237212933 Summary of Richard Daft s Book Management PDF

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CHAPTER 1 – MANAGEMENT FOR TURBULENT TIMES

In today’s work environment, managers rely less on command and control and more on coordination and communication. Innovations in products, services, management systems, production processes, corporate values, and other aspects of the organization are what keeps companies growing, changing, and thriving. Without innovation, no company can survive over the long run.

THE DEFINITION OF MANAGEMENT

What characteristic do all good managers have in common? They get things done through their organizations. Managers are the executive function of the organization, responsible for building and coordinating an entire system rather than performing specific tasks. That is, rather than doing all the work themselves, good managers create the systems and conditions that enable others to perform those tasks. Early twentieth-century management scholar Mary Parker Follett defined management as “the art of getting things done through people.” More recently, noted management theorist Peter Drucker stated that the job of managers is to give direction to their organizations, provide leadership, and decide how to use organizational resources to accomplish goals.

Our definition of management is as follows: Management is the attainment of organizational goals in an effective and efficient manner through planning, organizing, leading, and controlling organizational resources. This definition holds two important ideas: (1) the four functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling, and (2) the attainment of organizational goals in an effective and efficient manner. Planning means identifying goals for future organizational performance and deciding on the tasks and use of resources needed to attain them. In other words, managerial planning defines 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 on target toward its goals, and making corrections as necessary.

ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE

In an industrialized society where complex technologies dominate, organizations bring together knowledge, people, and raw materials to perform tasks no individual could do alone. An 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.

Organizational effectiveness is the degree to which the organization achieves a stated goal, or succeeds in accomplishing what it tries to do. Organizational efficiency refers to the amount of resources used to achieve an organizational goal. The ultimate responsibility of managers is to achieve high performance, which is the attainment of organizational goals by using resources in an efficient and effective manner.

MANAGEMENT SKILLS

The necessary skills for managing a department or an organization can be summarized in three categories: conceptual, human, and technical.

Conceptual skill is the cognitive ability to see the organization as a whole system and the relationships among its parts. Conceptual skill involves the manager’s thinking, information processing, and planning abilities. It involves knowing where one’s department fits into the total organization and how the organization fits into the industry, the community, and the broader business and social environment. It means the ability to think strategically—to take the broad, long-term view—and to identify, evaluate, and solve complex problems. Conceptual skills are needed by all managers but are especially important for managers at the top. Human skill is the manager’s ability to work with and through other people and to work effectively as a group member. It is the ability to motivate, facilitate, coordinate, lead, communicate, and resolve conflicts. A manager with human skills allows subordinates to express themselves without fear of ridicule, encourages participation, and shows appreciation for employees’ efforts. Technical skill is the understanding of and proficiency in the performance of specific tasks. Technical skills are particularly important at lower organizational levels. Many managers get promoted to their first management jobs by having excellent technical skills.

MANAGEMENT TYPES

An important determinant of the manager’s job is hierarchical level. For first-level managers, the main concern is facilitating individual employee performance. Middle managers, though, are concerned less with individual performance and more with linking groups of people, such as allocating resources, coordinating teams, or putting top management plans into action across the organization. For top-level managers, the primary focus is monitoring the external environment and determining the best strategy to be competitive. Top managers are responsible for setting organizational goals, defining strategies for achieving them, monitoring and interpreting the external environment, and making decisions that affect the entire organization. They look to the long-term future and concern themselves with general environmental trends and the organization’s overall success. Middle managers work at middle levels of the organization and are

responsible for business units and major departments. They are responsible for implementing the overall strategies and policies defined by top managers. Middle managers generally are concerned with the near future rather than with long-range planning. Over the past two decades, many organizations improved efficiency by laying off middle managers and slashing middle management levels. Traditional pyramidal organization charts were flattened to allow information to flow quickly from top to bottom and decisions to be made with greater speed. First-line managers are directly responsible for the production of goods and services. They are responsible for groups of nonmanagement employees. Their primary concern is the application of rules and procedures to achieve efficient production, provide technical assistance, and motivate subordinates. The time horizon at this level is short, with the emphasis on accomplishing day-to-day goals. The other major difference in management jobs occurs horizontally across the organization. Functional managers are responsible for departments that perform a single functional task and have employees with similar training and skills. General managers are responsible for several departments that perform different functions.

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A MANAGER?

