There are many trends in organizational behavior today.

Two of these trends are ethical

decision making and technology. Both of these trends can cause or alleviate stress in the
workplace if not handled correctly. Ethical decision making can help to alleviate stress if
people make their decisions looking at all aspects of the question and not just what they
want to have happen. Using technology to its full extent while alleviating the stress it
sometimes causes are problems that we are still trying to work through in the modern day
workplace. I am going to discuss how ethical decision making and technology affect work-
related stress.Ethics can cause stress in decision making when you do not take the other
person’s feelings or opinions into account. When you make a decision that affects others
you need to think not just about the final outcome but also about how this decision will
conclude in the long run. In our facility we are having problems with a decision a corporate
manager made. She felt free to discuss her political beliefs with the staff and when they did
not agree she would tell them what was wrong with their decision. It has not blown into a
debate in the workplace with employee

I had several employees that told me that if she would have explained the problem and
calmly asked them to remove the political buttons while in the workplace they would have
done this and the problem would not have gone any further. I do payroll and for quite a
while I was using an old, out dated computer and system. Conflicts and stress can be
reduced in the workplace when a person tries to think of the other people involved in the
situation and act accordingly. This caused a great deal of stress waiting for a new system to
be approved and arrive from the corporate office before being setup for payroll use. If a
manager thinks through a question before coming up with an answer she is more likely to
make a decision that will not cause a lot of conflict with the staff. Technology Causing
StressWhen you are a new employee on a new job you start out with a certain amount of
stress. If you have to add on learning new computer programs or problems with the
equipment, then more stress is added to an already stressful situation. I knew the system
was going but could get no one else to listen until my computer finally quit. If she would
have thought about how she would have felt being put in that situation she might have
made her decision differently. Because of this I was always behind other in getting payroll
completed on time. s wearing buttons and the manager citing rules that force them to take
them off. Technology can also relieve work related stress if used properly by people that
have been trained in their use. Now you can type the document, save it on a floppy disk,
open it later to move a paragraph from one place to another, change misspelled words and
make any editing changes on the screen before printing out a copy. She just assumed that
they would not listen to her and accept the decision she made. As shown above, the
corporate manager did not think the situation through before making a decision.
This paper examines the influence of ethics on decision making and the impact of
technology on work-related stress. It looks at how, up to recently, there has not been much
research on both these issues and however, due to recent developments related to the
growth of the internet and dot-com crashes, both issues are now being taken seriously by
business. The field of organizational behavior has grown rapidly in this time period and is
today a complex tapestry of historical trends, contemporary trends, and new emerging
trends. The Impact of Ethics on Decision-makingWhen speaking of the impact of ethics on
decision-making, it is hard to pin point a subject to speak on. Ethics is tightly intertwined
with decision-making in business today. Objectivity, impartiality, integrity, honesty, and
ethical principles above private gain – These are high ideals to which to aspire, and a
challenge to maintain. Ethics or morality poses questions about how we ought to act and
how we should live. Everything we do, or don’t do, is a choice that can affect the course of
our lives and the lives of others. Such ethics rest on universal values that cut across time,
culture, politics, religion and ethnicity. With all that at stake, it�

It is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable
and well-founded. Ethics can influence our decisions in many ways. Both the job and the
person play a role in situations of work-related stress. Every individual is influenced
personally by many things in their life, creating for them a filter in which to look through
when making decisions. Ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong. The
Impact of Technology on Work-related StressWork-related stress is experienced when the
demands of the work environment exceed the employees"tm ability to cope with (or control)
them. A person's vulnerability to stress includes personal aspects such as the person's
predisposition to interpret situations negatively or positively, personal beliefs about the
degree to which circumstances are controlled by external or internal forces, family-work
conflicts, social support, financial status, self-esteem and personal coping strategies.
Stressful working conditions are also associated with increased absenteeism, tardiness,
disability claims, and other factors that reduce a company's productivity and
competitiveness. The expansion of technology-computers, pagers, cell phones, fax
machines and the Internet-has resulted in heightened expectations for productivity, speed
and efficiency, increasing pressure on the individual worker to constantly operate at peak
performance levels. There are many tools for decision making, but few guides to indicate
when situations might have an ethical implication. Many decisions managers make require
them to consider who may be affected in terms of the result as well as the means. In
business, decisions that carry ethical impacts can help or hurt a company greatly. If every
individual were to conduct themselves and make decisions with ethics in mind, not
everyone would make the same decisions or conduct themselves in the same way. There is
also the constant pressure to keep up with technological breakthroughs and improvisations,
forcing employees to learn new software all the times. Many decisions managers make
require them to consider who may be affected in terms of the result as well as the means.

EMERGING TRENDS IN ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

A. Globalization
1. Definition
a. Occurs when an organization extends its activities to other parts of the
world, actively participates in other markets, and competes against
organizations located in other countries.
2. Implications for organizational behavior
a. Requires new structures and different forms of communication to assist
the organization�s global reach.
b. Creates new career opportunities and potentially brings in new knowledge
to improve the organization�s competitive advantage.
c. Emphasizes the need to recognize the contingencies of effective OB
practices in different cultures.
B. The Changing Work Force
1. Trends
a. Increase of minorities in the workforce.
b. Increase of a multicultural workforce due to an increasing demographic
diversity.
c. Greater difficulty in discussing ethic differences as inter-racial marriages
increase.
d. Increasing representation of women in the workforce.
e. More job security expected by baby boomers�people born between 1946
and 1964.
f. Less loyalty to one organization expressed by Gen-Xers�people born
between 1964 and 1977.
g. Impact of how Generation-Y employees �those born in the decade or so
since 1979�affect the workplace.
2. How diversity impacts organizational behavior
a. Can lead to a competitive advantage by improving decision-making and
team performance on complex tasks.
b. Can present new challenges for companies to overcome.
C. Emerging Employment Relationships
1. Employability: employees perform a variety of work activities rather than hold
specific jobs, and they are expected to continuously learn skills that will keep
them employed.
2. Contingent work: any job in which the individual does not have an explicit or
implicit contract for long-term employment, or one in which the minimum hours
of work can vary in a nonsystematic way.
3. Telecommuting: working from home usually with a computer connection to the
office.
 4. Virtual teams: cross-functional groups that operate across space, time, and
organizational boundaries with members who communicate mainly through
electronic technologies.
D. Information Technology
1. Lead to rise in telecommuting and virtual teams.
2. Creates opportunities to connect people around the plant.
3. Allows small businesses in developing countries to compete in the global
marketplace.
4. Leads to the creation of a network organization �an alliance of several
organizations for the purpose of creating a product or serving a client.
E. Workplace Values and Ethics
1. Definitions
a. Values � stable, long-lasting beliefs about what is important in a variety
of situations.
b. Cultural values � represent the dominant prescriptions of a society.
c. Personal values � incorporate cultural values, as well as other values
socialized by parents, friends, and personal life events.
d. Organizational values � those which are widely and deeply shared by
people within the organization.
e. Ethics � the study of moral principles or values that determine whether
actions are right or wrong and outcomes are good or bad.
2. Importance of values and ethics
a. Rise of globalization leads to a multitude of different values and ethics in
the workplace.
b. Old �command-and-control� system of direct supervision is not
congruent with today�s more independently-minded workforce.
c. Increased societal pressure on organizations to engage in ethical practices.