Chapter 1: Managers and Managing

Organizations: collections of people who work together and coordinate their actions to achieve a wide variety of goals or outcomes

Management: the planning, organizing, leading, and controlling of human and other resources to achieve organizational goals efficiently and effectively

    Resources:

  1. People and their skills/experience

  2. Machinery

  3. Raw Materials

  4. Computers and information technology

  5. Patents (a government-granted, temporary exclusive right to an inventor, preventing others from making, using, or selling their invention, in exchange for public disclosure, encouraging innovation and investment, and protecting things like new products, processes, or software), financial capital, and loyal customers/employees

A manager’s goal is to achieve high performance (provide good or service that customers value/desire)

Need to balance quality need and being cost effective

Organizational Performance: a measure of how efficiently and effectively managers use available resources to satisfy customers and achieve organizational goals

  • eliminating unsuccessful business and fostering a collaborative environment are some strategies

Efficiency: a measure of how well or how productively resources are used to achieve a goal

Effectiveness: a measure of the appropriateness of the goals an organization is pursuing and the degree to which the organization achieves those goals

  1. Low efficiency, high effectiveness: right goals to pursue, but poor use of resources to get there

  2. High efficiency, low effectiveness: inappropriate goals, but good use of resources

  3. Low efficiency, low effectiveness: wrong goals and poor use of resources

  4. High efficiency, high effectiveness: right goals and good use of resources

Four Functions of Management

  1. Planning

    1. choosing appropriate organizational goals and courses of action to best achieve those goals

  2. Organizing

    1. Establish task and authority relationships that allow people to work together to achieve organizational goals

  3. Leading

    1. Motivate, coordinate, and energize individuals and groups to work together to achieve organizational goals

  4. Controlling

    1. Establish accurate measuring and monitoring systems to evaluate how well the organization has achieved its goals

Planning

  1. Decide which goals to pursue

  2. Decide which strategies to adopt

  3. Decide how to allocate organizational resources

Organizing

  • structuring working relationship in a way that allows organizational members to work together to achieve goals

Organizational structure: a formal system of task and reporting relationships that coordinates and motivates organizational members so that they work together to achieve organizational goals

Leading

  • articulating a clear vision and energizing and enabling organizational members so they understand the part they play in achieving organizational goals.

Organization’s Vision: a short, succinct, and inspiring statement of what the organization intends to become and the goals it is seeking to achieve its desired future state

- Managers use their power, personality, influence, persuasion, and communication skills

Controlling

  • evaluating how well an organization is achieving its goals and taking action to maintain or improve performance.

  • outcome of control process is the ability to measure performance accurately and regulate organizational efficiency and effectiveness

Levels and Skills of Managers

Department: a group of managers and employees who work together and possess similar skills or use the same knowledge, tools, or techniques

CEO → Top → Middle → First-line managers (supervisors)

Supervisors: responsible for daily supervision of nonmanagerial employees

Middle Managers: supervises first-line managers, responsible for finding the best way to use resources to achieve organizational goals

Top Managers: responsible for the performance of all departments, establish organizational goals, decide how different departments should interact, monitor how well middle managers in each department use resources to achieve goals

Informational, delusional, and interpersonal

Conceptual skills: the ability to analyze and diagnose a situation and distinguish between cause and effect

Human skills: The ability to understand, alter, lead, and control the behavior of other individuals and groups.

Technical skills: Job-specific knowledge and techniques required to perform an organizational role

Restructuring: Downsizing an organization by eliminating the jobs of large numbers of top, middle, and first-line managers and nonmanagerial employees

Outsourcing: Contracting with another company, usually abroad, to perform a work activity the company previously performed itself

Empowerment: involves giving employees more authority and responsibility over how they perform their work activities

Self-managed work teams: groups of employees who assume collective responsibility for organizing, supervising, and controlling their own work activities

Management in the global environment is difficult due to:

  1. trying to build a competitive advantage

    1. Ability of one organization to outperform other organizations because it produces desired goods or services more efficiently and effectively than competitors

  2. maintain ethical and socially responsible standards

  3. managing a diverse workforce

  4. utilizing new technologies

  5. practicing global crisis management

    1. Create teams to facilitate rapid decision making and communication.

    2. Establish the organizational chain of command and reporting relationships     necessary to mobilize a fast response.

    3. Recruit and select the right people to lead and work in such teams.

    4. Develop bargaining and negotiating strategies to manage the conflicts that arise.

Natural causes: Crises that arise because of natural causes, including hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, famines, and diseases

Human causes: Human-created crises result from factors such as industrial pollution, inattention to employee safety, climate change, and the destruction of the natural habitat or environment, and geopolitical tensions and terrorism and recent pandemic

Innovation: the process of creating new or improved goods and services or developing better ways to produce or provide them

Turnaround Management: Creation of a new vision for a struggling company using a new approach to planning and organizing to make better use of a company’s resources and allow it to survive and eventually prosper