discrimination, and difficulty in managing disable workers, etc. yet promoting diversity in organizations has turned the utmost need at present context.
2. Outsourcing
Outsourcing is one of the evidential tools for increasing the quality, innovation, and development of an organization. It also has been a growing trend in most large and complex organizations. According to R.W. Griffin, “Outsourcing is the process of subcontracting services and operations to other firms that can perform them cheaper or better.” The advantages of outsourcing are; cost-saving, strategic tool beating competitors, risk transfer from firm to suppliers, improve quality of product, and transferring partial responsibilities of operations saves time.
Insourcing:
Taking back works that were outsourced earlier.
This is possible if the unions are strong (by bidding).
There are also few challenges of outsourcing such as; delayed delivery of spares and components, growing threat of suppliers, dual responsibilities of management, etc.
3. Knowledge Management
Knowledge management involves cultivating a learning culture in which organizational members systematically gather knowledge and share it with others in the organization so as to achieve better performance. This concept evolved just two decades before. Particularly knowledge management entails strategies and practices used in identifying, creating, and adopting insights and experiences in an organization. The strategies for knowledge management used in organizations are; transfer of best practitioner, rewards for knowledge sharing, knowledge fairs, master-apprentice relationship, Storytelling- a mode of transferring moral knowledge, collaborative technologies, etc. The assets of knowledge management are databases, documents, policies, procedures, experiences, and experts’ service and knowledge.
4. Learning Organization.
The accelerating pace of technology, the sophistication of customers, growing competition, and growing globalization has led modern managers to search newest approaches to management. Consequently, the learning organization has evolved as the new management concept.
According to Peter Senge, “Learning organization is one that works to facilitate the lifelong learning and personal development of all its employees while continually transforming itself to respond to changing demands and needs.” He has also identified the prominent features to this concept such as; systems thinking, shared vision, challenging of mental models, team learning, and personal mastery. The large organizations who have adopted this concept have gained advantages like; continuous improvement, quality improvement, enhances organization change, fostered successively, and replacement planning of human resources.
