The Liberalization of the Labor Market - Essay Example

Name Tutor Title Date Labour market liberalization Introduction Labour market liberalization is the transformation of a labour market so that it is more free compared to what it was prior to the change. Labourers in such a market have the freedom to change work places or organizations depending on their preferred levels of comfort. In a liberalized market employers are free to hire workers that meet their desired qualifications with no one to restrict them. Employers have to respect and uphold employee rights (Hood 1991). Labour market liberalization impacts organizations positively and negatively. It however benefits these organizations. It impacts on an organization by causing an increase in the number of people employed as well as their salaries and wages. In a liberalized market there are a number of market-like mechanisms that influence the operations of organizations (Hood 1991). They include competition and dispersed decision making which have been discussed in this paper. This paper examines the impacts of these market arrangements to the value and quality of the services of the organization and finally presents a retrospective commentary on the research done about labour market liberalization. Market like arrangements 1. Disperse decision making arrangement. When a person has a number of choices to choose from and must come up with one choose out of the list he has, then decision making comes into play. In disperse decision making the process of making choices is left to other people in the organization apart from the top management. A group of members from the organization make decisions such as deployment and recruitment of employees and purchase of products among other decisions. All people within the organization are part of the process of decision making. These decision making groups are skilled in various things such as marketing, accounting or purchasing. This ensures that they make quality and standard decisions based on their skills. In our work place, this arrangement has the purpose of ensuring that decision making authority is given to all management levels within the organization (Kossler, & Prestridge, 2011). Employees in our place of work are responsible because they play a role in decision making. The arrangement ensures that power is shared and that top managers are denied overpowers on the organization. The top management however maintains more power compared to lower administration levels. At our workplace this arrangement is helpful since it encourages lower management levels to get authority which enhances acquisition of skills that they need in human resource operations. Lower management level employees get motivation and they feel that they belong and own the organization. Decisions made in our organization are broad and diverse since the opinion of every member is considered. In such an arrangement the policies are easier to enforce compared to the ones made by top management alone because they are less unbending. It is easier for lower management employees to fit in the system because they participated in making them hence making their implementation easier (Hood 1991). Impacts of disperse decision making This arrangement impacts on the value and quality of the services we produce at our place of work. It has a good impact in our work place because decisions that we make with this arrangement are quality decisions that are helping our organization to grow. Making of decisions using this model is fast and produces quality decisions. This is because there is consultation of all the employees in the work place who give their opinion about it. By this arrangement facilitating employee motivation and the making of quality decisions it consequently results in very quality and valuable services. When lower level employees feel that they belong to the organization and own it they are bound to work harder and in a more loyal manner hence the production of the best services. Our services are rated among the best because disperse decision making allows for the input of all the people at our work place. This ensures that creativity and initiative is incorporated in service provision (OECD 1993). 2. Competition Competition is a kind of contest or rivalry that exists between people in an organization for prizes such as salary increments and bonuses (Kossler & Prestridge 2011). It can also exist between firms as they seek to increase their effectiveness and efficiency. At our place of work competition is aimed at motivating employees when the winner is rewarded. At our place of work employees compete directly to achieve set goals. Employees are encouraged to compete against the goals and standards set for them and not against each other so that they can improve quality of service delivery. Employees are given certain levels they have to meet within a given time duration. For example at our work place we have goals such as serving a given number of customers within every week. When this goal is met the employees responsible are rewarded and this motivates the workers (Nelson & Quick 2010). Impacts of competition in our work place At our work place, competition results in high quality services. The reason is that all the employees strive to perform the best way when it comes to output. The desire to be the best and to get the reward drives them to do their best. As a result, profits and returns to the company have considerably gone up following an increase in the number of out customers. Competition benefits employees because through it they can be rewarded with opportunities such as training for those ranked as the best performers at out work place (OECD 1994). Competition also results in rivalry between employees when some of them achieve higher than others. The low achievers feel less motivated. They also feel that they are not valued at the organization because they are poor workers and that they deserve no reward. This affects the achievement of objectives at our work place. Objectives are difficult to achieve because of the divisions that emerge from the feeling that the organization belongs to those giving and receiving the rewards. These divisions simply destroy the spirit of team work (Fitzgerald et al. 1991). Retrospective commentary based on this research The research done in this unit was of great benefit because so many things that were previously unclear to me are now very clear. Such things include the creation of awareness about the liberalization of the market and how it affects the market for example through the various market like arrangements such as competition and disperse decision making. The benefits flowing from this research do not only remain with the researcher but also impact the organization because the top management and other employees get equipped with skills for delegation of duties to lower staff so that decision making