Effective Business Management: Strategies and Structures

Posted on Dec 13, 2024 in Other subjects

Key Decisions and Their Types

Steps to channel daily actions:

  • Planning: Establishing goals and resources.
  • Organization: Distributing resources between tasks. Defining each task and the responsibility of each.
  • HR Direction: Establishing clear leadership through policy incentives and rewards.
  • Control: Verifying that the real answers to the plan, identifying deviations, to correct them.

Skills that every manager needs:

  • Technical: Knowledge of the subjects in which they work.
  • Human: Ability to understand, persuade, and motivate.
  • Conceptual: Understanding the interaction with the environment.

Types of decisions:

  • Routine: Known issues in an environment of certainty.
  • Adaptive: Take to adapt to gradual changes.
  • Innovative: A seismic shift.

Decision-Making Process

Phases:

  1. Diagnosis: Identify the problem and its causes.
  2. Review alternatives.
  3. Compare alternatives.
  4. Attach selection criteria.
  5. Select alternatives according to the criterion chosen.
  6. Implement the alternative.
  7. Evaluate the results.

Managerial Levels

Top management:

  1. Pilots the company.
  2. Makes high-level managerial decisions with high uncertainty.
  3. Deals with new and unfamiliar problems.
  4. Needs the greatest intellectual resources.

Directorate term:

  1. Works as a hinge, applying high-level decisions and gathering information from lower levels.
  2. The further down the chain of command, the more routine and predictable the work.

Directorate monitoring line 1:

  1. Resolves ordinary problems.
  2. Has contact with productive resources.

The Nature of Managerial Work

Multiple roles of a manager at work:

Interpersonal:

  1. Visible head in the company.
  2. Acts as a leader, influencing the behavior of other members (motivation).
  3. Creates networking.

Informative:

  1. Searches for information, encoded/implied, formal/informal.
  2. Disseminates external information to the organization.
  3. Spokesperson to third parties.

Decisional:

  1. Drives innovation.
  2. Takes remedies to problems.
  3. Assigns resources.
  4. Negotiates solutions to conflicts.

The Problem of Human Motivation

Classics: Only motivation, money.

School of human relations:

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Physiological, security, affection, esteem. As one level is satisfied, the next level becomes the primary motivator.

Herzberg: Wages, job security, position, status, quality of interpersonal relationships.

McGregor, two extreme forms of human behavior:

  1. Theory X: Human beings avoid work when they can, you need to use coercion on them to work, they do not want to be directed, avoid responsibilities, lack ambition, and are only worried about their safety.
  2. Theory Y: Job satisfaction is a source of motivation, people can self-control, self-direct, learn to take on responsibilities, have creativity/ingenuity.

Ouchi: Theory Z: Mechanisms to enhance motivation, leading to quality circles. Coordination, loyalty, equity, a sense of reality to acknowledge mistakes and correct them, celebrating successes, subtlety to substantially address all the problems, team spirit.

Leadership

Sources of Power:

A) Based on the ruler-governed interaction:

  1. Power to reward actions with money.
  2. Power of coercion to punish.
  3. Legitimate management power.
  4. Reference power.
  5. Expert power, shown by the manager in the workplace.

B) Based on the relationship between the organization and outside.

Concept: Arrangement of other people to follow a person as they consider what is best for achieving their personal goals.

Components:

  • Capacity to use power effectively.
  • Knowing the different sources of motivation.
  • Inspiring ideas, feelings, and actions to others.
  • Creating an appropriate climate in the organization.

Communication

Elements:

  1. The basic emitter-receptor: Coding system known to regulate rules, the purpose of the message.
  2. Technical point: Message, physical transmission media, communication channel.
  3. Interference: Deciphering the message, attitude, and behavior resulting from the misinterpretation of it.

Type in the company:

  • Descending: Hierarchical level lower than levels used for operating instructions.
  • Ascending: The lower level to the top organizational information travels on the control.
  • Crusader: Not linked to hierarchical relationships.

