Organizational Behavior and Values as Principles of Integrated, Value-Driven Leadership
Dr. Hans-Jürgen Lutz & Dr. Daniel Nummer
Industry and Work 4.0, New Work, digital transformation, etc. not only are the new buzzwords from the industrial and service sectors but also mean, in general, a social change that affects the entire breadth of the economy and the workforce. For companies, this means that a dynamic adaptation of organizational structures and leadership behavior becomes necessary. “Organizational behavior” is the application of knowledge about how individuals and groups in an organization act and react, thereby achieving the highest quality of performance and dominant satisfaction. This requires a deeper and objective insight into the workforce, the values of individuals and the organization and the current and future relevant leadership behaviors. The objective is to combine a novel organizational diagnostic system to adapt behavior based on integrated, value-driven leadership.
The New World of Work and Its Influence on Organizational Structures
The world of work is in a state of almost epochal upheaval. A new understanding of work is creating new challenges and new opportunities. The “brave new world of work” causes uncertainty in equal measure as it fascinates. The structural change in the world of work is accelerating worldwide and heralding an era of new work organization. New technological processes, digitalization and further globalization, as well as demographic change and constantly changing values are drastically changing the world of work. What and, above all, how we will work in the future concern us all. This change should not alter the basic understanding of good work. The work of the future must also serve society as a whole in a way that creates value and prosperity and is socially balanced. At the same time, it must offer each individual personal and entrepreneurial creative competencies and promote innovation, health, sustainability, and satisfaction (Robbins and Judge 2010).
Increasingly, higher-level competencies are required that can be applied across disciplines in a wide range of professions and fields of activity. Thus, in addition to competencies in the context of automation, planning activities, organization, interpersonal skills, and timely communication, creativity, abstract, networked and cross-thematic thinking, analytical skills, etc. are becoming increasingly important (Fleig 2010).
In the context of cultural history, work and organizational structure have always been re-evaluated in regular cycles, and until now, management structures have seen little added value in including the personal feelings of the individual in the evaluation. The vast majority of jobs are still very much defined in terms of instructions, so that independent thinking or even creative solution finding is still severely suppressed sometimes. However, at a time when the interfaces with customers and clients are becoming larger as ever, when finding solutions to challenges quickly is in demand and required, it is important to create structures that consist of dynamic networks of experts. At the same time, management must allow decision-making to take place where it actually makes sense and is in the interest of value creation – and in most cases, this is not just the management, which sometimes has to act at a great distance from the actual value-creating processes. In view of the changing requirements for value-creating work, it is now necessary to say goodbye to the old traditional organizational structures, because these serve only one purpose on the basis of “Taylorism” – “self-preservation.” The times when there was too little of everything are over. In the future, it will be all the more important to think and act within a holistic framework. This requires significantly more intellectual flexibility and will make the classic target orientations of companies in terms of KPIs (key performance indicators) much more complex. The organizational structures that are supposedly already “agile” are intended to promote further productivity gains, among other things, but are currently still virtually unchanged at their core in many industries (Baker 2019).
Current growth of industries is therefore largely passively explained by consumer behavior rather than by sustainable and meaningful content.
The social development and the younger Generations X to Z now provide for a new consideration of the term “work.” With the increasing relevance of the category “the meaning” and the growing tendency to be able to realize oneself personally in one’s job, the current definition of the term “work” points far beyond the previously valid regulations in the everyday life of most companies. If you want to find meaning in your daily activities, you have to ask yourself to which parts you find yourself in the value chain and in which context this is done for the benefit of your personal and social understanding of values.
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Since the desire for individual realization will become ever greater in the future, companies should address as quickly as possible how they can recognize the abilities and competencies, the needs and values, and the interests and personality traits of their employees and use them as effectively as possible. In any case, companies do not gain the information they need for this through CVs that are read out and assessed by software, but through the earliest possible, objective, and continuous exchange (Robbins and Judge 2010).
In the future, many companies will be more careful with their most valuable resources, people and knowledge, and will place more emphasis on looking at actual “organizational behavior” (Baker 2019). They will incorporate the ideas, personality, behavior, interests, and experience of each individual into processes, product developments, and projects, thereby fundamentally changing the substantive aspects of work structures and design.
Organizational behavior, that is, the application of knowledge about how individuals and groups feel, act, and react in terms of their fit in an organization, represents a valuable resource through which the highest quality of performance becomes attainable, because “people are replaceable – personalities are not.”
Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of
Springer Nature 2023
J. Lange (ed.), Value-Oriented Leadership in Theory and Practice,