can be diversified (Bruce 2001). Several new things have come up through the research process that I knew nothing about prior to the research. The liberalization of labour and the mechanisms used and its effects on our organization and the market in general were not things I knew. They are totally new things I have learned. As discussed above, liberalization of labour has various impacts both positive and negative on the employees and the management of our organization. It also affects the organization collectively. (OECD 1993). Before, I could not understand the mechanisms through the reasons why we were required to nurture competition between employees and other organizations. This has turned out to be a lesson for me. This research has revealed to me the criteria for the implementation of various market arrangements within our organization so that all employees feel valued. An example of this is the mode of operation of competition and motivation of nonperforming employees. A good lesson I have learned is that it is not easy to implement these market like arrangements since their implementation meets opposition within the organization. Again, a new market arrangement presents many challenges to those trying to implement it because not many if any organizations have attempted to implement it before and therefore there are no examples to be emulated. I have discovered that competition when not handled well can cause major problems in our organization. However on the other hand it is a powerful toll for employee motivation and improving production and the quality of output (Bruce 2006). One more lesson I can draw from research in this unit is the various impacts and effects that the market like arrangements have on those organizations that set out to adopt them. The reason here is that there is no change within an organization that does not come along with impacts. Market arrangements therefore come with both positive and negative impacts on organizations. Negative and positive impacts have been discussed through this research and therefore organizations have the opportunity to analyze them and decide on which ones are workable for them and which ones are not. Some impacts are totally new to organizations including ours and therefore we get an opportunity to draw lessons from them. These can be very instrumental lessons to many of the organizations especially those with the desire to change their market like arrangements in order to be up to date with the various changes taking place within the labour market. Included here are factors such as disperse decision making taking place within organizations (Nelson, & Quick, 2010). This is an aspect that is new but very beneficial to me, my work place and the rest of the organizations considering its significance in the discussion above. Involving all the employees within an organization in the process of decision making so that the quality of decisions made can be improved upon is a totally new and very strange phenomenon to certain organizations. Some of the new things that can be found in this exercise are the impacts and effects resulting from diversified decision making. Negative factors feature among these impacts on organizations (Ho, Li-Hsing & Chen-Chia Chuang, 2006). From this research I have learnt that in our organization diversification of the process of decision making causes problems in controlling operations where decision making is concerned. Decision making loses the aspect of uniformity within the organization when there is delegation of this duty. It has also become clear to me that the policies set through the disperse decision making arrangement do not remain standard since their origin is in different employees in the organization. Different people have different views, opinions and perspectives of looking at things. Decisions are maintained in a standardized manner if they are made by the top management alone. The implication here is that extra care is needed on the side of top managers when they choose to delegate decision making to lower level managers or the subordinate staff. This sensitive organizational role must be given to lower management levels that possess the appropriate skills to make the right decisions (Federman 2009). There is another problem with this market like arrangement. In the event that there is a wrong decision made and implemented it becomes hard to know the source of the decision since the chain of decision makers is long. It is hard to demand accountability for decisions of this nature because no one would like to take responsibility and those responsible for making the decision are not known. In our work place there it is hard to get somebody who wants to associate himself with wrong decisions that have been made. These negative impacts of the diverse decision making market like arrangement have come to me as lessons since they are a major challenge at our work place (Barrow 1996). This retrospective commentary has presented various comments and lessons from the research on labour market liberalization and the implementation and operation of market arrangements. The research paper in general shows the changes occurring within the labour market and how these changes impact on the well being of organizations and individual employees. The research paper also carries explanations on 2 different market like arrangements that are being utilized within our organization. It is a display of how these mechanisms operate and what impacts they create on the organization whenever they are implemented. References Barrow, C.W. (1996), "The strategy of selective excellence: Redesigning higher education for global competition in a postindustrial society. In: Higher Education, 41, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands Bruce, A. (2006): How to motivate every employee: 24 proven tactics to spark productivity in the workplace: McGraw-Hill professional. Federman, B. (2009): Employee engagement: a roadmap for creating profits, optimizing performance and increasing loyalty: John Wiley & Sons. Fitzgerald, L. et al. (1991), Performance Measurement in Service Businesses, Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, Cambridge, Ch 1. (Dixson 338.455/P438) Ho, Li-Hsing & Chen-Chia Chuang, (2006), 'A Study of Implementing Six-Sigma Quality Management System in Government Agencies for Raising Service Quality,' in Journal of American Academy of Business, Cambridge, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 167-173. Hood, C. (1991), 'A Public Management for all Seasons?', Public Administration, vol. 69, no. 1, Spring, pp. 3–19. Kossler, M.E & Prestridge, S. (2011): Leading dispersed teams: John Wiley & Sons. Nelson, D. L & Quick, J. C. (2010): Organizational behavior: Cengage learning. OECD (1993), Managing with Market-Type Mechanisms, OECD, Paris. OECD (1994), Public Management Developments: Update 1994, OECD, Paris. Read More