Twenty-First Century Workplace Challenges

Rabenu examines up-to-date changes in workplace relationships affecting the well-being of employees and society. The unique aspect of this book is the comprehensive review of top-tier academic and professional journals literature addressing the issue of how the pandemic, digitalization, the internet, globalization, generational differences, working from home, employee personalities, and work-life balance have changed the way work is currently organized. Rabenu provides significant discussion of the COVID-19 contribution to restrictive business flights, greater focus on safety, and increasingly boundary-free workplaces. A process-person-context-time model, anchoring the organization of the text, provides a holistic view of the work associated with managing employee/organization relationships, worker characteristics, environmental conditions, and periods in which work processes take place. Teams, too, have changed because of incorporating traditional workers with independent contractors, moonlighters, virtual employees, and diverse employees drawn from demographic minority groups. The author also looks to a future in which human-robot teams will collaborate by means of artificial intelligence. Academic researchers will appreciate the roughly 80 pages of recent references covering theoretical frameworks of organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, and human resource management. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.

* Choice Reviews *

Life is change, and reflecting this, the book Twenty-First Century Workplace Challenges is topical and timely. The world of work continues to rapidly evolve in the twenty-first century, and understanding these changes and processes is critical for individuals and organizations. Rabenu has done an excellent job in covering many prominent issues relating to working life, balancing the rigor of academic endeavour and the need to appeal to the lay reader.

-- Yehuda Baruch, University of Southampton

This timely publication provides a robust and powerful kaleidoscopic overview of developments in the workplace, offering an innovative forecast of how the workplace structure and relationships will evolve. The content is advanced, theoretically and practically, and grounded in an impressive number of references. Therefore, I wholeheartedly recommend this ground-breaking book to both academic and sophisticated managers.

-- Aharon Tziner, professor emeritus, Netanya Academic Col