Practicing Management

Alan S. Gutterman

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781949991246
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

A wide range of conceptualizations of "management" have been offered and it is often difficult for managers to fully understand their roles within the organization; however, managers striving for effectiveness would do well to invest effort into understanding the functions, roles, and skills associated with managerial positions. In order to be adroit practitioners of their craft, managers must understand these basic concepts, as well as the different levels of managerial effectiveness, how they are measured, the styles available to managers, and the factors that determine which style might be preferred in a particular instance.

This book addresses a wide array of topics relating to the practice of management including the roles and activities expected from an effective manager, specific managerial skills, styles of management, management systems, and managing in developing countries.

CHAPTER 1

Management Roles and Activities

Introduction

In order to understand whether someone is being an effective manager it is necessary to have some idea of the expectations regarding the person’s roles and activities within the organization. A number of different approaches have been taken in creating models of managerial functions or activities. Fayol famously argued that there were five principle managerial functions—planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling—and others have accepted these categories and added a handful of others such as staffing and rewarding. Mintzberg criticized Fayol’s “five functions” as being an inaccurate reflection of the complex and chaotic nature of the manager’s tasks and suggested an alternative model of the ten core “roles,” or organized sets of behaviors, identified with a managerial position, which he divided up into three groups: interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles. Others have pointed out that it is useful to distinguish between “functional” and “general” managers, each of whom have their own unique duties, responsibilities, and skill requirements. Finally, the position or level of the manager in the organizational hierarchy is likely to be relevant to his or her roles and activities: “first-line” managers focus primarily on supervision of operational employees, “middle managers” focus primarily on supervising the first-line managers and/or staff departments, and “top-level” or “senior” managers focus on setting the strategic direction for the entire organization.1

Models of Managerial Activities

Serious consideration of managerial roles and activities is often traced back to the work of Henri Fayol, who was one of the first to focus on the specific functions and roles of managers and famously observed in his writings in the early 20th century that managers had five principle roles: planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling.2 A good deal of the management literature created since the 1950s has relied on what has become known as the “functional approach” to ­management, which built on Fayol’s ideas and defined and analyzed the activities of managers and the managerial process by reference to functions such as planning and organizing as opposed to the traditional substantive functions such as manufacturing, sales, and finance.3

Other management theorists working and writing during the 1950s and 1960s also embraced what became known as the “process school of management,” which was based on the notion that management should be viewed as process that included an identifiable set of several interdependent functions. Like Fayol, they believed that these managerial functions were universal and thus would be relevant and applicable to all managers regardless of the type of organization in which they worked or their level within a particular organizational structure.4 For example, Koontz et al. identified the following five activities as “major management functions” 5:

• Planning: Predetermining a course of action for accomplishing organizational objectives
• Organizing: Arranging the relationships among work units for accomplishment of objectives and the granting of responsibility and authority to obtain those objectives
• Staffing: Selecting and training people for positions in the organization
• Directing: Creating an atmosphere that will assist and ­motivate people to achieve desired end results (sometimes referred to as “leading”)
• Controlling: Establishing, measuring, and evaluating ­performance of activities toward planned objectives

The process school of management, and the accompanying ­functions described earlier, remained the dominant analytical framework into the early 1970s when critics began to argue that Fayol’s “five functions” were too “normative and functional” and failed to adequately capture the complexity of a manager’s daily activities and the significant amount of time that managers must devote to nurturing informal relationships with ­subordinates and other parties outside of the organization in order to motivate the workforce, communicate their goals and ideas, and collect information about the organization’s external environment that can be used for planning.6 Perhaps the strongest opposition came from ­Mintzberg, who argued that the process school of management and its emphasis on tightly defined functional categories did not accurately reflect the complex and chaotic nature of the manager’s tasks. Mintzberg suggested an alternative model of “managerial roles” and generated a fair amount of debate regarding the validity of the process school of management. Several empirical studies were conducted to determine whether Fayol or Mintzberg had the most “accurate” model for managerial activities and the conclusion seemed to be that both approaches were useful and valid ways to describe and analyze the work of managers.7

