Management
Management (or managing)
is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a not-for-profit organization, or government
body. Management includes the activities of setting the strategy of
an organization and
coordinating the efforts of its employees (or of volunteers) to accomplish
its objectives through the application of
available resources,
such as financial, natural, technological, and human resources. The term "management" may also
refer to those people who manage an organization.
Social scientists study management as an academic discipline, investigating areas such as social organization and organizational leadership. Some people study management at colleges or universities;
major degrees in management include the Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com.) and Master of Business Administration (MBA.) and, for the public sector,
the Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree. Individuals who aim to
become management specialists or experts, management researchers, or professors
may complete the Doctor of Management (DM), the Doctor of Business Administration (DBA), or the PhD in Business Administration or Management.
Larger
organizations generally have three levels of managers, which are typically
organized in a hierarchical, pyramid structure:
·
Senior managers, such as members of a Board of Directors and a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or a President of
an organization. They set the strategic goals of the organization and make
decisions on how the overall organization will operate. Senior managers are
generally executive-level professionals, and provide direction to middle
management who directly or indirectly report to them.
·
Middle managers, examples of which would include branch
managers, regional managers, department managers and section managers, provide
direction to front-line managers. Middle managers communicate the strategic
goals of senior management to the front-line managers.
·
Lower managers, such as supervisors and front-line team leaders, oversee the work of regular employees (or
volunteers, in some voluntary organizations) and provide direction on their
work.
In
smaller organizations, an individual manager may have a much wider scope. A
single manager may perform several roles or even all of the roles commonly
observed in a large organization.
Definitions
Views
on the definition and scope of management include:
·
According to Henri Fayol, "to manage is to forecast and to plan,
to organise, to command, to co-ordinate and to control."Fredmund Malik defines it as "the transformation
of resources into utility."
·
Management included as
one of the factors of production – along with machines, materials and money.
·
Ghislain Deslandes defines it as “a vulnerable force, under pressure to
achieve results and endowed with the triple power of constraint, imitation and
imagination, operating on subjective, interpersonal, institutional and
environmental levels”. Peter Drucker (1909–2005) saw the basic task of
management as twofold: marketing and innovation. Nevertheless, innovation is also linked to
marketing (product innovation is a central strategic marketing issue). Peter
Drucker identifies marketing as a key essence for business success, but
management and marketing are generally understood as two different branches of business administration knowledge.
Theoretical scope
Management
involves identifying the mission, objective, procedures, rules and
manipulation of the human capital of an enterprise to contribute to the success of the
enterprise. This implies effective communication: an enterprise
environment (as opposed to a physical or mechanical mechanism) implies human
motivation and implies some sort of successful progress or system outcome.As such, management is not the manipulation of a mechanism
(machine or automated program), not the herding of animals, and can occur
either in a legal or in an illegal enterprise or environment. From an
individual's perspective, management does not need to be seen solely from an
enterprise point of view, because management is an essential function to
improve one's life and relationships. Management is therefore everywhere and it has a wider range of application. Based on this, management must have humans. Communication
and a positive endeavor are two main aspects of it either through enterprise or
independent pursuit. Plans, measurements, motivational psychological tools,
goals, and economic measures (profit, etc.) may or may not be necessary
components for there to be management. At first, one views management
functionally, such as measuring quantity, adjusting plans, meeting goals.This applies even in situations where planning does not
take place. From this perspective, Henri Fayol (1841–1925)considers management to consist of six functions:
1.
forecasting
2.
planning
3.
organizing
4.
commanding
5.
coordinating
6.
controlling
In
another way of thinking, Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933), allegedly defined management as "the art
of getting things done through people".She described management as philosophy.Critics, however, find this definition useful but far too narrow. The
phrase "management is what managers do" occurs widely,the difficulty of defining
management without circularity,
the shifting nature of definitionsand the connection of managerial practices with the existence of a managerial cadre or of a class.
One
habit of thought regards management as equivalent to "business administration" and thus excludes management in places outside commerce, as for example in charities and
in the public sector. More broadly, every organization must "manage" its
work, people, processes, technology, etc. to maximize effectiveness., many people refer to university departments
that teach management as "business schools". Some such institutions (such as
the Harvard Business School) use that name, while others (such as the Yale School of Management) employ the broader term "management".
