Contemporary Management Issues Learning Guide

Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop

Teaching and Research Skills

For further information see also

The Bookshop

Today's Videos Playlist

Rationale

Learning Outcomes

Teaching and Learning Resources

Managing and the Manager's Job
Traditional and Contemporary Issues and Challenges
The Environment of Organizations and Managers
The Ethical and Social Environment
The Global Environment
The Cultural and Multicultural Environment
Basic Elements of Planning and Decision Making
Managing Strategy and Strategic Planning
Managing Decision Making and Problem Solving
Managing New Venture Formation and Entrepreneurship
Basic Elements of Organizing
Managing Organization Design
Managing Organization Change and Innovation
Managing Human Resources in Organizations
Basic Elements of Individual Behavior in Organizations
Managing Employee Motivation and Performance
Managing Leadership and Influence Processes
Managing Interpersonal Relations and Communication
Managing Work Groups and Teams
Basic Elements of Control
Managing Operations, Quality, and Productivity
Managing Information and Information Technology

Case Studies

Learner Support

Related Workshops

Recommended Text

Resources

Assignments, Assessment

Learning Centres

Contemporary Management Issues

Rationale

Manager redirects here. For use in sports, see Coach (sport), Manager (baseball) or Manager (professional wrestling).

Enterprise management redirects here. For use in computer networks, see Network management or Systems management

The term "Management" characterizes the process of and/or the personnel leading and directing all or part of an organization (often a business) through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, capital, natural, intellectual or intangible).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "manage" comes from the Italian maneggiare (to handle — especially a horse), which in turn derives from the Latin manus (hand). The French word mesnagement (later ménagement) influenced the development in meaning of the English word management in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Management has to do with power by position, whereas leadership involves power by influence. Compare stewardship.

See also

Citations

Learning Outcomes

Coming soon ...

Today's Videos

Connect with us on http://www.youtube.com/finntrack
Google's Play lists

Teaching and Learning Resources

Click on titles

Learning Contents

Managing and the Manager's Job

Tutorials

Managing and the Manager's Job (zip)

Readings

Traditional and Contemporary Issues and Challenges

Tutorials

Traditional and Contemporary Issues and Challenges (zip)

Readings

Asian Cities in the 21st Century: Contemporary Approaches to Municipal Management in South Asia

Edited by Naved Hamid and Ma. Mildred R. Villareal

Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop

The Environment of Organizations and Managers

Tutorials

The Environment of Organizations and Managers (zip)

Readings

The External Environment

All outside factors that may affect an organization make up the external environment.

Read More ...

Managing Organisational Change

Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.

The Ethical and Social Environment

Tutorials

The Ethical and Social Environment (zip)

Readings

Strategy - The Social and Ethical Environment of Business

There is increasing emphasis in strategy literature on business ethics, and on the pressures faced by organisations operating within increasingly complex and demanding social and ethical environments. As concerns for the natural environment have grown, so too have demands that organisations conduct themselves with greater care and responsibility for the environment. The sites featured in this section will allow students to explore some of these issues in more depth.

Read More ...

Larger Map

The Global Environment

Tutorials

The Global Environment (zip)

Readings

The Cultural and Multicultural Environment

Tutorials

The Cultural and Multicultural Environment (zip)

Readings

The New Mainstream: How the Buying Habits of Ethnic Groups Are Creating a New American Identity

Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.

Managing Cultural Diversity in Technical Professions

Lionel Laroche Ph.D., P.Eng

Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.

Marketing Strategy, Planning and Decisions Making

Tutorials

Readings

Decision Making, Problem Solving

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ), PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological), Ecological, and Regulatory factors), and EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal).

Strategic planning is the formal consideration of an organization's future course. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:

"What do we do?"
"For whom do we do it?"
"How do we excel?"

In business strategic planning, the third question is better phrased "How can we beat or avoid competition?". (Bradford and Duncan, page 1).

In many organizations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or more -typically 3 to 5 years, although some extend their vision to 20 years.

In order to determine where it is going, the organization needs to know exactly where it stands, then determine where it wants to go and how it will get there. The resulting document is called the "strategic plan."

It is also true that strategic planning may be a tool for effectively plotting the direction of a company; however, strategic planning itself cannot foretell exactly how the market will evolve and what issues will surface in the coming days in order to plan your organizational strategy. Therefore, strategic innovation and tinkering with the 'strategic plan' have to be a cornerstone strategy for an organization to survive the turbulent business climate.

