External Environment
Factors, forces, situations, and events outside the organization that affect its performance.
One of the biggest mistakes managers make today is failing to adapt to the changing world. No successful organization, or its managers, can operate without understanding and dealing with the dynamic environment—external and internal—that surrounds it.
The term external environment refers to factors, forces, situations, and events outside the organization that affect its performance.
For example, a volcanic eruption in Iceland in 2010 prevented delivery of auto parts that led to a shutdown at a BMW plant in South Carolina and a Nissan Motors facility in Japan.
Components of the External Environment
the external environment includes six components:
The economic component encompasses factors such as interest rates, inflation, changes in disposable income, stock market fluctuations, and business cycle stages.
The demographic component includes trends in population characteristics such as age, race, gender, education level, geographic location, income, and family composition.
The technological component focuses on scientific and industrial innovations.
The sociocultural component is concerned with societal and cultural factors such as values, attitudes, trends, traditions, lifestyles, beliefs, tastes, and patterns of behavior.
The political/legal component looks at federal, state, and local laws, as well as other countries’ laws and global laws. It also includes a country’s political conditions and stability.
The global component encompasses issues associated with globalization and a world economy.
What Is the Economy Like Today?
◼ Global productivity still slow
◼ Global trade is sluggish
◼ U. employment is up
◼ Is the American dream still a possibility? The economic crisis that gripped the United States and other countries in 2008 appears to finally be over, though growth and productivity in Europe is still behind that of the United States. Global trade is also sluggish, prompting some analysts to ask whether the world is becoming less connected.
With an unemployment rate of just 5 percent, U. employment is up, but much of that is related to low-wage jobs. Further complicating the picture is the fact that some seven million Americans are trapped in part-time jobs, unable to find full-time positions. Moreover, just 64 percent of Americans still believe that the so-called American dream that hard work leads to success and riches is real.
Economic Inequality
Harris Interactive Poll: Only 10 percent of adults think economic inequality is “not a problem at all.”
Most survey respondents believed that it is either a major problem (57 percent) or a minor problem (23 percent). Why has this issue become so sensitive? Those who worked hard and were rewarded because of their hard work or creativity have long been admired. In the United States, that gap between the rich and the rest has been much wider than in other developed nations for decades and was accepted as part of our country’s values and way of doing things.
The Sharing Economy
Asset owners share with other individuals through peer-to- peer service, for a set fee, their underutilized physical assets or their knowledge, expertise, skills, or time.
Airbnb, Uber, Zipcar, and SnapGoods are just a few examples of a fast-growing phenomenon called the sharing economy, in which asset owners share with other individuals through peer-to-peer service, for a set fee, their underutilized physical assets or their knowledge, expertise, skills, or time.
Demographics
Demography is destiny.
Demographics refers to the characteristics of a population used for purposes of social studies. It has a significant impact on how managers manage and include such factors as age, income, sex, race, education level, ethnic makeup, employment status, geographic location, and more.
Age is a particularly important demographic for managers because the workplace often encompasses different age groups.
Baby Boomers are those individuals born between 1946 and 1964. The sheer number of people in that cohort means they’ve had a significant impact on every aspect of the external environment (from the educational system to entertainment/lifestyle choices to the Social Security system and so forth) as they’ve gone through various life cycle stages.
Gen X is used to describe those individuals born between 1965 and 1977. It followed the baby boom and is one of the smaller age cohorts.
Gen Y (or the “Millennials”) encompasses those individuals born between 1978 and 1994. From technology to clothing styles to work attitudes, Gen Y is impacting organizational workplaces.
Then, there is Gen Z—the youngest identified age group, basically teens and middle-schoolers. This group has always been digitally connected – their primary means of social interaction is online.
Demographic age cohorts are important to our study of management because large numbers of people at certain stages in the life cycle can constrain decisions and actions taken by businesses, governments, educational institutions, and other organizations.
Studying demographics involves looking at current statistics and future trends. For instance, recent analysis of birth rates shows that more than 80 percent of babies being born worldwide are from Africa and Asia. And here’s an interesting fact: India has one of the world’s youngest populations – by 2020, the median age will be 29. And by 2050, it’s predicted that China will have more people age 65 and older than the rest of the world combined.
How Does External Environment Affect Managers?
◼ Jobs and employment
◼ Assessing environmental uncertainty
◼ Managing stakeholder relationships
There are three ways that the external environment affects managers:
Its impact on jobs and employment.
The amount of environmental uncertainty.
The nature of stakeholder relationships.
As external environmental conditions change, managers face the impact of these changes on jobs and employment. Economists predict that about one quarter of the 8 million U. jobs eliminated during the most recent economic downturn won’t be reinstated.
Such readjustments create challenges for managers who must balance work demands with having enough people with the right skills to do the organization’s work.
Changes in external conditions not only affect the types of jobs available but they also affect how the jobs are created and managed. For example, many employers use flexible work arrangements and contract freelancers or temporary workers.
Assessing Environmental Uncertainty
Another constraint posed by external environments is the amount of uncertainty that exists, which can affect organizational outcomes. Environmental uncertainty refers to the degree of change and complexity in an organization’s environment. This matrix shows these two aspects. - The first dimension of uncertainty is the degree of unpredictable change; that is, a stable environment experiences minimal change and a dynamic environment experiences frequent change. For example, a stable environment might have no new competitors, few technological breakthroughs by current competitors, little pressure from groups trying to influence the organization, and so on.
