N201 Management : Evolution of Observation in Management Theory

Answer:

Introduction:

“A good boss is a good leader” so goes the saying. Likewise, a manager is an effective figurehead who is supposed to reinforce throughout the operations handled by him following the mission and the vision of any organization. He is the primary liaison between the employees, other leadership figures and the customers of the organization. The aim of this project is to understand the functioning of any management and how effective is a good culture to evolving of the organization. The project also aims at explaining various cause and effect of the actions that is usually undertaken by management in its day to day functioning. It shall also highlight common communication errors leading to the company’s underperformance. Various references drawn from third party resources, mainly journals, web publications have been referred to collect and present the examples to understanding and portraying the justifications of the answers for the tasks at hand.

Task 1

A manager of the company would be tasked with specific duties all the time and complex responsibilities in line with the mission and vision of the organization. There would, however; be four chief functions that would summarize his required skills sets to function effectively. They are:

1. Planning – this is the primary responsibility of the manager. The manager decides where he wants to take the organization and chooses appropriate steps to get there. This requires the manager to have a good assessment of the business in the present environment, both internal as well as external. The external environment assessment provides him information on the current economic, socio-cultural, technological, political, environment and legal factors. The internal environment is made up of organizational elements such as employee strength, company culture, management structure etc. Effective planning is considering all the multiple factors at play in both these environments and conduct a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities and threats) analysis. That helps to decide on planning the best way to meet company goals and objectives. In the mentioned scenario, where the manager has only 3 people under him and he must run a software company, his planning stage challenge shall entail knowing allocation of human resources and delegating tasks or responsibilities (Hopkin, 2017). Seeing to it that the team is meeting their targets, setting priority levels for tasks, adjusting where needed and creating timelines
2. Organizing – The manager needs to ensure the smooth functioning of the company. In the provided example; that would imply, he puts the best suited resources for tasks. For this he needs to know his resources well, can reorganize and coordinate among team members well in terms of authority and responsibility
3. Leading – Through proper direction setting and effective communication when setting processes, communicating new targets, policies, services and products, the manager needs to project a strong leadership image so that his team can follow him and look up to him in times of challenges or changes. In the present scenario, the manager could achieve the same by small personal interactions, motivating talks, supporting and encouragement to keep the small team on track to his achievement of goals set by him
4. Controlling – Check at each point is necessary to avoid leakage to failure in achievement of the goals and objectives of the company. Control could be in terms of process, quality, employee performance, efficiency, budget etc. (Ashkanasy, Bennett & Martinko, 2016). In the present scenario control could be set to timelines being set for tasks delegated. The manager would continuously keep a track on progress of each team member and make changes where required so that his deadline is met.

In day to day functioning, any of these four factors take priority and sometimes even, all four can be play at same time simultaneously for effective functioning.

Task 2

Management or organizational culture is the practices, perceptions and views shared by all employees of the organization. As McKinsey organization famously coined the phrase “how we do things around here” Different organizations breed or tolerate different cultures. Different culture types prevalent are – clan, adhocracy, and market or hierarchy culture. Some breed friendly work environment where the employee is empowered and involved, in some, the work environment is dynamic and creative. Some focus on getting things done and are task oriented and in some environments, things move according to procedures fixed, they are process centric (Kapucu & Hu, 2016). All in all, a strong culture is that where the core values set by the organization are believed by majority of the employees. Let us focus on work culture at Google Inc. When talking about Google, the symbol or the logo itself portrays its image of how it sees itself and how it wants the industry or the world to view it. In this case, it is colorful, simple and fun. Exactly what Google also does at its work places? It follows the 70/20/10 rule which emphasizes it shall work on its core business just 70% of the time. The employees are left to research, experiment, and get their hands dirty on to the fun things at their workspaces. It keeps them happy, satisfied and motivated (Brunk, 2016). The organizational structure at Google is regular where they only have functional heads for different value chain activities. Within each top-level activity, there is multi-dimensional structure where based on geography and market, small business units are created. This is what keeps them a global organization. This enables centralized planning to happen and simultaneously allows the small business units to take advantage of the flexibility and run as start-ups. Lastly, taking onto account, the power structure. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the organization and still influence largely at leadership level. Their brilliancy reflects in filling the top positions by keeping an unbelievable balance between business and technical expertise. They have positions within the organization just to keep the employees motivated and encourage innovation, look out for new technology and make it available. Page & Brin take a token of $1 as their annual salary to send out the message to its employees that they are not there for the money rather long term success and performance of the organization.  Culture has long been held responsible to bind the employees together in following and achieving the company goals and objectives and specifically for their long-term success. Beliefs flowing from top down and reflecting in organization level decisions and actions help bind more and more employees buy into the belief. If the employees keep the core mission at their heart at work, it helps the organization live its vision and mission in its identity and existence (Blok, Thijssen, & Pascucci, 2017). It overall helps close the feedback loop. This is essential in getting new talent from the market and retaining the present employees. This overall has a huge impact on training costs. By encouraging the employees to pursue their passion stay in the motivated environment stops them from quitting. Employees feel largely invested in their work and it increases their productivity and effectiveness (Hu & Shi, 2017). All this overall impact the brand image of the organization. Stronger culture helps build unique brand identities and leads to commercial success in the long run.

