,Chapter 1
Managers and Managing
What is management?
Organizations are collections of people who work together and coordinate their actions to
achieve a wide variety of goals or desired future outcomes. Management , then, is the planning,
organizing, leading, and controlling of human and other resources to achieve organizational
goals efficiently and effectively.
Achieving High Performance: A Manager’s Goal
One of the key goals of organizations is to
provide goods and services that
customers value and desire.
Organizational performance is a
measure of how efficiently and effectively
managers use available resources to
satisfy customers and achieve
organizational goals.
Efficiency is a measure of how
productively resources are used to
achieve a goal. Effectiveness is a
measure of the appropriateness of the
goals that managers have selected for the
organization to pursue and the degree to which the organization achieves those goals.
Essential managerial tasks
Planning
(1) deciding which goals the
organization will pursue,
(2) deciding what strategies to adopt
to attain those goals, and
(3) deciding how to allocate
organizational resources to pursue
the strategies that attain those goals.
Organizing
is structuring working relationships so
organizational members interact and cooperate to
achieve organizational goals. The outcome of organizing is
the creation of an organizational structure.
2
,Leading
managers articulate a clear organizational vision for the organization’s members to accomplish,
and they energize and enable employees so everyone understands the part he or she plays in
achieving organizational goals.
Controlling
the task of managers is to evaluate how well an organization has achieved its goals and to take
any corrective actions needed to maintain or improve performance.
Performing Managerial Tasks: Mintzberg’s Typology
Henry Mintzberg, by following managers and observing what they actually do hour by hour and
day by day, identified 10 kinds of specific roles, or sets of job responsibilities, that capture the
dynamic nature of managerial work. He grouped these roles according to whether the
responsibility was primarily decisional, interpersonal, or informational.
Decisional roles:
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:
Figurehead: symbolizing the organization’s mission and what it is seeking to achieve
(ceremonial and symbolic duties).
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:
Monitor: analyzing information from internal and external environment.
Disseminator (in Dutch: ‘verspreider’): transmitting information to influence the
attitudes and behavior of employees (primarily inside the organization).
Spokesperson: using information to positively influence the way people (in and) out of
the organization respond to it (primarily outside the organization)
3
, Levels and skills of managers
first-line manager: A manager who is responsible for the daily supervision of nonmanagerial
employees.
middle manager: A manager who supervises first-line managers and is responsible for finding
the best way to use resources to achieve organizational goals.
top manager: A manager who establishes organizational goals, decides how departments
should interact, and monitors the performance of middle managers
Research has shown that education and experience help managers acquire and develop three
types of skills: conceptual, human, and technical.
conceptual skills: The ability to analyze and diagnose a situation and to distinguish between
cause and effect.
human skills: The ability to understand, alter, lead, and control the behavior of other
individuals and groups.
technical skills: The job specific knowledge and techniques required to perform an
organizational role.
Recent Changes in Management Practices
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 have it perform an activity
the organization previously performed itself.
Empowerment: The expansion of employees’ knowledge, tasks, and decision- making
responsibilities.
Self-managed team: A group of employees who assume responsibility for organizing,
controlling, and supervising their own activities and monitoring the quality of the goods and
services they provide.
Challenges for Management in a Global Environment
global organizations: Organizations that operate and compete in more than one country.
Five major challenges stand out: building a competitive advantage, maintaining ethical standards,
managing a diverse workforce, utilizing new information systems and technologies, and practicing
global crisis management.
competitive advantage: The ability of one organization to outperform other organizations
because it produces desired goods or services more efficiently and effectively than they do. The
four building blocks of competitive advantage are superior efficiency; quality; speed,
flexibility, and innovation; and responsiveness to customers.
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