See also

External links

Managing New Venture Formation and Entrepreneurship

Tutorials

Managing New Venture Formation and Entrepreneurship (zip)

Readings

Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, which is a French word meaning "one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods". This may result in new organizations or may be part of revitalizing mature organizations in response to a perceived opportunity. The most obvious form of entrepreneurship is that of starting new businesses; however, in recent years, the term has been extended to include social and political forms of entrepreneurial activity. When entrepreneurship is describing activities within a firm or large organization it is referred to as intra-preneurship and may include corporate venturing, when large entities spin-off organizations.[1]

According to Paul Reynolds, entrepreneurship scholar and creator of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, "by the time they reach their retirement years, half of all working men in the United States probably have a period of self-employment of one or more years; one in four may have engaged in self-employment for six or more years. Participating in a new business creation is a common activity among U.S. workers over their course of their careers." [2] And in recent years has been documented by scholars such as David Audretsch to be a major driver of economic growth in both the United States and Western Europe.

Entrepreneurial activities are substantially different depending on the type of organization that is being started. Entrepreneurship ranges in scale from solo projects (even involving the entrepreneur only part-time) to major undertakings creating many job opportunities. Many "high value" entrepreneurial ventures seek venture capital or angel funding in order to raise capital to build the business. Angel investors generally seek returns of 20-30% and more extensive involvement in the business.[3] Many kinds of organizations now exist to support would-be entrepreneurs, including specialized government agencies, business incubators, science parks, and some NGOs. In more recent times, the term entrepreneurship has been extended to include elements not related necessarily to business formation activity such as conceptualizations of entrepreneurship as a specific mindset (see also entrepreneurial mindset) resulting in entrepreneurial initiatives e.g. in the form of social entrepreneurship, political entrepreneurship, or knowledge entrepreneurship have emerged.

See also

Further reading

External links

Entrepreneurship , Fifth Edition
Robert W. Price, Senior Research Fellow, Global Entrepreneurship Institute;
ISBN: 0-07-352835-8

Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.

Basic Elements of Organizing

Tutorials

Basic Elements of Organizing (zip)

Readings

Managing Organization Design

Tutorials

Managing Organization Design (zip)

Readings

Managing Organization Change and Innovation

Tutorials

Managing Organization Change and Innovation (zip)

Readings

Organization development (OD) is a planned, organization-wide effort to increase an organization's effectiveness and viability. Warren Bennis, has referred to OD as a response to change, a complex educational strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values, and structure of organization so that they can better adapt to new technologies, marketing and challenges, and the dizzying rate of change itself. OD is neither "anything done to better an organization" nor is it "the training function of the organization"; it is a particular kind of change process designed to bring about a particular kind of end result. OD can involve interventions in the organization's "processes," using behavioural science knowledge[1] as well as organizational reflection, system improvement, planning, and self-analysis.

Kurt Lewin (1898–1947) is widely recognized as the founding father of OD, although he died before the concept became current in the mid-1950s. From Lewin came the ideas of group dynamics, and action research which underpin the basic OD process as well as providing its collaborative consultant/client ethos. Institutionally, Lewin founded the "Research Center for Group Dynamics" at MIT, which moved to Michigan after his death. RCGD colleagues were among those who founded the National Training Laboratories (NTL), from which the T-group and group-based OD emerged. In the UK, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was important in developing systems theories. The joint TIHR journal Human Relations was an early journal in the field. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences is now the leading journal in the field.

The term "Organization Development" is often used interchangeably with Organizational effectiveness, especially when used as the name of a department within an organization. Organization development is a growing field that is responsive to many new approaches including Positive Adult Development.

See also

Managing Human Resources in Organizations

Tutorials

Managing Human Resources in Organizations (zip)

Readings

Human resources is a term used to describe the individuals who comprise the workforce of an organization, although it is also applied in labor economics to, for example, business sectors or even whole nations. Human resources is also the name of the function within an organization charged with the overall responsibility for implementing strategies and policies relating to the management of individuals (i.e. the human resources). This function title is often abbreviated to the initials 'HR'.

Human resources is a relatively modern management term, coined in the 1960s. The origins of the function arose in organizations that introduced 'welfare management' practices and also in those that adopted the principles of 'scientific management'. From these terms emerged a largely administrative management activity, co-ordinating a range of worker related processes and becoming known, in time as the 'personnel function'. Human resources progressively became the more usual name for this function, in the first instance in the United States as well as multinational corporations, reflecting the adoption of a more quantitative as well as strategic approach to workforce management, demanded by corporate management and the greater competitiveness for limited and highly skilled workers.

See also

Human resource management

References

Strategic Human Resources
Compensation News+
Since 1993

Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.

Basic Elements of Individual Behavior in Organizations

Tutorials

Basic Elements of Individual Behavior in Organizations (zip)

Readings

Managing Employee Motivation and Performance

Tutorials

Managing Employee Motivation and Performance (zip)

Readings

Motivation is the activation or energization of goal-oriented behavior. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic. The term is generally used for humans but, theoretically, it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation. According to various theories, motivation may be rooted in the basic need to minimize physical pain and maximize pleasure, or it may include specific needs such as eating and resting, or a desired object, hobby, goal, state of being, ideal, or it may be attributed to less-apparent reasons such as altruism, selfishness, morality, or avoiding mortality. Conceptually, motivation should not be confused with either volition or optimism.[1] Motivation is related to, but distinct from, emotion.

