Organizations have entered a new era characterized by rapid, dramatic and turbulent changes. The accelerated pace of change has transformed how work is performed by employees in diverse organizations. Change has truly become an inherent and integral part of organizational life.

Several emerging trends are impacting organizational life. Of these emerging trends, five will be examined: globalization, diversity, flexibility, flat, and networks. These five emerging trends create tensions for organizational leaders and employees as they go through waves of changes in their organizations. These tensions present opportunities as well as threats, and if these tensions are not managed well, they will result in dysfunctional and dire organizational outcomes at the end of any change process. These five trends and the specific tensions they produce are presented in Table 1.
GLOBALIZATION

Organizations operate in a global economy that is characterized by greater and more intense competition, and at the same time, greater economic interdependence and collaboration. More products and services are being consumed outside of their country of origin than ever before as globalization brings about greater convergence in terms of consumer tastes and preferences. Yet at the same time, in the midst of greater convergence, there is the opposite force of divergence at work where companies have to adapt corporate and business strategies, marketing plans, and production efforts to local domestic markets.

To stay competitive, more organizations are embracing offshore outsourcing. Many functions are being shifted to India, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other countries for their low labor costs, high levels of workforce education, and technological advantages. According to the 2002-2003 Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Workplace Forecast, companies such as Ford, General Motors, and Nestle employ more people outside of their headquarters countries than within those countries.

Almost any company, whether in manufacturing or services, can find some part of its work that can be done off site. Forrester Research projects that 3.3 million U.S. service- and knowledge-based jobs will be shipped overseas by the year 2015, 70 percent of which will move to India. Communication and information sharing are occurring across the globe in multiple languages and multiple cultures. Global competition and global cooperation coexist in the new world economy.

One major consequence of globalization is greater mobility in international capital and labor markets. This creates a global marketplace where there is more opportunity, because there are more potential customers. However, there is also more competition, as local companies have to compete with foreign companies for customers.

According to Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the processes associated with the global integration of markets for goods, services, and capital have created two sources of tensions.

First, reduced barriers to trade and investment accentuate the asymmetries between groups that can cross international borders, and those that cannot. In the first category are owners of capital, highly skilled workers, and many professionals. Unskilled and semiskilled workers and most middle managers belong in the second category.

Second, globalization engenders conflicts within and between nations over domestic norms and the social institutions that embody them. As the technology for manufactured goods becomes standardized and diffused internationally, nations with very different sets of values, norms, institutions, and collective preferences begin to compete head on in markets for similar goods. Trade becomes contentious when it unleashes forces that undermine the norms implicit in local or domestic workplace practices.

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