PRELIM FLASHCARDS
What is an organization?
A group of people working together in a structured and coordinated fashion to achieve a set of goals
What is management?
A set of activities (including planning and decision making, organizing, leading, and controlling) directed at an organization’s resources (human, financial, physical, and information), with the aim of achieving organizational goals in an efficient and effective manner.
What is a manager?
Someone whose primary responsibility is to carry out the management process.
efficient vs. effective
Efficient is using resources wisely in a cost-effective way. While, effective is making the right decisions and successfully implementing them.
4 Management Process
Planning/Decision Making - setting organization’s goals and how best to achieve them
Organizing - determining how best to group activities and resources
Leading - motivating members to work in the best interests of the organization
Controlling - monitoring and correcting ongoing activities to facilitate goal attainment
Top managers responsibilities
sets objectives, scans environment, plans and makes decisions
Middle managers responsibilities
reports to top management, oversees first-line managers, develops and implements activities, allocates resources
First-line managers
reports to middle managers, supervises employees
Kinds of Managers by Area
- Marketing Managers
- Financial Managers
- Operations Managers
- Human Resources Managers
- Administrative Managers
- Specialist Managers
Technical skills
The skills necessary to accomplish or understand the specific kind of work done in an organization.
Interpersonal skills
The ability to communicate with, understand, and motivate both individuals and groups.
Conceptual skills
The manager’s ability to think in the abstract.
Diagnostic skills
The manager’s ability to visualize the most appropriate response to a situation.
Communication skills
The manager’s abilities both to effectively convey ideas and information to others and to effectively receive ideas and information from others.
Decision-making skills
The manager’s ability to correctly recognize and define problems and opportunities and to then select an appropriate course of action to solve problems and capitalize on opportunities
Time management skills
The manager’s ability to prioritize work, to work efficiently, and to delegate appropriately.
The Science of Management
- Managers can gather data, facts, and objective information.
- They can use quantitative models and decision-making techniques to arrive at “correct” decisions.
- Technical and decision-making skills
The Art of Management
- Managers frequently make decisions and solve problems on the basis of intuition, experience, instinct, and personal insights.
- A manager may have to decide among multiple courses of action that look equally attractive.
- conceptual, communication, interpersonal, and time management skills
Early Management Pioneers
Robert Owen – Recognized the importance of human resources and the welfare of workers.
Charles Babbage – Focused on creating production efficiencies through division of labor and application of mathematics
2 Classical Management Perspectives and their definition
➝ Scientific Management – Concerned with improving the performance of individual workers.
➝ Administrative Management – focuses on managing the total organization.
Earliest advocates of scientific management and their contributions
Frederick W. Taylor - pioneer ; solved soldiering by a piecework pay system
Frank and Lillian Gilbreth - contemporaries of Taylor that crafted bricklaying (reduction of physical movement)
Primary contributors to administrative management and their contributions
Henri Fayol - first to identify
the specific managerial functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling
Lyndall Urwick - integrated scientific management with the work of Fayol ; developed a list of
guidelines for improving managerial effectiveness.
Max Weber - bureaucracy laid the foundation for contemporary organization theory
It emphasizes on individual attitudes and behaviors and group processes.
The Behavioral Management Perspective
Contributors to behavior management perspective
Hugo Munsterberg - father of industrial psychology ; suggested that psychologists could make valuable contributions to managers in the areas
of employee selection and motivation.
Mary Parker Follett - worked during the scientific
management era but quickly came to recognize the human element in the workplace.
The Hawthorne Studies
1st study: manipulating illumination for one group of workers
and comparing their subsequent productivity with the productivity of another group
2nd study: piecework incentive pay plan for a group of nine
men assembling terminal banks for telephone exchanges.
It argued that workers respond primarily to the social context of the workplace.
The Human Relations Movement
Two writers who help advance the human relations movement
Abraham Maslow - Hierarchy of Needs
Douglas McGregor - Theory X and Theory Y
It focuses on decision making, cost effectiveness, mathematical models and the use of computers.
Quantitative management perspective
Two branches of quantitative approach
- Management Science - focuses specifically on the development of mathematical models.
2.Operations Management - concerned with helping the organization more efficiently produce its products or services.
It is an interrelated set of elements functioning as a whole.
system
open system vs. closed systems
Open systems are systems that interact with their environment, whereas
closed systems do not interact with their environment.
What is a subsystem?
systems within a
broader system
It suggests that organizational units (or subsystems) may often be more successful
working together than working alone.
Synergy
When does entropy happen?
When an organization
does not monitor feedback from its environment and make appropriate adjustments.
What is universal perspective?
It is an attempt to identify the one best way to do something.
What is contingency perspective?
It suggests that appropriate managerial behavior in a given situation depends on or is contingent on, unique elements in a given situation.
Give a Contemporary Management Issues and Challenge
(1) Globalization, (2) An increasingly diverse and globalized workforce, (3) Increased emphasis on ethics and social responsibility, (4) The use of quality as the basis for competition, (5) The shift to a predominately service-based economy, (6) Meeting the challenges of a recovering economy, (7) Creating new organizational structures, (8) The effects of new information technology on how work is done in organization
