Introduction
Introduction
1. Manager: ..................................................................................................................................................... 2
2. Organization:.............................................................................................................................................. 2
3. Management Functions: ........................................................................................................................... 2
3.1 Planning: ............................................................................................................................................. 3
3.2 Organizing:......................................................................................................................................... 3
3.3 Leading: .............................................................................................................................................. 3
3.4 Controlling: ........................................................................................................................................ 4
4. Management Roles .................................................................................................................................... 4
5. Management Skills: ................................................................................................................................... 5
5.1 Technical Skills: ................................................................................................................................. 6
5.2 Human Skills:..................................................................................................................................... 6
5.3 Conceptual Skills: .............................................................................................................................. 6
6. Effective versus Successful Managerial Activities ................................................................................ 7
6.1 Average Managers: ........................................................................................................................... 7
6.2 Successful Managers: ........................................................................................................................ 7
6.3 Effective Managers: ........................................................................................................................... 8
1. Manager:
Managers get things done through other people.
They _
Make decisions,
Allocate resources, and
Direct the activities of others to attain goals.
2. Organization:
Managers do their work in an organization, which is a consciously coordinated social unit,
composed of two or more people that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common
goal or set of goals.
By this definition,
Manufacturing and service firms are organizations, and so are
Schools, hospitals, churches, military units, retail stores, police departments, and local, state,
and federal government agencies.
3. Management Functions:
In the early part of the twentieth century, French industrialist Henri Fayol wrote that all managers
perform five management functions:
3.2 Organizing:
Managers are also responsible for designing an organization’s structure. We call this function
organizing. It includes
Determining what tasks are to be done,
Who is to do them,
How the tasks are to be grouped,
Who reports to whom, and
Where decisions are to be made.
3.3 Leading:
Every organization contains people, and it is management’s job to direct and coordinate those people.
This is the leading function. When managers
Motivate employees,
Direct their activities,
Select the most effective communication channels, or
Resolve conflicts among members, they’re engaging in leading.
3.4 Controlling:
Here are the key points for the controlling function in management:
Performance Monitoring: Track the organization's performance regularly.
Goal Comparison: Compare current performance with previously set goals.
Identify Deviations: Detect any significant deviations from the goals.
Corrective Actions: Implement measures to correct deviations and realign with goals.
Continuous Improvement: Ensure ongoing adjustments for optimal performance.
4. Management Roles
In the late 1960s, Henry Mintzberg, then a graduate student at MIT, under took a careful study of five
executives to determine what they did on their jobs. On the basis of his observations, Mintzberg
concluded that managers per form ten different, highly interrelated roles—or sets of behaviors. 7 As
shown in Exhibit 1-1 , these ten roles are primarily
(1) Interpersonal,
(2) Informational, or
(3) Decisional.
Liaison: The sales manager who obtains information from the quality-control manager in his or her
own company has an internal liaison relationship. When that sales manager has contacts with other
sales executives through a marketing trade association, he or she has an outside liaison relationship.
Decisional: Mintzberg identified four roles that require making choices.
In the entrepreneur role, managers initiate and oversee new projects that will improve their
organization’s performance.
As disturbance handlers, managers take corrective action in response to unforeseen problems.
As resource allocators, managers are responsible for allocating human, physical, and
monetary resources.
Finally, managers perform a negotiator role, in which they discuss issues and bargain with
other units to gain advantages for their own unit.
5. Management Skills:
Researchers have identified a number of skills that differentiate effective from ineffective managers:
Technical skills
Human skills
Conceptual skills
The ability to understand, communicate with, motivate, and support other people, both
individually and in groups, defines human skills.
Many people are technically proficient but poor listeners, unable to understand the needs of
others, or weak at managing conflicts.
Because managers get things done through other people, they must have good human skills.
Managers must have the mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations. These tasks
require conceptual skills.
Decision making, for instance, requires managers to identify problems, develop alternative
solutions to correct those problems, evaluate those alternative solutions, and select the best one.
After they have selected a course of action, managers must be able to organize a plan of action
and then execute it.
The ability to integrate new ideas with existing processes and innovate on the job are also crucial
conceptual skills for today’s managers.
6. Effective versus Successful Managerial Activities
Fred Luthans and his associates looked at what managers do from a somewhat different perspective.
They studied more than 450 managers. All engaged in four managerial activities:
Traditional management. Decision making, planning, and controlling.
Communication. Exchanging routine information and processing paperwork.
Human resource management. Motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, staffing, and training.
Networking. Socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders.
The “average” manager spent 32 percent of his or her time in traditional management activities,
29 percent communicating, 20 percent in human resource management activities, and 19 percent
networking.
However, the time and effort different individual managers spent on those activities varied a great
deal.
Among effective managers (defined in terms of quantity and quality of their performance and the
satisfaction and commitment of employees), communication made the largest relative
contribution and networking the least.
This research offers important insights. Successful managers give almost the opposite emphases to
traditional management, communication, human resource management, and networking as do
effective managers. This finding challenges the historical assumption that promotions are based on
performance, and it illustrates the importance of networking and political skills in getting ahead in
organizations.