English-speakers
may also use the term "management" or "the management" as a
collective word describing the managers of an organization, for example of
a corporation.Historically this use of the term often
contrasted with the term "labor" – referring to those being managed.
But
in the present erathe concept of management is identified in the wide areasand its frontiers have been pushed to a broader range. Apart from profitable organizations even non-profitable
organizations (NGOs) apply management
concepts. The concept and its uses are not constrained Management on the whole is the process of planning,
organizing, coordinating, leading and controlling.
History
Some
see management (by definition) as late-modern (in the sense of late modernity) conceptualization. On those terms it cannot
have a pre-modern history, only harbingers (such as stewards). Others, however, detect
management-like-thought back to Sumerian traders and to the builders of the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Slave-owners through the centuries faced the
problems of exploiting/motivating a dependent but sometimes unenthusiastic or
recalcitrant workforce, but many pre-industrial enterprises, given their small scale, did not feel
compelled to face the issues of management systematically. However, innovations such as the spread of Hindu numerals (5th to 15th centuries) and the codification of double-entry book-keeping (1494) provided tools for management assessment, planning and control.
Also, Machiavelli wrote
about how to make organisations efficient and effective. The principles that
Machiavelli set forth in Discourses (1531) can be adapted to
apply the management of organisations today:
·
An organisation is
more stable if members have the right to express their differences and solve
their conflicts within it.
·
While one person can
begin an organisation, "it is lasting when it is left in the care of many
and when many desire to maintain it."
·
A weak manager can
follow a strong one, but not another weak one, and maintain authority.
·
A manager seeking to
change an established organization "should retain at least a shadow of the
ancient customs."With
the changing workplaces of industrial revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries, military theory and practice contributed
approaches to managing the newly-popular factories.
Given
the scale of most commercial operations and the lack of mechanized
record-keeping and recording before the industrial revolution, it made sense
for most owners of enterprises
in those times to carry out management functions by and for themselves. But
with growing size and complexity of organizations, the split between owners
(individuals, industrial dynasties or groups of shareholders) and day-to-day managers (independent
specialists in planning and control) gradually became more common.
19th century
Classical
economists such as Adam Smith (1723–1790) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) provided a theoretical
background to resource-allocation, production, and pricing issues.
About the same time, innovators like Eli Whitney (1765–1825), James Watt (1736–1819), and Matthew Boulton (1728–1809) developed elements of
technical production such as standardization, quality-control procedures, cost-accounting, interchangeability of parts, and work-planning. Many of these aspects of management existed
in the pre-1861 slave-based sector of the US economy. That environment saw 4
million people, as the contemporary usages had it, "managed" in
profitable quasi-mass production.
Salaried
managers as an identifiable group first became prominent in the late 19th
century.
20th century
By
about 1900 one finds managers trying to place their theories on what they
regarded as a thoroughly scientific basis (see scientism for perceived limitations of this
belief). Examples include Henry R. Towne's Science of management in
the 1890s, Frederick Winslow Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Lillian Gilbreth's Psychology of Management (1914), Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's Applied motion study (1917), and Henry L. Gantt's charts (1910s). J. Duncan wrote the
first college management-textbook in 1911. In 1912 Yoichi Ueno introduced Taylorism to Japan and became the first management consultant of the "Japanese-management style". His son
Ichiro Ueno pioneered Japanese quality assurance.
The
first comprehensive theories of management appeared around 1920. The Harvard Business School offered the first Master of Business Administration degree (MBA) in 1921. People like Henri Fayol (1841–1925) and Alexander Church described the various branches of management and their
inter-relationships. In the early 20th century, people like Ordway Tead
(1891–1973), Walter Scott and J. Mooney applied the principles
of psychology to
management. Other writers, such as Elton Mayo (1880–1949), Mary Parker Follett(1868–1933), Chester Barnard (1886–1961), Max Weber (1864–1920), who saw what he called the
"administrator" as bureaucrat Rensis Likert (1903–1981), and Chris Argyris(born 1923) approached the phenomenon of management
from a sociological perspective.
