Management

Why Management Is Essential for Any Organization

Managers are charged with the responsibility of taking actions that will make it possible for individuals to make their best contributions to group objectives. Management thus applies to small and large organizations, to profit and not-for-profit enterprises, to manufacturing as well as service industries. The term “enterprise” refers to businesses, government agencies, hospitals, universities, and other organizations, since almost everything sad in this book refers to business as well as non-business organizations. Effective managing is the concern of the corporation president, the hospital administrator, the government first-line supervisor, the Boy Scout leader, the bishop in the church, the baseball manager, and the university president.

A Glimpse over Managerial Functions

Management is the process of designing and maintaining an environment for the purpose of efficiently accomplishing selected aims. Managers carry out the functions of planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling, Managing is an essential activity at all organizational levels; however, the managerial skills required vary with organizational levels. Although women have made progress in obtaining responsible positions, they still have al long way to go. The goal of all managers is to create a surplus and to be productive, that is, to achieve a favorable output-input ration within a specific time period with due consideration for quality. Productivity implies effectiveness (achieving objectives) and efficiency (using the least amount of resources).
Managing as practice is an art; organized knowledge about management is a science. The development of management theory involves the development of concepts, principles and techniques.
The organization is an open system that operates within and interacts with the environment. The systems approach to management includes inputs from the external environment and from claimants, the transformation process, the communication system, external factors, outputs, and a way to reenergize the system. The transformation process consists of the managerial functions, which also provide the framework of organizing knowledge in this book. Throughout the book, but especially in Chapter 4 and in the part closings, international aspects of managing are emphasized.

The functions of managers

The functions of managers provide a useful structure for organizing management knowledge. There have been no new ideas, research findings, or techniques that cannot readily be placed in the classifications of planning, organizing, staffing, leading and controlling.
Planning involves selecting missions and objectives and the actions to achieve them; it requires decision making that is, choosing future courses of action from among alternatives. There are various types of plans, ranging from overall purposes and objective to the most detailed actions to be taken, such as ordering a special stainless steel bolt for an instrument or hiring and training workers for an assembly line. No real plan exists until a decision–a commitment of human or materials resources or reputation – has been made. Before a decision is made, all that exists is a planning study, an analysis, or a proposal; there is no real plan.
In brief, planning means setting an organization’s goals and deciding how best to achieve them. Decision-making, a part of the planning process, involves selecting a course of action from a set of alternatives. Planning and decision-making help maintain managerial effectiveness by serving as guides for future activities. In other words, the organization’s goals and plans clearly help managers know how to allocate their time and resources.

Organizing

People working together in groups to achieve some goal must have roles to play, much like the parts actors fill in a drama, whether these roles are ones the develop themselves, are accidental or haphazard, or are defined and structured by someone who wants to make sure that people contribute in a specific way to group effort. The concept of a “role” implies that what people do has a definite purpose or objective; they know how their job objective fits into group effort, and they have the necessary authority, tools, and information to accomplish the task.
This can be seen in as simple a group effort as setting up camp on a fishing expedition. Everyone could do anything he or she wanted to do, but activity would almost certainly be more effective and certain tasks would be less likely to be left undone if one or two persons were given the job f gathering firewood, others the assignment of getting water, others the task of starting a fire, others the job of cooking, and so on.
Organizing, then, is that part of managing that involves establishing an intentional structure of roles for people to fill in an organization. It is intentional in the sense of making sure that all the tasks necessary to accomplish goals are assigned and, it is hoped, assigned to people who can do them best.
The purpose of an organization structure is to help in creating an environment for human performance. It is, then, a management tool and not an end in and of itself. Although the structure must define the tasks to be done, the roles so established must also be designed in the light of the abilities and motivations of the people available.
Designing an effective organization structure is not an easy managerial task. Many problems are encountered in making structures fit situations, including both defining the kinds of jobs that must be done and finding the people to do them.
Once a manager has set goals and developed a workable plan. The next management function is to organize people and the other resources necessary to carry out the plan. Specifically, organizing involves determining how activities and resources are to be grouped.
Staffing involves filling, and keeping filled, the positions in the organization structure. This is done by identifying work-force requirements; inventorying the people available; and recruiting, selecting, placing, promoting, appraising, planning the careers of, compensating, and training or otherwise developing both candidates and current jobholders so that task are accomplished effectively and efficiently.
Leading is influencing people so that they will contribute to organization and group goals; it has to do predominantly with the interpersonal aspect of managing. All managers would agree that their most important problems arise from people – their desires and attitudes, their behavior as individuals and in groups – and that effective managers also need to be effective leaders. Since leadership implies follower ship and people tend to follow those who offer a means of satisfying their own needs, wishes, and desires, it is understandable that leading involves motivation, leadership styles and approaches, and communication.
The third basic managerial function is leading. Some people consider leading to be both the most important and the most challenging of all managerial activities. Leading is he set of processes used to get members of the organization to work together to further the interests of the organization.
Controlling is measuring and correcting individual and organizational performance to ensure that events conform to plans. It involves measuring performance against goals and plans, showing where deviations form standard exist, and helping to correct them. In short, controlling facilitates the accomplishment of plans. Although planning must preset controlling, plans are not self-achieving. Plans guide managers in the use of resources to accomplish specific goals; then activities are checked to determine whether they conform to the plans.
Control activities generally relate to the measurement of achievement. Some means of controlling, like the budget for expenses, inspection records, and the recorded of labour-hours lost, are generally familiar. Each measures, and each shows whether plans are working out. If deviations persist, correction is indicated. But what is corrected? Activities, through persons. Nothing can be done about reducing scrap, for example, or buying according to specifications, or handling sales returns unless on e knows who is responsible for these functions. Compelling events to conform to plans means locating the persons who are responsible for results that differ from planned action and then taking the necessary steps to improve performance. Thus, outcomes are controlled by controlling what people do.
The final phase of the management process is controlling, or monitoring the organizations progress toward its goals. As the organization moves toward its goals, managers must monitor progress to ensure that it is performing in such a way as to arrive at its “destination” at the appointed time.

The functions of Management

Many scholars and managers have found that the analysis of management is facilitated by a useful and clear organization of knowledge. In studying management, therefore, it is helpful to break it down into five managerial functions – planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling – around which can be organized the knowledge that underlies hose functions. Thus, the concepts, principles, theory, and techniques of management are grouped into these five functions.
This framework has been used and tested for many years. Although their are different ways o organizing managerial knowledge, most textbook authors today have adopted this or a similar framework even after experimenting at times with alternative ways of structuring knowledge.
Although the emphasis in this book is on manager’s tasks that pertain to designing an internal environment for performance within an organization, it must never be overlooked hat managers must operate in the external environment of an enterprise as well. Clearly, managers cannot perform their tasks well unless they have an understanding of, and are responsive to, the many elements of the external environment – economic, technological, social, political, and ethical factors that affect their areas of operations. Moreover, many organizations operate now in different countries.