Contents
Fundamentals of Management
Rationale
"Management" (from Old French ménagement "the directing", from Latin manu agere "to lead by the hand") characterises the process of leading and directing all or part of an organisation, often a business, through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, financial, material, intellectual or intangible). Early twentieth-century management writer Mary Parker Follett defined management as "the art of getting things done through people."
One can also think of management functionally, as the action of measuring a quantity on a regular basis and of adjusting some initial plan, and as the actions taken to reach one's intended goal. This applies even in situations where planning does not take place. From this perspective, there are five management functions: planning, organizing, leading, co-ordinating and controlling. For others though, this definition, while useful, is far too narrow. The phrase "management is what managers do" is also prevalent, conveying the difficulty with which management is defined, the shifting nature of definitions, and the connection of managerial practices with the existence of a managerial cadre or class. Management is known by some as "business administration", although this then excludes management in places outside business, eg charities and the public sector. University departments that teach management are nonetheless usually called "business schools". The term "management" may also be used as a collective word, describe the managers of an organization, for example of a corporation. |
 |
- Adhocracy
- Administration
- Corporate governance
- Design management
- Engineering management
- Futures Studies
- Knowledge visualization
- Leadership
- Management consulting
- Management development
- Management fad
- Management styles
- Management Technology
- Managing upwards
- Micromanagement
- Middle management
- Music management
- Organizational studies
- Predictive analytics
- Public administration
- Scientific management
- Senior management
- Social entrepreneurship
- Virtual management
- Peter Drucker's management by objectives
- Eliyahu M. Goldratt's theory of constraints
- Pointy Haired Boss — negative stereotypes of managers
- Lists
Today's Videos
- Connect with us on http://www.youtube.com/finntrack
- Google's Playlists
Teaching and Learning Resources
Introduction. Managers' Job
- Understanding the Manager's Job
- The Environment of Organizations and Managers
- Planning and Strategic Management
The following is a series of articles on Basic Management Skills which appeared in IEE Engineering Management Journal bimonthly from Oct 1991 until Apr 1993 (and which won the journal Premium Award :-)).
|
 |
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), STEER analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, 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:
|
 |
In business strategic planning, some authors phrase the third question as "How can we beat or avoid competition?". (Bradford and Duncan, page 1). But this approach is more about defeating competitors than about excelling.
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 (long term), 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.
- Etymology
- Vision statements, Mission statements and values
- Strategic planning outline
- Methodologies
- Situational analysis
- Goals, objectives and targets
- References
- Further reading
Decision Making and Organisation
Tutorials
- Managing Decision Making
- Entrepreneurship and New Venture Management
- Organization Structure and Design
- Organization Change and Innovation
Readings
Decision Making is the cognitive process leading to the selection of a course of action among alternatives. Every decision making process produces a final choice called a decision. It can be an action or an opinion. It begins when we need to do something but we do not know what. Therefore, decision-making is a reasoning process which can be rational or irrational, and can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions.
Common examples include shopping, deciding what to eat, when to sleep, and deciding whom or what to vote for in an election or referendum.
Decision making is said to be a psychological construct. This means that although we can never "see" a decision, we can infer from observable behaviour that a decision has been made. Therefore, we conclude that a psychological event that we call "decision making" has occurred. It is a construction that imputes commitment to action. That is, based on observable actions, we assume that people have made a commitment to affect the action.
Structured rational decision making is an important part of all science-based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge in a given area to making informed decisions. For example, medical decision making often involves making a diagnosis and selecting an appropriate treatment. Some research using naturalistic methods shows, however, that in situations with higher time pressure, higher stakes, or increased ambiguities, experts use intuitive decision making rather than structured approaches, following a recognition primed decision approach to fit a set of indicators into the expert's experience and immediately arrive at a satisfactory course of action without weighing alternatives.
Due to the large number of considerations involved in many decisions, computer-based decision support systems have been developed to assist decision makers in considering the implications of various courses of thinking. They can help reduce the risk of human errors. The systems which try to realize some human/cognitive decision making functions are called Intelligent Decision Support Systems (IDSS), see for ex. "An Approach to the Intelligent Decision Advisor (IDA) for Emergency Managers, 1999".
- Decision making style
- Cognitive and personal biases in decision making
- Cognitive neuroscience of decision making
- Decision making in groups
- Decision making in one's personal life
- Decision making in healthcare
- Path dependency
- Decision making in business and management
- Decision-makers and influencers
- References
- Sources of Power: How people make decisions, -Klein, G. (1998), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
- Society for Medical Decision Making
- How to make better decisions
- Emotional and Decision Making Lab, Carnegie Mellon, EDM Lab
- High-Intelligence & Decision Research Group, - the Italian Research Agency ENEA
- General Morphological Analysis: A General Method for Non-Quantified Modelling From the Swedish Morphological Society
- Strategic Decision Support using Computerised Morphological Analysis
- Myers, I. (1962) Introduction to Type: A description of the theory and applications of the Myers-Briggs type indicator
- The de Borda Institute - Emerson, P J. Beyond the Tyranny of the Majority
- Intelligent Decision Support Systems - Pages of Adam Maria Gadomski
- Some important research journals
Organizational Structure is the way in which the interrelated groups of an organization are constructed. From a managerial point of view the main concerns are ensuring effective communication and coordination.
