Managers and Managing

What is Management?

  • All managers work in organizations.
  • Organizations
    • Collections of people who work together and coordinate their actions to achieve a wide variety of goals or desired future outcomes.
  • Managers
    • The people responsible for supervising the use of an organization’s resources to meet its goals.

Management Defined

  • Management
    • The planning, organizing, leading, and controlling of human and other resources to achieve organizational goals effectively and efficiently.
  • Resources
    • Include people, skills, know-how and experience, machinery, raw materials, computers and IT, financial capital, and loyal customers and employees.

Organizational Performance

  • Organizational Performance
    • A measure of how efficiently and effectively managers use available resources to satisfy customers and achieve organizational goals.
  • 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 they are achieved.

Why Study Management?

  1. The more efficient and effective use of scarce resources that organizations make of those resources, the greater the relative well-being and prosperity of people in that society.
  2. Helps people deal with their bosses and coworkers.
  3. Opens a path to a well-paying job and a satisfying career.

Four Tasks of Management

  • Planning
    • Choose appropriate organizational goals and courses of action to best achieve those goals.
  • Organizing
    • Establish task and authority relationships that allow people to work together to achieve organization goals.
  • Leading
    • Motivate, coordinate, and energize individuals and groups to work together to achieve organizational goals.
  • Controlling
    • Establish accurate measuring and monitoring systems to evaluate how well the organization has achieved its goals.

Steps in the Planning Process

  1. Deciding which goals the organization will pursue.
  2. Deciding what courses of action to adopt to attain those goals.
  3. Deciding how to allocate organizational resources.

Example: Dell Computers

  • Michael Dell needed a new strategy to compete with Apple, HP, and ACER.
  • In 2010, Dell introduced more powerful, customized laptops and a major focus on providing computer hardware, software, and consulting geared to the needs of corporate customers.

Organizing

  • Organizing involves grouping people into departments according to the kinds of job-specific tasks they perform.
  • Managers lay out lines of authority and responsibility.
  • Decide how best to organize resources, particularly human resources.
  • Organizational structure
    • A formal system of task and reporting relationships that coordinates and motivates members so that they work together to achieve organizational goals.

Leading

  • Leadership involves using power, personality, and influence, persuasion, and communication skills.
  • It revolves around encouraging all employees to perform at a high level.
  • Outcome of leadership is a highly motivated and committed workforce.

Controlling

  • The outcome of the control process is the ability to measure performance accurately and regulate organizational efficiency and effectiveness.
  • Managers must decide which goals to measure.
  • Control means monitoring performance
    • Are we doing what we planned to do?
      • If we are, great! If not, what do we need to change?
    • Benchmarking – Set a standard for achieving the goal.

Decisional Roles

  • Roles associated with methods managers use in planning strategy and utilizing resources
    • Entrepreneur—deciding which new projects or programs to initiate and to invest resources in.
    • Disturbance handler—managing an unexpected event or crisis.
    • Resource allocator—assigning resources between functions and divisions, setting the budgets of lower managers.
    • Negotiator—reaching agreements between other managers, unions, customers, or shareholders.

Interpersonal Roles

  • Roles that managers assume to provide direction and supervision to both employees and the organization as a whole
    • Figurehead—symbolizing the organization’s mission and what it is seeking to achieve.
    • Leader—training, counseling, and mentoring high employee performance.
    • Liaison—linking and coordinating the activities of people and groups both inside and outside the organization.

Informational Roles

  • Roles associated with the tasks needed to obtain and transmit information in the process of managing the organization.
    • Monitor—analyzing information from both the internal and external environment.
    • Disseminator—transmitting information to influence the attitudes and behavior of employees.
    • Spokesperson—using information to positively influence the way people in and out of the organization respond to it.

Areas of Managers

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

Levels of Management

  • First-line managers
    • Responsible for the daily supervision of the 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 utilize resources to achieve goals

Managerial Skills

  • 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 skills required to perform a particular type of work or occupation at a high level.

Core Competency

  • Core competency
    • Specific set of departmental skills, abilities, knowledge and experience that allows one organization to outperform its competitors
    • Skills for a competitive advantage

Recent Changes in Management Practices

  • Restructuring
    • Involves simplifying, shrinking, or downsizing an organization’s operations to lower operating costs
  • Outsourcing
    • Contracting with another company, usually in a low cost country abroad, to perform a work activity the company previously performed itself
  • Empowerment
    • Involves giving employees more authority and responsibility over the way they perform their work activities

Challenges for Management in a Global Environment

  • Building a Competitive Advantage
  • Maintaining Ethical Standards
  • Managing a Diverse Workforce
  • Utilizing Information Technology
  • Global Crisis Management

Building Competitive Advantage

  • Competitive Advantage
    • Ability of one organization to outperform other organizations because it produces desired goods or services more efficiently and effectively than its competitors
  • Innovation
    • The process of creating new or improved goods and services or developing better ways to produce or provide them.

Turnaround Management

  • 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 to allow it to survive, and eventually prosper

Maintaining Ethical and Socially Responsible Standards

  • Managers are under considerable pressure to make the best use of resources
  • Too much pressure may induce managers to behave unethically, and even illegally

Managing a Diverse Workforce

  • To create a highly trained and motivated workforce managers must establish HRM procedures that are legal, fair and do not discriminate against organizational members