Emerging future trends in organization design
The article Emerging Trends in Organizational Design by Jonathan Mozenter insinuates the processes of organizational design is mainly instigated by dynamic organizational challenges. Consequently, there are macro forces determining the types of organizational challenges exposed to a company such as technological advances and knowledge management. The enhanced automation and proximity abilities attributed to technological advances have allowed new organizational designs (Mozenter, 2002). These factors integrated with the fact an organization cannot rely on present actions for future success due to constant change give rise to new approaches in organizational design.
The article identifies five trends as the future of organizational design. The first is the increased acceptance and expansion of organizational design. Every organization in the future will be keenly studying and evaluating its organizational design as opposed to the past where OD did not take precedence. An indication of this trend is the increased literature reviewing the subject of OD in the age of globalization. Expansion of organizational design to accommodate the constant change and stiff competition attributed to globalization is inevitable. The access to information for benchmarking is enhanced implying the competitive advantage can only be attained by organizations ability to utilize and capitalize on the information.
The article further identifies the integration of OD into hard conventional business competencies as the future of OD. This is evidenced by the managers implementing OD elements such as mission, visions, change management and value system to create an allure of continuous learning as well as improvement. Additionally, OD will be incorporated more into the business consultation process. A prognosis indicates future success in companies will required strict adherence to OD guiding elements such as mission, vision and value system.
The third future trend in OD identified by Jonathan is increased frequency of holistic system adjustment. This means the OD practitioners will prefer systems overhauling the system from the root of the problem to a system merely isolating and dealing with the problem. In spite of holistic system overhauls being expensive, they produce long lasting change. It entails the alignment of the organizational culture and design to relevant business model. The holistic system overhaul will be necessitated by the need for enhanced nimbleness and agility since organizations are required to be quick adapters to the dynamic environment.
The facilitation of partnerships, mergers and alliances by OD is another prognosis stated in the article. A discrepancy between the need by organizations for OD interventions to ensure successful partnerships and OD specialists is noted. OD will be used to create new strategic partnerships from the traditional relationships. Some of these relationships to be enhanced by OD include the organization-supplier partnership (Mozenter, 2002). Vertical integration has its risks and logistics generating the need for OD specialists since OD competencies are required for success in such ventures. OD will be essential as companies co-operate in setting marketing standards aimed at creating leverage against competition.
The future will necessitate organizations to have their employees constantly learning to create and maintain competitive advantage. This leads to the fifth future trend in organizational design of enhancing constant learning (Mozenter, 2002). OD competences will come in handy given companies are faced by constant change making it hard to reschedule operations to allow employees to learn. The viable option available is employees learning while working making knowledge management vital. OD provides interventions facilitating this such as distance learning, system thinking and leadership development.
Reference:
Mozenter J. (2002).Emerging Trends in Organizational Development. Boston. Boston University.
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