Task 3

Poor workplace communication leads to underperformance of an organization. While at workplace, poor employee-employer relations, unfriendly environment makes employees unproductive and, unsatisfied, demotivated, inefficient and ineffective.

Some of the possible communication mistakes could be:

1. Unclear goals and objectives – if the employees are unclear of what is expected from them, no matter how much heart and soul they put into their work, they could still lose track according to the management as it never cared to relay its expectations to the person doing the job (Mérand & Rayroux, 2016). This ultimately leads to poor performance and frustration making the employee demotivated. Example - a manager communicating the tasks for the day to the team however failing to inform the deadline for a high priority task as 2 hours. The team members could assume the deadline to be end of business hours and could miss the deadline.
2. Poor Leadership – Incompetent leaders are indecisive and are unable to give clear direction to their employees. This leads to poor confidence in the leader because of which he may feel the need to exercise “control” on the employees leading to poor communication. Employees may be tempted to bad mouth the leadership, question their own purpose and that may lead to attrition (Carroll, Primo & Richter, 2016). Continuous attritions ultimately leave no one to work with! The organization may fail to achieve its goals without the right talent in place. Example – a team leader failing to understand that a team mate is sick and is unable to focus at work. He shouted at him without trying to understand his restrictions for performing at his best
3. Demoralization – disrespected, demotivated, under-appreciated employees may lose their focus and become confused of their quality of work or if they are not provided provisions to exercise their skills and creativity. On the other hand, if employees are respected, encouraged and nudged to pursue their skills and creativity; they will become more productive and efficient (Kenworthy et al.2016). In the long run, demoralization leads to weak communication. Example – a team leader is jealous of good performance of one of the team members and sees him as his future competition. Instead of encouraging him and putting in good words for him into managements’ ears so that his promotion could become an example for his other team members, he chooses to be disrespectful to him each time he comes up with a query or a suggestion (Anderson, Cleveland & Schroeder, 1989). Finally, the team member left the organization because of his boss as he was unclear of his problem with him.
4. Improper handling of cultural diversity- with the world becoming more and more cultural diversified at workplaces, it is important to encourage and respect cultural diversity at work. It is important to keep the employees culturally aware of acceptance of certain things in some culture and rejection of the same in other (Marti & Scherer, 2016). Example – a team manager always points his index finger at people in team meetings to pinpoint the achievements and misses. An Asian found this very offensive and started building within him a negative picture of his personality. As a result, the employee always bad mouthed him when he found more Asians and slowly all the Asians complained to HR of the company about his behavior. The Company had to act upon the complaint and eventually lost a good manager (Bernstein, 2017).

Conclusion:

As pointed out above in the project, a business manager has the sole responsibilities of making use of all talents and resources in the organization, primarily human resources to gain a strong foothold of its strategic plans and objectives. While planning, organizing, leading and controlling are important to a company’s smooth functioning and keeping a check on its progress to attainment of the organizations goals and objectives; at the same time, maintaining culture of the organization itself is equally to be focused to keep the workforce motivated. To build a positive brand identity a good and strong management culture goes a long way. Communication slip ups should not be committed as they destroy eventually the organization’s long term performance. Interpersonal skills of a manager are hence crucial to success of the business. The manager sets the tone of the organization and its environment. It is therefore important for him to maintain good levels of communication within the organization for its long-term success.

Reference:

Books

Ashkanasy, N. M., Bennett, R. J., & Martinko, M. J. (Eds.). (2016). Understanding the High Performance Workplace: The Line Between Motivation and Abuse. Routledge.

Hopkin, P. (2017). Fundamentals of risk management: understanding, evaluating and implementing effective risk management. Kogan Page Publishers.

Journals

Anderson, J. C., Cleveland, G., & Schroeder, R. G. (1989). Operations strategy: a literature review. Journal of Operations Management, 8(2), 133-158.

Bernstein, E. S. (2017). Making transparency transparent: The evolution of observation in management theory. Academy of Management Annals, 11(1), 217-266.

Blok, V., Thijssen, S., & Pascucci, S. (2017). Understanding Management Practices in Business Incubators: Empirical Evidence of the Factors Impacting the Incubation Process. International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, 1750023.

Brunk, K. H. (2016). Towards a better understanding of the ethical brand and its management. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Brand Management, 280.

Carroll, R. J., Primo, D. M., & Richter, B. K. (2016). Using item response theory to improve measurement in strategic management research: An application to corporate social responsibility. Strategic Management Journal, 37(1), 66-85.

Hu, Q., & Shi, W. (2017). Understanding Nonprofit Organizations' Use of Social Networking Sites: An Examination of Management Factors. International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age (IJPADA), 4(1), 19-34.

Kapucu, N., & Hu, Q. (2016). Understanding multiplexity of collaborative emergency management networks. The American Review of Public Administration, 46(4), 399-417.

Kenworthy, T., Kenworthy, T., Balakrishnan, J., & Balakrishnan, J. (2016). Theory usage in empirical operations management research: a review and discussion. Management Decision, 54(10), 2413-2432.

Marti, E., & Scherer, A. G. (2016). Financial regulation and social welfare: The critical contribution of management theory. Academy of Management Review, 41(2), 298-323.

Mérand, F., & Rayroux, A. (2016). The practice of burden sharing in European crisis management operations. European security, 25(4), 442-460.