See also

References

Further reading

Managing Leadership and Influence Processes

Tutorials

Managing Leadership and Influence Processes (zip)

Readings

Leadership is stated as the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task.”[1] Definitions more inclusive of followers have also emerged. Alan Keith of Genentech stated that, "Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen."[2] Tom DeMarco says that leadership needs to be distinguished from posturing.[3]

Leadership remains one of the most relevant aspects of the organizational context. However, defining leadership has been challenging and definitions can vary depending on the situation. According to Ann Marie E. McSwain, Assistant Professor at Lincoln University, “leadership is about capacity: the capacity of leaders to listen and observe, to use their expertise as a starting point to encourage dialogue between all levels of decision-making, to establish processes and transparency in decision-making, to articulate their own value and visions clearly but not impose them. Leadership is about setting and not just reacting to agendas, identifying problems, and initiating change that makes for substantial improvement rather than managing change.”

The following sections discuss several important aspects of leadership including a description of what leadership is and a description of several popular theories and styles of leadership. This article also discusses topics such as the role of emotions and vision, as well as leadership effectiveness and performance, leadership in different contexts, how it may differ from related concepts (i.e., management), and some critiques of leadership as generally conceived.

See also

External links

Managing the President's Program: Presidential Leadership and Legislative Policy Formulation

Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.

Managing Interpersonal Relations and Communication

Tutorials

Managing Interpersonal Relations and Communication(zip)

Readings

An interpersonal relationship is an association between two or more people that may range from fleeting to enduring. This association may be based on limerence, love and liking, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment. Interpersonal relationships take place in a great variety of contexts, such as family, friends, marriage, associates, work, clubs, neighborhoods, and churches. They may be regulated by law, custom, or mutual agreement, and are the basis of social groups and society as a whole. Although humans are fundamentally social creatures, interpersonal relationships are not always healthy. Examples of unhealthy relationships include abusive relationships and codependence.

A relationship is normally viewed as a connection between two individuals, such as a romantic or intimate relationship, or a parent-child relationship. Individuals can also have relationships with groups of people, such as the relation between a pastor and his congregation, an uncle and a family, or a mayor and a town. Finally, groups or even nations may have relations with each other, though this is a much broader domain than that covered under the topic of interpersonal relationships. See such articles as international relations for more information on associations between groups. Most scholarly work on relationships focuses on romantic partners in pairs or dyads. These intimate relationships are, however, only a small subset of interpersonal relationships. Interpersonal relationships also can include friendships, such as relationships involving individuals providing relational care to marginalized persons.[1]

These relationships usually involve some level of interdependence. People in a relationship tend to influence each other, share their thoughts and feelings, and engage in activities together. Because of this interdependence, most things that change or impact one member of the relationship will have some level of impact on the other member.[2] The study of interpersonal relationships involves several branches of the social sciences, including such disciplines as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and social work.

See also

References

External links

Managing Work Groups and Teams

Tutorials

Managing Work Groups and Teams (zip)

Readings

Groups

Teamwork is the capability to comprehend and recognize the diverse strengths and abilities in a group setting and then applying them to one final solution The concept has spread from the world of sports where it is well known and accepted, to business, so much so that it is in danger of being considered by some as an empty buzzword, or a form of corporate-speak. In the 21st century, as people are becoming more sophisticated and society is becoming more technically advanced, working as a team makes it easier to accomplish goals.' Some things cannot be accomplished by people working individually. Larger, ambitious goals usually require that people work together with other people. Anyone who has ever been to a job interview will invariably be asked what the concept of teamwork means to them. The reason for this is because companies today want people who are team players, people who are able to get along with their colleagues and work together in a cohesive group. Because teamwork is the oft-desired goal of many organizations today, they will often go to the effort of coordinating team building events in an attempt to get people to work as a team rather than as individuals.

Basic Elements of Control

Tutorials

Readings

What do you mean by Managerial Control?

Managing Operations, Quality, and Productivity

Tutorials

Managing Operations, Quality, and Productivity (zip)

Readings

Managing Information and Information Technology

Tutorials

Managing Information and Information Technology (zip)

Readings

Information technology (IT) is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware", according to the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA).[1] IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information.

Today, the term information has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term has become very recognizable. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases.

A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems. Information technology is starting to spread farther than the conventional personal computer and network technology, and more into integrations of other technologies such as the use of cell phones, televisions, automobiles, and more, which is increasing the demand for such jobs.

When computer and communications technologies are combined, the result is information technology, or "infotech". Information technology is a general term that describes any technology that helps to produce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information.

In recent days ABET and the ACM have collaborated to form accreditation and curriculum standards[2] for degrees in Information Technology as a distinct field of study separate from both Computer Science and Information Systems. SIGITE[3] is the ACM working group for defining these standards.