Week 13 - The Changing Landscape of Organisation

Image Source:

http://www.nycop.com/Spring2006/Globalization/cartoon_globo_large.GIF

Welcome to Week 13, guys, it’s time to celebrate because this is the last week of your course, and perhaps this is the last week of your university study. Wooah….

This week, we are going to discover the changing landscape of organisation in terms of globalisation. Organisations in 21^st century become much more complex than before, under the trend of globalisation, organisation has changed profoundly.

People in nowadays world have moved from a landscape in which companies are largely associated with one country to a landscape where there is a mix of domestic organisations, multicultural organisations, multinational organisations, international organisations and global organisations.

It is worthwhile to mention that globalisation influences organisational communication in many ways,

l  Time and space compression

l  Global consciousness

l  Disembedded organisations and people

With the significant trend of globalisation, there are also a number of challenges faced by contemporary organisations,

l  Convergence

l  Divergence

l  Human effects

l  Ethical dilemmas

The increasing importance of organisational identity makes organisations pay attention to their performances of PR, issue management, marketing, advertising etc. Organisations seek to create and maintain positive images in order to achieve long-term goals. The economy is increasingly dominated by organisations that provide services rather than products. The challenges of communication in a service environment can be particularly pronounced in the information economy, which is increasingly dominated by electronic transactions, or e-commerce (Miller 2012).

Workers in today’s economy increasingly hold temporary and contingent positions that make them more “disposable” and that change the basic relationship between workers and organisations. The reason why people need to know about the changes is because these changes highlight areas of increasing importance in the workplace, such as managing diversity in a multicultural organisation or understanding the comings and goings of temporary workers (Miller 2012).

In my organisation, the management is keen to recruit more oversea-experienced employees because they are expected to be able to communicate and work with people from foreign countries. As an English-training organisation, my organisation not only requires employee’s English proficiency, but also their recognition of western cultures. Some of senior workers without English education are required to participate English training sessions. Like our principal said, “our organisation is aimed to become an international-scaled organisation, I want our employees can have the competency to communicate and collaborate with people from other countries.”

Apparently, globalisation is a crucial factor by which many organisations are involved in the changing landscape.

Ahmad (2013) in his media story portrays the nowadays changing landscape of organisation as the “culture club.” He depicts that “without proper understanding of cross-cultural differences, a person will have problems communicating and interacting with another from a different background. We need to be culturally competent to interact globally. ”

References:

Ahmad, A F 2013, ‘We are in a culture club’, New Straits Times, 6 November, viewed 12 November 2013,

<http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/InfoWeb?p_product=AWNB&p_theme=aggregated5&p_action=doc&p_docid=149ECB7C39F91850&p_docnum=1&p_queryname=2>

Miller, K 2012, Organisational communication – approaches and processes, 6^th edn, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Boston.