The other dimension of uncertainty describes the degree of environmental complexity , which looks at the number of components in an organization’s environment and the knowledge that the organization has about those components.
Therefore, an organization with few competitors, customers, suppliers, or government agencies to deal with, or an organization that needs little information about its environment, has a less complex and more certain, stable environment, as seen in Cell 1. So how does the concept of environmental uncertainty influence managers? As illustrated here, each of the four
Google has created a creative and innovative culture at their headquarters in California with an android googleplex, bikes, and bringing your dog to work.
Organizational Culture
Organizational culture has been described as the shared values, principles, traditions, and ways of doing things that influence the way organizational members act.
Culture is:
Culture is perceived. It’s not something that can be physically touched or seen, but employees perceive it on the basis of what they experience within the organization.
Culture is descriptive. It’s concerned with how members perceive or describe the culture, not with whether they like it.
Culture is shared. Even though individuals may have different backgrounds or work at different organizational levels, they tend to describe the organization’s culture in similar terms.
Dimensions of Culture
These seven dimensions shown in Exhibit 2-4:
Range from low (not typical of the culture) to high (especially typical of the culture).
Provide a composite picture of the organization’s culture.
May emphasize one cultural dimension more than the others, essentially shaping the organization’s personality and the way organizational members work.
—Apple’s focus is product innovation (innovation and risk taking). The company “lives and breathes” new product development and employees’ work behaviors support that goal.
—Southwest Airlines has made its employees a central part of its culture (people orientation) and shows this through the way it treats them.
Learning Organizational Culture
An organization’s culture generally reflects the vision or mission of its founders, who establish the early culture by projecting an image of what the organization should be and what its values are.
Employees most commonly learn an organization’s culture through its stories, rituals, material symbols, and language.
How Does Organizational Culture Affect Managers Organizational culture affects managers in two primary ways:
Through its effect on what employees do and how they behave, and
Through its effect on what managers do as they plan, organize, lead, and control.
Ambrosia Humphrey, vice-president of talent at Hootsunite, describes how the power of organizational culture affects her as a manager. She says that a top priority for her is to nurture and nourish the company’s culture by continually creating employee experiences that reflect transparency, one of the company’s important values.
How Does Culture Affect What Employees Do?
Strong cultures:
cultures in which the key values are deeply held and widely shared.
The more employees accept the organization’s key values and the greater their commitment to those values, the stronger the culture is. Most organizations have moderate to strong cultures; that is, there is relatively high agreement on what’s important, what defines “good” employee behavior, what it takes to get ahead, and so forth. The stronger a culture becomes, the more it affects what employees do and the way managers plan, organize, lead, and control.
Strong Cultures Can:
◼ Substitute for formal rules and regulations
◼ Create predictability, orderliness, and consistency
The stronger an organization’s culture, the less managers need to be concerned with developing formal rules and regulations. Instead, those guides will be internalized in employees when they accept the organization’s culture.
If, on the other hand, an organization’s culture is weak—if no dominant shared values are present— its effect on employee behavior is less clear.
Say What?
Ten percent of executives say they have not identified or communicated an organizational culture.
Because an organization’s culture constrains what they can and cannot do and how they manage, it’s particularly relevant to managers. Such constraints are rarely explicit. They’re not written down. It’s unlikely they’ll even be spoken. But they’re there, and all managers quickly learn what to do and not do in their organization. For instance, you won’t find the following values written down, but each comes from a real organization:
Look busy even if you’re not.
If you take risks and fail around here, you’ll pay dearly for it.
Before you make a decision, run it by your boss so that he or she is never surprised.
We make our product only as good as the competition forces us to.
What made us successful in the past will make us successful in the future.
If you want to get to the top here, you have to be a team player.
“Ready-aim-fire” versus “Ready-fire-aim”
The link between values such as these and managerial behavior is fairly straightforward. Take, for example, a so- called “ready-aim-fire” culture. In such an organization, managers will study and analyze proposed projects endlessly before committing to them. However, in a “ready-fire-aim” culture, managers take action and then analyze what has been done.
If an organization’s culture supports the belief that profits can be increased by cost cutting and that the company’s best interests are served by achieving slow but steady increases in quarterly earnings, managers are unlikely to pursue programs that are innovative, risky, long-term, or expansionary.
In an organization whose culture conveys a basic distrust of employees, managers are more likely to use an authoritarian leadership style than a democratic one.
The culture establishes for managers appropriate and expected behavior.
Managerial Decisions Influenced by Culture
As shown here in Exhibit 2-5, a manager’s decisions are influenced by the culture in which he or she operates. An organization’s culture, especially a strong one, influences and constrains the way managers plan, organize, lead, and control.
For example, the culture influences managerial planning about the degree of risk that plans should contain, whether plans should be developed by individuals or teams, or the amount of environmental scanning in which management will engage. With organizing activities, culture influences how much autonomy should be designed into employees’ jobs, whether tasks should be done by individuals or in teams, and the degree to which department managers interact with each other.
When it comes to leading , organization culture helps determine the degree to which managers try to increase employee job satisfaction, appropriate leadership styles, and whether all disagreements—even constructive ones— should be eliminated.
Finally, the culture influences managers’ controlling activities: for example, whether they impose external controls or to allow employees to control their own actions, which criteria should be emphasized in employee performance evaluations, and the repercussions for exceeding one’s budget.