Peter Drucker (1909–2005) wrote one of the earliest
books on applied management: Concept of the Corporation (published in 1946). It resulted from Alfred Sloan (chairman of General Motors until 1956) commissioning a study of the organisation. Drucker went on to write 39 books, many in
the same vein.
H.
Dodge, Ronald Fisher (1890–1962), and Thornton C. Fry introduced statistical
techniques into management-studies. In the 1940s, Patrick Blackett worked in the development of the applied-mathematics science of operations research, initially for military operations. Operations research,
sometimes known as "management science" (but distinct from
Taylor's scientific management), attempts to take a scientific approach to solving decision-problems,
and can apply directly to multiple management problems, particularly in the
areas of logistics and
operations.
Some
of the more recent developments include the Theory of Constraints, management by objectives, reengineering, Six Sigma and various information-technology-driven theories such as agile software development, as well as group-management theories such as Cog's Ladder.
As
the general recognition of managers as a class solidified during the 20th
century and gave perceived practitioners of the art/science of management a
certain amount of prestige, so the way opened for popularised systems of
management ideas to peddle their
wares. In this context many management fads may have had more to do with pop psychology than with scientific theories of
management.
Towards
the end of the 20th century, business management came to consist of six
separate branches, namely:
21st century
In the
21st century observers find it increasingly difficult to subdivide management
into functional categories in this way. More and more processes simultaneously
involve several categories. Instead, one tends to think in terms of the various
processes, tasks, and objects subject to management.Branches
of management theory also exist relating to nonprofits and
to government: such as public administration, public management, and educational management. Further,
management programs related to civil-society organizations have also spawned programs
in nonprofit management
and social entrepreneurship.
Note
that many of the assumptions made by management have come under attack
from business-ethics viewpoints, critical management studies, and anti-corporate activism.
As
one consequence, workplace democracy (sometimes referred to as Workers' self-management) has become both more common and advocated to a greater extent,
in some places distributing all management functions among workers, each of
whom takes on a portion of the work. However, these models predate any current
political issue, and may occur more naturally than does a command hierarchy. All management embraces to some degree a
democratic principle—in that in the long term, the majority of workers must
support management. Otherwise, they leave to find other work or go on strike.
Despite the move toward workplace democracy, command-and-control organization
structures remain commonplace as de facto organization
structure. Indeed, the entrenched nature of command-and-control is evident in
the way that recent layoffs have been conducted with management ranks affected
far less than employees at the lower levels. In some cases, management has even
rewarded itself with bonuses after laying off lower-level workers.
According
to leadership academic Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, a contemporary senior management team will almost inevitably
have some personality disorders.
Basic functios of
management
According
to Fayol, management operates
through five basic functions: planning, organizing, coordinating, commanding,
and controlling.
·
Planning: Deciding what needs to happen in the future
and generating plans for action (deciding in advance).
·
Organizing (or staffing): Making sure the human and
nonhuman resources are put into place.
·
Coordinating: Creating a structure through which an
organization's goals can be accomplished.
·
Commanding (or leading): Determining what must be
done in a situation and getting people to do it.
·
Controlling: Checking progress against plans.
·
Interpersonal: roles that involve coordination and
interaction with employees
Figurehead,leader
·
Informational: roles that involve handling, sharing, and
analyzing information
Nerve
centre, dissciminator
·
Decision: roles that require decision-making
entrepreneur,negotiator,allocator
Skills of management
Management
skills include:
·
conceptual: used to
analyze complex situations
·
Behavioral:Perception
towards others.
Implementation of
policies and strategies
·
All policies and
strategies must be discussed with all managerial personnel and staff.
·
Managers must
understand where and how they can implement their policies and strategies.
·
A plan of action must
be devised for each department.
·
Policies and
strategies must be reviewed regularly.
·
Contingency plans must
be devised in case the environment changes.
·
Top-level managers
should carry out regular progress assessments.
·
The business requires
team spirit and a good environment.
·
The missions,
objectives, strengths and weaknesses of each department must be analyzed to
determine their roles in achieving the business's mission.
·
The forecasting method
develops a reliable picture of the business's future environment.
·
A planning unit must
be created to ensure that all plans are consistent and that policies and
strategies are aimed at achieving the same mission and objectives.
