Example of a boundaryless organization

Business Management

INTRODUCTION TO MANAGEMENT: EXAM QUESTIONS

TOPIC 1: ORIGINS OF MANAGEMENT PRACTICES Lecture + Robbins Ch. 1 1. What is management? Have these definitions changed over time?

The organization and coordination of the activities of a business in order to achieve defined objectives. Management is often included as a factor of production along with? machines, materials, and money. Management consists of the interlocking functions of creating corporate policy and organizing, planning, controlling, and directing an organization's resources in order to achieve the objectives of that policy. Other definition of management where directors and managers who have the power and responsibility to make decisions and oversee an enterprise. The size of management can range from one person in a small organization to hundreds or thousands of managers in multinational companies. Management changes can help a lot with timing. If a board of directors is serious about restructuring, they'll often hire someone from a best-in-class company to make it happen. Those people aren't cheap, which shows the board is serious, and the fact that the person is willing to come indicates they think they can add value. An executive from a first-class company taking over a laggard can mean an opportunity is ripe for the picking.

2. Explain the differences between effectiveness and efficiency. Give examples to illustrate your answer. Discuss ways that managers at each of the four levels of management can contribute to efficiency and effectiveness.

Effectiveness is the level of results from the actions of employees and managers. Employees and managers who demonstrate effectiveness in the workplace help produce high-quality results. Take, for instance, an employee who works the sales floor. If he’s effective, he’ll make sales consistently. If he’s ineffective, he’ll struggle to persuade customers to make a purchase. Companies measure effectiveness often by conducting performance reviews. The effectiveness of a workforce has an enormous impact on the quality of a company’s product or service, which often dictates a company’s reputation and customer satisfaction

While Efficiency in the workplace is the time it takes to do something. Efficient employees and managers complete tasks in the least amount of time possible with the least amount of resources possible by utilizing certain time-saving strategies. Inefficient employees and managers take the long road. For example, suppose a manager is attempting to communicate more efficiently. He can accomplish his goal by using email rather than sending letters to each employee. Efficiency and effectiveness are mutually exclusive. A manager or employee who's efficient isn’t always effective and vice versa. Efficiency increases productivity and saves both time and money.

To improve effectiveness, managers must take the initiative to provide thorough performance reviews, detailing an employee’s weakness through constructive criticism. Managers must make it a point to address effectiveness and explain how an employee’s performance affects the company as a whole. To avoid a workplace full of ineffective employees, companies must hire high-performing employees by weeding out candidates at the recruiting level.

To improve efficiency, employees and managers are often inefficient because they either don’t know how to be efficient or do not have the necessary tools to perform tasks efficiently. Ways to improve efficiency include meeting with managers and employees to outline ways to implement efficiency in the workplace and asking for opinions on what the workplace is missing. For example, a small business that lacks an employee email system prevents managers from communicating with employees efficiently.

3. In today’s environment, which is more important to organisations—efficiency or effectiveness? Explain your choice.

Efficiency is the most important factor that is preferred by organization in today’s environment in that Strategic management decisions that promote efficiency tend to be aimed at reducing the use of resources through maximizing return. Any action taken to reduce inventory waste, for example, would be a strategic management decision aimed at greater efficiency. Efforts to increase productivity would be included in this category. Another strategic management decision that would be efficiency-oriented would be having executives share an executive assistant, rather than hiring executive assistants for each executive.

4. Fayol, Mintzberg and Katz studied and wrote about management – though each in a different way. Discuss the focus of each contribution for the management of contemporary organisations.

Fayol is considered to be among the most influential contributors to the modern concept of management. The theory falls under the Administrative Management school of thought. Henri Fayol's Principle of Management Followings are the 14 principles of management developed by the Henry Fayol:

i. Division of Work: division of work means specialization

ii. Authority and Responsibility: Authority and responsibility go together or co-existing.

iii. Discipline: According to Henry Fayol discipline means sincerity about the work and enterprise, carrying out orders and instructions of superiors and to have faith in the policies and programs of the business enterprise

iv. Unity of Command: A subordinate should take order from only one boss and he should be responsible and accountable to him

v. Unity of direction: Fayol advocates "One head and one plan" which means that group efforts on a particular plan be led and directed by a single person

vi. Subordination of individual interests to general interests

vii. Fair Remuneration to employees: According to Fayol wage-rates and method of their payment should be fair, proper and satisfactory.

