EXTERNAL INFLUENCES INFLUENCING THE FIRM

External influences influencing the firm and its activities.



EXTERNAL/ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCE

Major External Influences

Management scholars recognize that external networks are a critical component of team functioning. Teams can deliver high-quality goods and services by utilizing their external networks to exchange and combine resources with other workgroups in an organization. Thus, it is important that we understand the factors that can constrain or enhance the extent to which teams can network effectively. In the United States, along with the increasing implementation of teams, a parallel trend transforming the workplace is the burgeoning diversity of the workforce. As we attempt to understand external networks in this setting, the demographic diversity of teams has emerged as an important consideration. Yet few researchers have considered external networking in relation to team diversity. When examining the outcomes of team diversity, researchers have typically focused on the internal functioning of teams.

Although the concept of strategic human resource management has evolved only recently, this should not be construed to mean that human resource practices have not always existed in organizations—rather, the notion of strategic human resource management has evolved only recently. In the past organizations had departments tasked with the traditional human resource management functions of compensation, staffing, and training? However, in the past, these departments were primarily concerned with the technical rather than the strategic facets of their areas of expertise. Indeed, the adoption of the phrase human resource management to cumulatively describe these functions implicitly recognizes the strategic facet of human resource management practices and the potential for these activities to contribute as sources of competitive advantage. Today, we not only recognize the importance of strategic human resource management, but we also have evidence supporting its importance as research has found that firms' human resource management practices have significant implications for organizational performance.

Labor Unions

Labor unions were founded and exist today to aid workers in considering with the management of an association, as the declared third-party agent, the union actions on behalf of its constituents to secure wages, hours, and other periods and conditions of employment. Another critical aspect of unions is that they promote and foster what is called a grievance method, or a specified method for the resolving of dissimilarities between employees and management. In numerous instances, this process alone constrains administration from making unilateral decisions. For instance, a present HRM issue is the debate over employers' proficiency to terminate workers when they want. When a union is present and HRM practices are spelled out in a discussed affirmation, employees will not blaze for unjustified causes. However, whereas only about 12 per hundred of the work force is unionized, the effect unions have on other nonunion organizations, called the spillover effect, should be kept in perspective. Thead covering is, nonunion workers often gaze at whead covering those in the unionized work force gain through contract negotiations. To sustain a nonunion rank, then, HRM practices must be comparable to those where unions exist.

Management Thought

The last locality of external leverage is ...