In recent years other suggestions and descriptions of managerial roles and duties have been put forth by scholars and consultants working in a number of different disciplines. For example, Noe, writing about the relationship between strategy and training, argued that managers have a number of key roles and duties at companies that use high-performance work practices8:

• Managing Alignment: Clarifying team and company goals; helping employees manage their objectives and scanning the organizational environment for useful information for the team
• Coordinating Activities: Ensuring that the team is meeting internal and external customer needs; ensuring that the team meets it quantity and quality objectives; helping the team resolve problems with other teams and ensuring uniformity in the interpretation of policies and procedures
• Facilitating Decision-Making Processes: Facilitating team decision-making and helping the team use effective ­decision-making processes (i.e., dealing with conflicts and statistical process controls)
• Encouraging Continuous Learning: Helping the team ­identify training needs; helping the team become effective at “on the job” training and creating an environment that encourages learning
• Creating and Maintaining Trust: Ensuring that each team member is responsible for his or her work load and ­customers; treating all team members with respect and listening and responding honestly to team ideas

Fayol’s Primary Functions of Management

Henri Fayol pioneered the notion of “functions of management” in his 1916 book “Administration Industrielle et Generale” in which he identified and described five functions of managers—planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling—that he believed were universal and required of all managers as they went about performing their day-to-day activities regardless of whether they were operating in the business environment or overseeing the activities of governmental, military, religious, or philanthropic organizations.9 Fayol also prescribed 14 general principles of management and organization that were intended to provide managers with further guidance on how they might effectively execute their five primary management functions. At the time, Fayol was the managing director of a large coal mining firm in France and most of his ideas were based in large part on his own experiences as a manager as opposed to classical empirical research.

Fayol’s work was not widely known outside of France until 1949 when his book was first published in English.10 Nonetheless, his ideas had already begun to appear in the emerging area of management studies. For example, in 1937 Gulick and Urwick coined the acronym “POSDCORB” to refer to their own collection of seven management activities that included the five suggested by Fayol as well as two additional items: reporting and budgeting. These activities have been described as follows11:

• Planning (P): working out the things that need to be done and the methods for doing them to accomplish the purpose set for the enterprise
• Organizing (O): establishment of the formal structure of authority through which work sub-divisions are arranged, defined, and coordinated for the defined objective
• Staffing (S): the whole personnel function of bringing in and training the staff and maintaining favorable ­conditions of work
• Directing (D): continuous task of making decisions and embodying them in specific and general orders and ­instructions, and serving as the leader of the enterprise
• Coordinating (CO): The all-important duty of inter-relating the various parts of the work
• Reporting (R): keeping the executive informed as to what is going on, which thus includes keeping himself and his subordinates informed through records, research, and inspection
• Budgeting (B): all that goes with budgeting in the form of fiscal planning, accounting, and control

Mackenzie’s 3-D Model of the Management Process

While there was little that was new in Mackenzie’s “three dimensional” model of the management process presented in the late 1960s, it did provide an interesting alternative way of looking at the activities, functions, and basic elements of the manager’s job.12 Mackenzie began with an observation that managers must deal with three basic elements as they go about their day-to-day activities—ideas, things, and people—and noted that these elements aligned themselves with three essential skill sets: conceptual thinking, particularly planning, administration, and leadership. He pointed out that organizations needed managers who were adroit at practicing each of these skill sets (i.e., planners, administrators, and leaders); however, he conceded that someone who was good at one set of skills may not be good at the others. Common illustrations included situations where someone might be a strong charismatic leader who could easily motivate people yet be weak in areas such as planning and management that required conceptual skills.

Mackenzie then went to suggest two categories of managerial functions: “sequ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• title
• Copyright
• Abstract
• Contents
• 01_chapter 1
• 02_Chapter 2
• 03_Chapter 3
• 04_Chapter 4
• 05_Chapter 5
• 06_Bios
• 07_Index
• 08_Adpage
• Backcover