Ch 1: Managers and Managing Flashcards
What is an Organization?
Collections of people who work together and coordinate their actions to achieve a wide variety of goals or desired future outcomes.
What is a manager?
Person responsible for supervising the use of an organization’s resources (human and other) to meet its goals.
Organizational Performance
A measure of how efficiently and effectively a manager uses resources to satisfy customers and achieve organizational goals.
Organizational performance increases in direct proportion to increases in efficiency and effectiveness, true or false?
True
Effectiveness
A measure of the appropriateness of the goals an organization is pursuing and the degrees to which the organization achieves those goals. (Organizations are effective when managers choose appropriate goals and achieve them.)
Efficiency
A measure of how well or how productively resources are used to achieve a goal. (Organizations are efficient when managers minimize the amount of input resources ex. labor, raw materials and component parts.)
What are the tasks of management?
Planning, organizing, leading, controlling.
Planning
Identifying and selecting appropriate goals and course of action; they develop strategies for how to achieve high performance.
What are the steps involved in planning?
- Deciding which goals the organization will pursue.
- Deciding what strategies to adopt to attain those goals
- Deciding how to allocate organizational resources to pursue the strategies that attain those goals.
Strategy
a cluster of decisions about what goals to pursue, what actions to take, and how to use resources to achieve goals.
Organizing
Structuring working relationships so organizational members interact and cooperate to achieve organizational goals. (Organizing people into departments according to the kinds of job specific tasks they perform lays out lines of authority and responsibility between different individuals and groups.)
Leading
Articulating a clear vision and energizing and enabling organizational members so they understand the part they play in achieving organizational goals. (involves managers using power, personality, influence, and persuasion, and communication skills to coordinate people and groups so their activities are in harmony)
Controlling
Evaluating how well an organization is achieving its goals and taking action to maintain or improve performance.
What are the essential managerial skills?
Conceptual skills, human skills, technical skills.
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.
Core competency
Specific set of departmental skills, knowledge and experience that allows one organization to outperform its competitors.
Departmental skills that create a core competency give an organization a ______?
Competitive advantage.
Empowerment
The expansion of employees’ knowledge, tasks, and decision-making responsibilities.
What has been increasingly used to empower employees by expanding the employees job knowledge and increases the scope of their job responsibilities?
IT
Self-managed work teams
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. (causes company to better utilize its workforce)
Competitive advantage
The ability of one organization to outperform other organizations because it produces desired goods or services mored efficiently and effectively than they do.
What are the four building blocks of competitive advantage?
Superior efficiency, quality (speed, flexibility), innovation, and responsiveness to customers.
Speed
How fast they can bring a new product to the market.
Flexibility
How easily they can change or alter the way they perform their activities to respond to actions of their competitors.
Innovation
The process of creating new or improved goods and services or developing better ways to produce or provide them.
Restructuring
Downsizing an organization by eliminating the jobs of large numbers of top, middle, and first-line managers and non managerial employees.
Outsourcing
Contracting with another company, usually abroad, to have it perform an activity the organization previously performed itself.
