33. History Module A Brief History of Management’s Roots Anjum Nisar Qureshi 1-
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After studying this chapter you will be able to: Tell who managers are and where they work Define management Describe what managers do Explain why it’s important to study management, and Describe the factors that are reshaping and redefining management
Three characteristics that identify an organization are its: Goals People , and Structure. Examples of organizations include: Your neighborhood convenience store The Dallas Cowboys football team Fraternities and sororities The Cleveland Clinic, and Internationally known corporations such as Nokia.
Here we see three levels of managers whose titles describe their place in the managerial hierarchy: top, middle, and first-line managers.
Management is the process of getting things done effectively and efficiently , with and through people.
Another way to describe what managers do is by looking at the skills they need for managing. Management researcher Robert L. Katz and others describe four critical skills: Conceptual skills Interpersonal skills Technical skills, and Political skills.
Until now, we’ve looked at management as a generic activity. But in reality, a manager’s job varies depending on: The manager’s level in the organization , and Whether the organization is a profit or nonprofit organization. Depending on a manager’s position within an organization, the importance of a manager’s role differs in degree and emphasis . That is, the decisions of a top manager will have greater ramifications than those of a middle manager due to the content of the decision. All managers—whether in profit or nonprofit organizations—make decisions and plan, lead, organize, and control. However, the following variables change based on the manager’s level in the organization: The amount of time a manager gives to each activity is not necessarily constant. For example, as seen in this illustration, as managers move up the organization they spend less time supervising and more time planning. T he content of the managerial activities also changes with the manager’s level . That is, a first-level manager spends the majority of his time leading but a top manager spends the majority of his time organizing. It’s important to note that management performance is measured according to different objectives depending on the nature of the organization: For businesses, profit is the bottom line, but Nonprofits do not exist to maximize profits.
How generic or universal are the manager’s roles when it comes to working in a small organization versus a large corporation? What differences might exist? Are the managerial concepts we’ve been discussing transferable across countries? If so, they would apply universally in any country in the world. However, research shows that while concepts transfer easily among many English-speaking countries, managers will likely have to modify their management when dealing with India, China, Chile, or other countries with economic, political, social, or cultural environments that differ from those of traditional Western free-market democracies.
As we see here, the importance of managerial roles in small and large businesses differ. For the purposes of our discussion, a small business is an independent business having fewer than 500 employees that doesn’t necessarily engage in any new or innovative practices and has relatively little impact on its industry. The most important role of a small business manager is that of spokesperson, performing externally in meeting with customers, arranging financing with bankers, searching for new opportunities, and stimulating change. The actions of manager in a large organization, however, are directed internally , deciding which organizational units get which and how much of the available resources.. A small business manager is more likely to be a generalist in a less formal, less structured, and less complex environment than his counterpart in a large organization. Managers in both small and large organizations perform essentially the same activities, but how they go about those activities and the proportion of time they spend on each differ.
Understanding management offers insights into why some companies get our orders right the first time, why once-thriving organizations no longer exist, and which companies continue to prosper during challenging economic times. Studying management provides knowledge about manager skills and responsibilities, how organizations function, and how people behave in the workplace.
Managers everywhere face changing circumstances such as managing workers in both domestic and foreign workplaces, emerging technologies, ethical and trust issues, and global economic uncertainties. As a result, how they manage is also changing and affecting the way they plan, organize, lead, and control. Two important changes to note are: The increasing importance of customers , and Innovation.
Organizations need customer to exist. Until recently, customer focus was thought to be the responsibility of marketing, but organizations are now discovering that employee attitudes and behaviors play a big role in customer satisfaction. Managers are recognizing that delivering consistent high-quality customer service is essential for survival and success in today’s competitive environment. They recognize that employees are an integral part of creating a customer-responsive organization where employees are friendly and courteous, accessible, knowledgeable, prompt in responding to customer needs, and willing to do what’s necessary to please the customer.
Innovation means doing things differently, exploring new territory, and taking risks. In today’s challenging environment, innovation is critical and managers need to understand what, when, where, how, and why innovation can be fostered and encouraged throughout an organization. Managers need to be personally innovative and to encourage their employees to be innovative.
The Egyptian pyramids are proof that projects of tremendous scope, employing more than 100,000 workers for some 20 years, were completed in ancient times. Someone had to plan the project, organize the labor and materials, and to impose controls to ensure that the work was done correctly.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the discipline of management began to evolve as a unified body of knowledge. Frederick W. Taylor, known as the father of scientific management , developed a method of scientifically finding the “one best way to do a job” in his 1911 groundbreaking book, Principles of Scientific Management .
Unlike Taylor, who focused on an individual production worker’s job, Henri Fayol and Max Weber looked at organizational practices by focusing on what managers do and what constituted good management. This approach is known as general administrative theory . Fayol first identified five management functions and fourteen principles of management that could be applied to all organizations. Weber, shown here, is known for his description and analysis of bureaucracy, which he believed was an ideal form of organization structure, especially for large organizations.
Managers get things done by working with people. From the late 1700s to the early 1900s, several management writers recognized the importance of people to an organization’s success. Some examples are: Robert Owen, who was concerned about deplorable working conditions, proposed an idealistic workplace. Hugo Munsterberg , a pioneer in the field of industrial psychology, suggested using psychological tests for employee selection, learning theory concepts for employee training, and studies of human behavior for employee motivation. Mary Parker Follett recognized that organizations could be viewed from both individual and group behavior perspectives, and argued that organizations should be based on a group ethic rather than on individualism.
From 1924 to the mid-1930s, the Hawthorne Studies —conducted at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Illinois—were the most important contribution to the behavioral approach to management. Initially designed as a scientific management experiment to measure the effect of various lighting levels on worker productivity, these studies revealed that pressures significantly affect individual productivity and that people behave differently when being observed. The Hawthorne Studies had a dramatic impact on management beliefs about the role of people in organizations and led to a new emphasis on the human behavior factor in organizational management.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the quantitative approach provided tools for managers to make their jobs easier. These tools focused on the application of statistics, optimization models, information models, computer simulations, and other quantitative techniques to improve decision-making. Quality experts W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Duran’s ideas became the basis for total quality management, or TQM, a management philosophy devoted to continual improvement and response to customer needs and expectations.
Most of the early approaches to management focused on managers’ concerns inside the organization. Beginning in the 1960s, management researchers began to look at what was happening in the environment outside the organization. The systems approach views systems as a set of interrelated and interdependent parts arranged in a manner that produces a unified whole. Organizations function as open systems, which means they are influenced by and interact with their environments. A manager must efficiently and effectively manage all parts of the system to achieve established goals. In the 1960s, Fred Feildler first popularized the contingency approach, which states that organizations, employees, and situations are different and require different management approaches. Since the 1980s, dramatic changes in information technology have directly affected the manager’s job. Nearly everyone in an organization is connected via technology and managers may manage employees working from home or halfway around the world.
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