Introduction to Management
Chapter 1
Managers get things done by coordinating and motivating other people.
Innovations are what keep companies growing, changing, and thriving.
Innovation is more important than cost-reduction for long-term success.
Management is the attainment of organizational goals in an effective and
efficient manner through planning, organizing, leading, and controlling
organizational resources.
Planning means identifying goals for future organizational performance
and deciding on the tasks and use of resources needed to attain them
(where the organization wants to be in the future and how to get there).
Organizing involves assigning tasks, grouping tasks into departments,
delegating authority, and allocating resources across the organization.
Leading is the use of influence to motivate employees to achieve
organizational goals. Controlling means monitoring employees’ activities,
determining whether the organization is moving toward its goals, and
making corrections as necessary.
Organization is a social entity that is goal directed and deliberately
structured. Social entity means being made up of two or more people.
Goal directed means designed to achieve some outcome. Deliberately
structured means that tasks are divided, and responsibility for their
performance is assigned to organization members. Effectiveness is the
degree to which the organization achieves a stated goal, or succeeds in
accomplishing what it tries to do. Efficiency refers to the amount of
resources used to achieve an organizational goal. Performance is the
attainment of organizational goals by using resources in an efficient and
effective way.
Conceptual skill is the cognitive ability to see the organization as a
whole system and the relationships among its parts. Human skill is the
manager’s ability to work with and through other people and to work
effectively as a group member. Technical skill is the understanding of
and proficiency in the performance of specific tasks. Two major reasons
that managers fail are poor communication and poor interpersonal skills. A
manager’s weaknesses become more apparent during stressful times of
uncertainty, change, or crisis.
Chapter 2
Social forces refer to those aspects of a culture that guide and influence
relationships among people. Social contract refers to the unwritten,
common rules and perceptions about relationships among people and
between employees and management. Political forces refer to the
influence of political and legal institutions on people and organizations.
Economic forces pertain to the availability, production, and distribution
of resources in a society.
, The study of modern management began in the late nineteenth century
with the classical perspective, which took a rational, scientific approach
to management and sought to turn organizations into efficient operating
machines. Scientific management emphasizes scientifically determined
jobs and management practises as the way to improve efficiency and
labour productivity. A systematic approach developed in Europe that
looked at the organization as a whole is the bureaucratic organizations
approach, which emphasizes management on an impersonal, rational
basis through elements such as clearly defined authority and
responsibility. Administrative principles approach is a subfield of the
classical perspective that focuses on the total organization rather than on
the individual worker and delineates the management functions of
planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling.
The humanistic perspective on management emphasized the
importance of understanding human behaviours, needs, and attitudes in
the workplace, as well as social interaction and group processes. The
human relations movement as based on the idea that truly effective
control comes from within the individual worker rather than from strict,
authoritarian control. The Hawthorne studies were important in shaping
ideas concerning how managers should treat workers. The human
resources perspective suggests that jobs should be designed to meet
people’s higher level needs by allowing employees to use their full
potential. The behavioural sciences approach uses scientific methods
and draws from sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, and
other disciplines to develop theories about human behaviour and
interaction in an organizational setting.
Management science, also referred to as the quantitative perspective,
uses mathematics, statistical techniques, and computer technology to
facilitate management decision making, particularly for complex problems.
Three subsets of management science are operations research, operations
management, and information technology. Quants have come to
dominate decision making in financial firms.
Systems thinking is the ability to see both the distinct elements of a
system or situation and the complex and changing interaction among
those elements. A system is a set of interrelated parts that function as a
whole to achieve a common purpose. Subsystems are parts of a system,
such as an organization, that depend on one another. Synergy means
that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The contingency view
tells managers that what works in one organizational situation might not
work in others. Managers can identify important contingencies that help
guide their decisions regarding the organization. Total quality
management (TQM) focuses on managing the total organization to
deliver quality to customers. Four significant elements of TQM are
employee involvement, focus on the customer, benchmarking, and
continuous improvement.