Recruitment, Selection, and Training

Recruitment: Detect potential employees. Selection tools: Interviews, knowledge tests, psychological testing, practical.

Training: To meet 2 functions:

a) Improve the adequacy of the subject to the job.

b) Personal skills to adapt to a changing environment.

Requirements for a manager:

  1. Analytic ability and problem-solving.
  2. Leadership capacity.
  3. Ethics at work.
  4. Experience.

Performance Evaluation, Reward Systems, and Objectives

A proper incentive system must respect the following principles:

a) Information: The cost of the incentive is greater if further action is unknown to agents.

b) Incentive intensity: The incentive to be proportional to the performance of the task, the agent’s sensitivity to it.

c) Equal: Equally encourage all tasks.

Reward systems:

  1. Individual.
  2. Explicit: A) A piece, produced by UF. Disadvantages: Conditional entry into the demand for the product and the rate is fixed if you mark an assembly line. B) Commission. C) Executive: Stock options: The executive is involved in the objectives of the shareholder.
  3. Implicit: Based on perceived performance of a function that has been evaluated. No contracts are agreed upon in advance.
  4. Group: a) Profit-sharing plan, b) Reward for goals achieved.

Organizational Structure

Concept: Scope: Formal model of coordination between members that influences:

A) Differentiation: Assigning tasks to each member;

B) Integration: Create lines of communication between different departments.

Stability, or permanence in time, adapting to the environment.

Informal-formal character.

Items:

Individuals: You have to understand their motivations and evaluate their performance.

Group: Formal structure, hierarchy groups, functions of each group.

Structural Dimensions

Internal factors of an anatomical nature: Variables used to establish operating guidelines.

  1. Specialization: Division of functions and tasks as execution and control. Horizontal: Division of tasks for better performance. Vertical: Between execution and control. Are not independent, is an alternative to enlargement.
  2. Standardization: Define standards, procedures, and rules of the tasks. Can be done in work processes, outcomes, skills. Reasons for it: Need for coordination, accuracy, mechanical, and ensure fairness. Problems: Excessive rules, destroys relationships, greater rigidity information.
  3. Formalization: The degree to which the rules are explained in writing.
  4. Centralization: The degree to which authority is concentrated in the decision-making. Compatible with the delegation of functions. Is rigid.
  5. Configuration: A group of tasks. Departmentalization: By function, geography, by product, customer, per process.

Structural Models

Parts of the whole structure:

  • Senior Management: Responsible for the overall objectives.
  • Midline: Implemented strategies.
  • Operational Level: Staff dealing with the work.
  • Technostructure: Analysts.
  • Staff or personal advice.

Typical Structures

  1. Simple Configuration: Young structure, without qualifications or departments.
  2. Mechanical Bureaucracy: Standardizes and formalizes behaviors, stable and routine work.
  3. Professional Bureaucracy: Standardized and formalized tasks and protocols in specialized fields for stable but complex environments.
  4. Multidivisional Structure: Autonomous organizational units coordinated by management for large organizations with diverse products and dynamic environments.
  5. Ad Hoc Structure: Highly skilled professionals on complex technologies. With high creativity.

Benefits: Problems and greater adaptability to environmental variation, takes creativity expert agents, form working groups to the extent of the problems, there is no hierarchy in decision-making.

Disadvantages: Difficult to manage and control, tension personnel to prevent the orderly and scheduled work, only to organizations with high-risk situations with great ability to change, not resist dynamic and complex environments.

New Models

  1. Team Structure: Coordination groups seeking to prevent defects in bureaucratic organizations.
  2. Virtual Organization: Cloverleaf structure: Small core executive who outsources most tasks. 3 sheets are created: a) Professionals and managers, b) To outsource activities, c) Flexible working, d) 4th sheet: Customer self-employment.
  3. Federal Organization: Independent business entity with a global mission, advised by a central core, but not controlled from the center.
  4. Organization without Borders: Working Groups, where the staff rotates through all the posts.
  5. Women’s Organization: Evaluation of human beings, promoting the development of individual members of the organization.