Chapter 1: Managers and Management
Section 1.2 – What Are The Management Processes?
Key Terms
- Management processes
- Planning
- Organizing
- Leading
- Controlling
- Managerial roles
- Small business
Summary
No two managers’ jobs are alike, but management writers and researchers have developed three specific categorization schemes to describe what managers do; functions, roles, and skills.
Henri Fayol, a French industrialist from the early part of the twentieth century, proposed that managers perform five management activities, known as the “management process”: planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling.
These functions still provide the basis around which popular management textbooks are organized, but the functions have been condensed to four.
a. Planning involves the process of defining goals, establishing strategies for achieving those goals, and developing plans to integrate and coordinate activities.
b. Organizing is the process of determining what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be grouped, who reports to whom, and where decisions are to be made.
c. Leading includes motivating subordinates, influencing individuals or teams as they work, selecting the most effective communication channel, or dealing in any way with employee behavior issues.
d. Controlling is monitoring activities to ensure that they are being accomplished, comparing performance with previously set goals, and correcting any significant deviations.
The continued popularity of the process approach is a tribute to its clarity and simplicity. Some have argued that the approach is no longer appropriate or relevant.
In the late 1960s, Henry Mintzberg conducted a study of managers at work. He concluded that managers perform 10 different, but highly interrelated roles. These 10 roles are grouped under three primary headings;
a. Interpersonal roles included figurehead, leadership, and liaison activities.
b. Informational roles included monitoring, disseminating, and spokesperson activities.
c. Decisional roles included those of entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator.
Follow-up studies of Mintzberg’s role categories in different types of organizations and at different managerial levels within organizations have generally supported the notion that managers perform similar roles however; the emphasis that managers give to the various roles seems to change with the organizational level.
All managers make decisions, set objectives, create workable organization structures, hire and motivate employees, secure legitimacy for their organization’s existence, and develop internal political support in order to implement programs. There are some noteworthy differences. The most important is measuring performance. Profit or the bottom line acts as an unambiguous measure of the effectiveness of a business organization. However, there is no such universal measure when it comes to not-for-profit organizations.
When it comes to defining small business there is no commonly agreed definition because of different criteria used to define small. Organizations can be classified as a small business using criteria including, number of employees, annual sales, or total assets. For our purposes, we will define small business as any independently owned and operated profit seeking enterprise that has fewer than 500 employees.
Small Business Administration statistics tell us that small businesses account for about 98% of all non-farm United States businesses and employ over 60% of the private workforce as well as generating half of all new jobs in the next decade.
Section Outline
- What are the management processes?
- Planning
- Organizing
- Leading
- Controlling
- What are management roles?
- Interpersonal
- Informational
- Decisional
- Is the manager’s job universal?
- Level in the organization
- Profit versus not-for-profit
- Size of organization