Organizations often promote the star performers—those who demonstrate individual expertise in their area of responsibility and have an ability to work well with others—both to reward the individual and to build new talent into the managerial ranks. The individual performer is a specialist and a “doer.” His or her mind is conditioned to think in terms of performing specifi c tasks and activities as expertly as possible. The manager, on the other hand, has to be a generalist and learn to coordinate a broad range of activities. Whereas the individual performer strongly identify es with his or her specific tasks, the manager has to identify with the broader organization and industry. In addition, the individual performer gets things done mostly through his or her own efforts, and develops the habit of relying on self rather than others. The manager, though, gets things done through other people. Diverse manager activities can be organized into 10 roles. A role is a set of expectations for a manager’s behavior. These roles are divided into three conceptual categories: informational (managing by information); interpersonal (managing through people); and decisional (managing through action). Each role represents activities that managers undertake to ultimately accomplish the functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.

SUMMARY:

 This chapter introduced the topic of management and defined the types of roles and activities managers perform. Managers are responsible for attaining organizational goals in an efficient and effective manner through the four management functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Managers are the executive function of the organization. Rather than performing specific tasks, they are responsible for creating systems and conditions that enable others to achieve high performance. To perform the four functions, managers need three types of skills—conceptual, human, and technical. Conceptual skills are more important at top levels of the organization; human skills are important at all levels; and technical skills are most important for first-line managers.  A manager’s job varies depending on whether one is a top manager, middle manager, or fi rst-line manager. A manager’s job may also differ across the organization, to include project managers and interim managers as well as functional managers (including line managers and staff managers) and general managers.  Becoming a manager requires a shift in thinking. New managers often struggle with the challenges of coordinating a broad range of people and activities, delegating to and developing others, and relating to former peers in a new way.  Managers’ activities are associated with ten roles: the informational roles of monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson; the interpersonal roles of figurehead, leader, and liaison; and the decisional roles of entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator.  Rapid and dramatic change in recent years has caused significant shifts in the workplace and the manager’s job. Rather than managing by command and control, managers of today and tomorrow use an empowering leadership style that focuses on vision, values, and communication. Team-building skills are crucial. Instead of just directing tasks, managers focus on building relationships, which may include customers, partners, and suppliers.

CHAPTER 2 – THE EVOLUTION OF MANAGEMENT THINKING

CLASSICAL MANAGEMENT

Scientific management emphasizes scientifically determined jobs and management practices as the way improve efficiency and labor productivity. The ideas of scientific management that began with Taylor dramatically increased productivity across all industries, and they are still important today. A recent Harvard Business Review article discussing innovations that shaped modern management puts scientific management at the top of its list of 12 influential innovations. Indeed, the ideas of creating a system for maximum efficiency and organizing work for maximum productivity are deeply embedded in our organizations. A systematic approach developed in Europe that looked at the organization as a whole is the bureaucratic organizations approach, a subfield within the classical perspective. Weber envisioned organizations that would be managed on an impersonal, rational basis. This form of organization was called a bureaucracy. Weber believed that an organization based on rational authority would be more efficient and adaptable to change because continuity is related to formal structure and positions rather than to a particular person, who may leave or die. To Weber, rationality in organizations meant employee selection and advancement based not on whom you know, but rather on competence and technical qualifications, which are assessed by examination or according to training and experience. Positions are organized in a hierarchy, with each position under the authority of a higher one. The manager depends not on his or her personality for successfully giving orders but on the legal power invested in the managerial position. Another major subfield within the classical perspective is known as the administrative principles approach. Whereas scientific management focused on the productivity of the individual worker, the administrative principles approach focused on the total organization.

In his most significant work, General and Industrial Management, Fayol discussed 14 general principles of management, several of which are part of management philosophy today. For example:  Unity of command. Each subordinate receives orders from one—and only one—superior.  Division of work. Managerial work and technical work are amenable to specialization to produce more and better work with the same amount of effort.  Unity of direction. Similar activities in an organization should be grouped together under one manager.  Scalar chain. A chain of authority extends from the top to the bottom of the organization and should include every employee.

The informal organization occurs in all formal organizations and includes cliques and naturally occurring social groupings. Barnard argued that organizations are not machines and stressed that informal relationships are powerful forces that can help the organization if properly managed.

HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE

Humanistic perspective on management emphasizes the importance of understanding human behaviors, needs, and attitudes in the workplace as well as social interactions and group processes. There are three subfields based on the humanistic perspective: the human relations movement, the human resources perspective, and the behavioral sciences approach.

