Section Two MANAGEMENT TRENDS
Several managerial trends are having an impact on human
resources. Trends discussed in this section include work teams,
virtual teams, open-book management, management of
diversity, total quality management, reengineering,
management of professionals, and managing in the aftermath
of mergers and acquisitions.
Management of Diversity
Because of the increased heterogeneity of the workforce, which
will be discussed later in this section, managers must be
prepared to deal with the challenges associated with such
demographic changes. Effective management of diversity can
increase an organization’s productivity through several
avenues, one of which is increased problem-solving ability.
Such productivity may result from increases in creativity that
have been hypothesized to be related to heterogeneity. For
example, bilingualism and biculturalism have been found be
related to divergent thinking, which in turn has been
hypothesized to be associated with creativity. Recently, it has
been demonstrated that ethnic heterogeneity in small groups is
associated with increased quality of ideas generated for solving
problems. Increased heterogeneity also may bring another
benefit—the prevention of the “groupthink” phenomenon that