Unit 13 Employment

Satisfiers and Motivators

It’s logical to suppose that things like good labour relations, good working conditions, good wages and benefits, and job security motivate workers. But in “Work and the Nature of Man”, Frederick Herzberg argued that such conditions don’t motivate workers. They are merely “satisfiers” or, more importantly, “dissatisfiers”. “Motivators”, on the contrary, include things such as having a challenging and interesting job, recognition and responsibility, promotion, and so on.

However, even with the development of IT technologies, there are and always will be plenty of boring, mindless, repetitive and mechanical jobs in all sectors of the economy, and lots of unskilled people who have to do them.

So how do managers motivate people in such jobs? One solution is to give them some responsibilities, not as individuals but as part of a team. For example, some supermarkets combine office staff, the people who fill the shelves, and the people who work on the checkout tills into a team and let them decide what product lines to stock, how to display them, and so on. Other employers ensure that people in repetitive jobs change them every couple of hours, as doing 4 different repetitive jobs a day is better than doing only 1. Many people now talk about the importance of a company’s shared values or corporate culture, with which all the staff can identify: for example, being the best hotel or restaurant chain, or airline, or making the best, the safest, the most user-friendly, the most ecological and the most reliable products in a particular field. Such values are more likely to motivate workers than financial targets, which ultimately only concern a few people. Unfortunately, there is just a limited number of such goals to go round, and by definition, not all the competing companies in an industry can seriously claim to be the best.

Notes:

checkout till – касса (в магазине)

user-friendly – удобный для пользователя

Unit 14 Globalization

Global Organizations

International businesses have been around for a long time. Siemens, for instance, was selling its products in many countries in the 19-th century. Ford Motor Company set up its first overseas sales branch in France in 1908. By the 1920s, other companies, including Fiat, had gone multinational. But it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that multinational corporations (MNCs) became commonplace. These corporations – which maintain significant operations in two or more countries simultaneously but are based in one home country – inaugurated the rapid growth in international trade.

The expanding global environment has extended the goals of MNCs to create an even more generic global organization called the transnational corporation (TNC). This type of organization doesn’t seek to replicate its domestic success by managing foreign operations from its home country. Rather, decision making at TNCs takes place at the local level. Nationals typically are hired to run operations in each country. The product or marketing strategies for each country are uniquely tailored to that country’s culture. Nestle, for example, is a transnational company. With operations in almost every country on the globe, it is the world’s largest food company, yet its managers match the company’s products to its consumers. Thus, in parts of Europe Nestle sells products that are not available in the USA or Latin America.

Many large, well-known companies are moving to globalize their management structure more effectively by breaking down internal arrangements that impose artificial geographical barriers; this global type of organization is called a borderless organization. The borderless organization can be said to approach global business from the geocentric perspective. For instance, IBM dropped its organizational structure based on the country and reorganized into some industry groups.

Managers of multinational, transnational, and borderless organizations have become increasingly global in their perspectives and accept the reality that national borders no longer define ways of doing business efficiently and effectively.

Notes:

replicate – повторять, копировать

impose – навязывать

artificial – искусственный