VISIONING FOR THE FUTURE

Visioning for the Future

Visioning for the Future

The Future Of Organizational Development

Workers and managers alike face unfamiliar challenges and new demands in the fast-moving, unforgiving business climate of the twenty-first century. Survival will depend on teamwork, loyalty, and vision at every level.

Today's worker is no longer willing to work in an authoritarian and dehumanizing environment. Workers want meaning in their work and balance in their lives. Given the amount of time people spend at work, they want opportunities to contribute and to know how their work contributes to the organization. They also want to be valued as individuals with goals and aspirations, not just replaceable drones in the hive.

The very nature of organizations can make this change difficult. (Deutsch, 2005) Every organization has reasons for its existence. A corporation is a structured environment with a purpose - a business purpose. It is an environment established to create wealth, not a natural human social environment. The foundation for building human relationships in such an environment is a mutual respect for what employees contribute to the organization and for the individuals themselves. (Goleman, Boyatzis, McKee, 2002)

The evolution to this new, meaningful corporate culture will encompass many changes. These will affect not only the design of work and compensation, but quality of life, environmental accountability, social responsibility, and scope for the human spirit.

Leadership

There has been considerable interest in whether the attitudes, behavior, and motivation of managers and employees differ across cultures and in the effects those differences have on work group performance (Chen, Chen, & Meindl, 2006). The need to learn more about these potential cross-cultural differences coincides with the rapid globalization of the world's economy as well as with the cultural diversification of the U.S. workforce, in which the majority of new entrants over the next 20 to 30 years will be women, Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans (Johnston & Packer, 2006).

These changes have produced a sense of urgency among many organizational leaders regarding the practical importance of understanding, addressing, and meeting the needs of culturally diverse work groups (Hofstede, 2006). The changing composition of the U.S. workforce raises an important question: Are current leadership and management models valid for explaining the behavior and motivation of culturally different work groups? Supporting the need for cross-cultural research, Hofstede (2005b) argued that many differences in individual motivation and leadership styles could be traced to differences in cultural programming. Erez (2004) also challenged the appropriateness of simply assuming that United States-centric leadership theories can be generalized to other cultures. (Goleman, Boyatzis, McKee, 2002)

Should one lead differently in different cultural settings? This question was formulated on the basis of preliminary evidence showing that culturally different groups prefer different ways of being led (Hofstede, 2006; Triandis, 2006). Although there are several theoretical models to help explain cultural differences regarding what constitutes effective leadership (see, for example, Dorfman [2006] and Triandis [2006]), only a handful of studies have actually examined the effects of differences in cultural orientation on the effectiveness of leader-follower ...