Change Management can take many forms and include many change environments. The most common usage to the term refers to organizational change management.
Organizational change management is the process of developing a planned approach to change in an organization. Typically the objective is to maximize the collective benefits for all people involved in the change and minimize the risk of failure of implementing the change. The discipline of change management deals primarily with the human aspect of change, and is therefore related to pure and industrial psychology. Many technical disciplines (for example Information technology) have developed similar approaches to formally control the process of making changes to environments. Change management can be either 'reactive', in which case management is responding to changes in the macroenvironment (that is, the source of the change is external), or proactive, in which case management is initiating the change in order to achieve a desired goal (that is, the source of the change is internal). Change management can be conducted on a continuous basis, on a regular schedule (such as an annual review), or when deemed necessary on a program-by-program basis. |
 |
Change management can be approached from a number of angles and applied to numerous organizational processes. Its most common uses are in information technology management, strategic management, and process management. To be effective, change management should be multi-disciplinary, touching all aspects of the organization. However, at its core, implementing new procedures, technologies, and overcoming resistance to change are fundamentally human resource management issues.
- The psychology of change
- Schools and Concepts of Change Management
- Formula for Change
- Management's role
- Change management in information technology
- Change management in industrial plants
- List of human resource management topics
- Strategic change for change theories in strategic management
- Force field analysis
- Change management process
- References
Human Resourses. Leadership.
Tutorials
- Managing Human Resources
- Managing Individual Behaviour
- Motivating Employee Performance
- Leadership and Influence Processes
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 as early as the 1960s - when humanity took a shift as human rights came to a brighter light during the Vietnam Era. 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, coordinating 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 or international corporations, reflecting the adoption of a more quantitative as well as strategic approach to workforce management, demanded by corporate management to gain a competitive advantage, utilizing limited skilled and highly skilled workers.
|
 |
The word Leadership can refer to:
- the process of leading
- the concept of leading
- those entities that perform one or more acts of leading.
The various meanings can lead to some confusion.
- Terminology, usage and conceptual scope
- Categories and types of leadership
- Leadership associated with positions of authority
- Leadership amongst primates
- Leadership as a vanguard
- Scope of leadership
- Orthogonality and leadership
- Support-structures for leadership
- Determining what makes effective "leadership"
- Leadership's relation with management
- Leadership by a group
- Leader relationships with followers
- Historical views on leadership
- Specific theories of leadership
- Alternatives to leadership
- Islamic leadership
- Charisma
- Max Weber's Charismatic authority
- Chieftain
- Coaching
- Crowd psychology
- Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony
- Fiedler contingency model
- Followership
- Functional leadership model
- Ideal leadership Model
- Leader (Scouting)
- Leadership Character Model
- Leadership development
- Managerial grid model
- Path-goal model
- Situational leadership theory
- Social skills, Intercultural competence
- Trait theory
- Toxic Leadership
- Anarchism - an ideology opposed to the perceived inevitability of individual leadership among humans
- References
Communication. Group Work. Quality and Control
Tutorials
- Communication in Organizations
- Managing Groups and Teams
- Managing the Control Process
- Managing Operations, Quality, and Productivity
Readings
Organizational Communication is the study of the following:
- how people communicate within an organizational context, or
- the influence of, or interaction with organizational structures in communicating/organizing.
- History and development of the discipline
- Assumptions underlying early organizational communication
- Research methodologies include
- Components of Organizational communication
- References
"Team building" (or "'teambuilding'") refers to the process of establishing and developing a greater sense of collaboration and trust between team members. Interactive exercises, team assessments, and group discussions enable groups to cultivate this greater sense of teamwork. Team building has many contexts, for example in sport clubs and work organizations.
Recommended Texts
 |
Fundamentals
of Management Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.
|
Resources
- Skills of Effective Managers
- Self-Awareness
- Belief and Values Questionnaire
- The Strategic Manager Quiz
- Goal-Setting Questionnaire
- Guide to Managing Human Resources
- How is Your Organization Managed?
- Diagnosing Poor Performance and Enhancing Motivation
- Assessing Your Mental Abilities
- Managerial Leadership Behavior Questionnaire
- Benefits of Using Teams
- Understanding Control
- Defining Quality and Productivity