The human relations movement was based on the idea that truly effective control comes from within the individual worker rather than from strict, authoritarian control. The human resources perspective maintained an interest in worker participation and considerate leadership but shifted the emphasis to consider the daily tasks that people perform. The human resources perspective combines prescriptions for design of job tasks with theories of motivation. In the human resources view, jobs should be designed so that tasks are not perceived as dehumanizing or demeaning but instead allow workers to use their full potential. The point of Theory Y is that organizations can take advantage of the imagination and intellect of all their employees. Employees will exercise self-control and will contribute to organizational goals when given the opportunity. The behavioral sciences approach uses scientific methods and draws from sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, and other disciplines to develop theories about human behavior and interaction in an organizational setting.

Management science perspective is distinguished for its application of mathematics, statistics, and other quantitative techniques to management decision making and problem solving. During World War II, groups of mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists were formed to solve military problems. Because those problems frequently involved moving massive amounts of materials and large numbers of people quickly and efficiently, the techniques had obvious applications to largescale business firms. Operations management refers to the field of management that specializes in the physical production of goods or services. Operations management specialists use quantitative techniques to solve manufacturing problems. Information technology (IT) is the most recent subfield of the management science perspective, which is often reflected in management information systems. These systems are designed to provide relevant information to managers in a timely and cost-efficient manner.

RECENT HISTORICAL TRENDS

The systems theory of organizations consists of five components: inputs, a transformation process, outputs, feedback, and the environment. Inputs are the material, human, financial, or information resources used to produce goods and services. The transformation process is management’s use of production technology to change the inputs into outputs. Outputs include the organization’s products and services. Feedback is knowledge of the results that influence the selection of inputs during the next cycle of the process. The environment surrounding the organization includes the social, political, and economic forces. Some ideas in systems theory significantly affected management thinking. They include open and closed systems, synergy, and subsystem interdependencies. Open systems must interact with the environment to survive; closed systems need not. Synergy means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When an organization is formed, something new comes into the world. Management, coordination, and production that did not exist before are now present. Organizational units working together can accomplish more than those same units working alone. Subsystems depend on one another as parts of a system. Changes in one part of the organization affect other parts. The organization must be managed as a coordinated whole. Managers who understand subsystem interdependence are reluctant to make changes that do not recognize subsystem impact on the organization as a whole. Systemic thinking means looking both at the distinct elements of a situation and at the interaction among those elements. The fundamental assumption of systemic thinking is that everything in the world affects and is affected by the things around it. For example, all managers know that price, cost, volume, quality, and profit are all interrelated. Changing one will affect the others. However, most managers tend to think analytically, by breaking things down to their distinct elements. Systemic thinking takes a further step. To think systemically, managers look not only at the distinct parts of a system or situation but also at the interactions among those parts, which are continually changing and affecting each other differently.

A second contemporary extension to management thinking is the contingency view. The classical perspective assumed a universalist view. Management concepts were thought to be universal; that is, whatever worked—leader style, bureaucratic structure—in one organization would work in another. In business education, however, an alternative view exists. In this case view, each situation is believed to be unique. Principles are not universal, and one learns about management by experiencing a large number of case problem situations. Managers face the task of determining what methods will work in every new situation. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, total quality management (TQM), which focuses on managing the total organization to deliver quality to customers, moved to the forefront in helping U.S. managers deal with global competition. The approach infuses quality values throughout every activity within a company, with frontline workers intimately involved in the process. Four significant elements of quality management are employee involvement, focus on the customer, benchmarking, and continuous improvement. Employee involvement means that achieving quality requires companywide participation in quality control. All employees are focused on the customer; companies find out what customers want and try to meet their needs and expectations. Benchmarking refers to a process where by companies find out how others do something better than they do and then try to imitate or improve on it.

Continuous improvement is the implementation of small, incremental improvements in all areas of the organization on an ongoing basis.

MANAGING IN TURBULENT TIMES

The learning organization can be defined as one in which everyone is engaged in identifying and solving problems, enabling the organization to continuously experiment, change, and improve, thus increasing its capacity to grow, learn, and achieve its purpose. The essential idea is problem solving, in contrast to the traditional organization designed for efficiency. In the learning organization all employees look for problems, such as understanding special customer needs. Employees also solve problems, which means putting things together in unique ways to meet a customer’...