Essential Managerial Skills and Modern Management Perspectives
**Essential Managerial Skills**
Technical: To accomplish or understand the specific kind of work being done in an organization. Interpersonal: To communicate with, understand, and motivate both individuals and groups. Conceptual: To think in the abstract. Diagnostic: To visualize the appropriate response to a situation. Communication: To convey ideas and information effectively to others and to receive the same effectively from others. Decision-making: To recognize and define problems and opportunities and then to select an appropriate course of action to solve problems and capitalize on opportunities. Time management: To prioritize work, to work efficiently, and to delegate appropriately.
10 Basic Managerial Roles
Interpersonal
- Figurehead: Attending ribbon-cutting ceremony for new plant.
- Leader: Encouraging employees to improve productivity.
- Liaison: Coordinating activities of two project groups.
Informational
- Monitor: Scanning industry reports to stay abreast of developments.
- Disseminator: Sending memos outlining new organizational initiatives.
- Spokesperson: Making a speech to discuss growth plans.
Decisional
- Entrepreneur: Developing new ideas for motivation.
- Disturbance handler: Resolving conflict between two subordinates.
- Resource allocator: Reviewing and revising budget requests.
- Negotiator: Reaching agreement with a key supplier or labor union.
What Is a Theory?
A theory is simply a conceptual framework for organizing knowledge and providing a blueprint for action.
Modern Management Perspectives
The Classical Perspective
Assumes that workers do not like to work, accept responsibility, or change behavior. Only motivated by money, and they prefer to be told exactly what to do.
- Scientific management: Performance of individual workers (efficiently). Taylor’s 4 steps:
- Breaking job into small tasks.
- Selecting and training best employees.
- Monitoring to ensure.
- Replacing employees who do not show high achievement.
- Administrative management: Focuses on managing the total organization utilizing bureaucracy, effective planning, top-down coordination and control, and so on. (Henry Fayol).
- Bureaucracy (Max Weber) focused on identifying the ideal form of structure for an organization:
- Division of labor.
- Hierarchy.
- Selection.
- Career orientation.
- Formalization.
- Impersonality.
Today:
Contributions:
- Laid foundation for later theoretical developments.
- Identified management processes, functions, and skills.
- Focused attention on management as a valid subject of scientific inquiry.
Limitations:
- More appropriate approach for use in traditional, stable, simple organizations.
- Prescribed universal procedures that are not appropriate in some settings.
- Employees viewed as tools rather than as resources.
The Behavioral Perspective
Placed emphasis on individual attitudes and behaviors and group processes. Recognized the importance of behavioral processes in the workplace.
- Human relations: (after Hawthorne studies). Social factors, attitudes, supervision, and informal work groups affect performance. The movement includes the need theories of motivation such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and McGregor’s Theory X (negative) and Theory Y (positive). Important topics in organizational behavior: Job satisfaction and stress, motivation and leadership, group dynamics and organizational politics, interpersonal conflict, and the design of organizations.
Today:
Contributions:
- Provided insights into motivation, group dynamics, and other interpersonal processes.
- Focused managerial attention on these critical processes.
- Challenged the view of employees as tools, but valuable resources.
Limitations:
- Complexity of individuals makes behavior difficult to predict.
- Concepts are not used because managers are reluctant to adopt them.
The Quantitative Perspective
Focuses on decision-making, economic effectiveness, mathematical models, and the use of computers.
- Management Science: Development of mathematical models, helping organizations try out various activities with the use of a computer. Modeling can help managers determine the best way to do things, saving money and time.
- Operations Management: An applied form of management science that helps organizations develop techniques to produce their products and services more efficiently.
Today:
Contributions:
- Sophisticated quantitative techniques can assist managers in decision-making.
- Application of its models has increased awareness and understanding of complex processes and situations.
- Useful in planning and controlling.
Limitations:
- Cannot fully explain or predict behavior.
- Mathematical sophistication may come at the expense of other managerial skills.
- Models may require unrealistic assumptions, limiting applicability.
Systems Perspective
Integrating perspective. A system is an interrelated set of elements functioning as a whole.
- Open system: An organization that interacts with its external environment.
- Closed system: Does not interact with its external environment.
- Subsystems: The importance of subsystems is due to their interdependence on each other within the organization. Stresses the importance of departments (marketing, finance, etc.).
- Concept of synergy: The whole is better than the sum of its parts.
Universal Perspective
Classical, behavioral, and quantitative. Attempts to identify the “one best way.”
Contingency Perspective
Suggests each organization is unique. Appropriate managerial behavior for managing an organization depends on the current situation in the organization.
Modern Management Today
Complementary way of thinking. Each of the major perspectives can be useful to managers but should recognize the situational context. Involves recognition of current system and subsystem interdependencies, environmental influences, and situational nature of management.