Management Principles and Practices

Posted on Apr 1, 2025 in International Business Economics

Management Functions

  • Planning: Preparing for the future
  • Organizing: Ensuring everything is in its proper place and time
  • Leading: Guiding a group to achieve an objective
  • Controlling: Ensuring everything is accurate and functioning correctly

Management Levels

  • Top-Level Management: CEO, Board of Directors
  • Middle-Level Management: Area or Department Managers
  • Low-Level Management: Team Leaders, Supervisors, Chiefs
  • Non-Managerial Employees: Workers

Types of Managers

  • General Managers: Responsible for complex company units
  • Functional Managers: Responsible for a specific unit

Types of Plans

  • Strategic Plans: Long-term goals and a vision of the desired future. SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely)
  • Tactical Plans: Support strategic plans by translating them into specific tasks

Managerial Competencies

  1. Strategic Action
  2. Multiculturalism
  3. Communication
  4. Planning and Administration
  5. Teamwork
  6. Self-Management

Management Definition

Management is the process of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling resources to achieve company goals.

Control Systems

A systematic process through which managers ensure that behaviors and decisions conform to organizational standards and legal requirements.

Steps of Feedback Control

  1. Establish performance standards
  2. Measure actual performance
  3. Compare actual performance to standards
  4. Take corrective action

Financial Analysis

Managers evaluate financial reports, compare performance with other data and industry standards, analyze financial reliability, review profits, assets, sales, and inventory, and ensure compliance with laws and regulations.

Types of Control

  • Corrective Control: Mechanisms to reduce or eliminate unwanted behaviors (e.g., direct supervision, feedback, disciplinary actions, reporting procedures, financial reports).
  • Preventive Control: Mechanisms to decrease the likelihood of unwanted events (e.g., rules, regulations, standards, recruitment procedures, training).

The Creative Process

  1. Preparation: Gathering and collecting facts and ideas
  2. Concentration: Focusing energy on identifying and solving an issue (e.g., brainstorming)
  3. Incubation: Pausing conscious thought to allow for subconscious processing
  4. Illumination: The moment of insight when connections are made subconsciously and brought to conscious awareness

Quality

A product or service free of deficiencies that satisfies customer needs.

Internal Perspectives on Controlling Quality

Excellence

  • Advantages: Clear organizational vision, motivates employees
  • Disadvantages: Limited practical guidance, ambiguous definition

Value

  • Advantages: Appeals to discerning customers, facilitates product comparison
  • Disadvantages: Difficult to measure and control, challenging to determine value, balancing excellence and cost

Conformance to Specifications

  • Advantages: Measurable, increases efficiency, promotes consistency
  • Disadvantages: Difficult to evaluate subjectively, hinders adaptability to change

Process Flow: Suppliers → Input → Process → Output → Satisfied Customer

Control Methods

Mechanistic/Bureaucratic

  • Strict rules and procedures
  • Top-down authority
  • Activity-based jobs
  • Extrinsic rewards (wages, pensions, status)
  • Distrust of teams

Organic/Decentralized

  • Flexible rules and procedures
  • Adaptive authority
  • Results-based jobs
  • Extrinsic and intrinsic rewards (meaningful work, satisfaction)
  • Use of teams