viii. Centralization and Decentralization: There should be one central point in the organization which exercises overall direction and control of all the parts

ix. Scalar chain: The scalar chain is a chain of supervisors from the highest to the lowest rank.

x. Order: According to Fayol there should be proper, systematic and orderly arrangement of physical and social factors, such as land, raw materials, tools and equipments and employees respectively

xi. Equity: The principle of equality should be followed and applicable at every level of management

xii. Stability of Tenure: Principle of stability is linked with long tenure of personnel in the organization.

xiii. Initiative: Under this principle, the successful management provides an opportunity to its employees to suggest their new ideas, experiences and more convenient methods of work

xiv. Spirit of Co-operation: In order to achieve the best possible results, individual and group efforts are to be effectively integrated and coordinated

Mintzberg: Henry Mintzberg discusses seven different forms of business organization, and six components that characterize all organizations. Henry Mintzberg's theory of organizational structure also breaks organizations' work down into six coordination mechanisms, illustrating how distinct tasks are performed and then coordinated to accomplish goals. The management theory of Henry Mintzberg also breaks down the manager's tasks into three areas: interpersonal, information processing and decision making. Managers' various roles, such as serving as a leader, a spokesman and a resource allocator, fit into one of these three areas of activity.

The Mintzberg theory of management continues to evolve as Henry Mintzberg does more work with active managers and businesspeople, as well as in the academy. Keeping up to date with Mintzberg's work can help you stay on the cutting edge of business management as well. Mintzberg's website provides comprehensive information about his past and ongoing publications. Henry Mintzberg advocates a basic management theory that is designed to be practiced and experiential.

Katz: Social psychologist Katz in 1974, in his article,” Skills of an Effective Administrator“ in Harvard Business thought about the relationship of managerial skills and hierarchical management levels. The result was the setting of the three areas of managerial skills and determination, for which level they are characterized:

· Technical skills - competencies important, particularly for lower management

· Human skills - competencies needed for all levels of management

· Conceptual skills - competencies with a substantial importance, particularly for top management

5. Describe the key similarities and differences between the management theories developed by Fayol, Mintzberg and Katz

Mintzberg obtained his theory as a result of research based on observation. Hence, his roles directly depict what managers do. He argues that Fayol’s functions ‘do not describe the actual work of managers at all; they describe certain vague objectives of managerial work’ (Mintzberg 1971). As he observed the managers in his research, he found that all activities captured at lease one of his ten roles in practice whereas they could not be simplified to be known singularly as one of Fayol’s functions

Fayol’s focus on what managers should do if they lived in an idealised state… Mintzberg’s concerns with what manager’s actually do, given on the demands they experience day-to-day.

Fayol has five functions of management; planning, commanding, coordinating and controlling. These functions are to predict the future, plan for the future, developing different technique structure, managing activities, send information to staff members and make sure that things go according to what plan and also get feedback in order to correct inappropriate activities.

According to Mintzberg, he say that management is more than just planning, commanding, coordinating and controlling, it is having an interpersonal relationship and communicate with employees and customers. He describes management as the roles of management. It split into three broad groups, Informational, Interpersonal and decisional roles which comprises of monitor, disseminator, spokesperson, figurehead, leader, laision, entrepreneur, resource allocation and disturbance handler.

Both Fayol and Mintzberg describe management in their own term. Although management is a vague term, Fayol and Mintzberg use their own observation to describe how management works. They take different approaches to highlight how manager operation in an organization.

Katz believed that a successful manager would be sensitive to the needs of those around them with the ability to judge potential reactions and outcomes and to then make an educated decision on the correct course of action to carry out. Katz divided human skills into two categories, leadership ability within the unit and ability within interpersonal relationships. The third and final skill that Katz believed essential to a successful manager was conceptual. Fuyol concluded that it was a necessity for a successful manager to display and enhance three fundamental skills. These skills were technical, human and conceptual. He found that the importance of such skills depended upon the size of the organization and the extent of reliance that was placed on managerial responsibility.

TOPIC 2: MANAGING ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR Lecture + Robbins Ch. 8

1. Describe the three ‘attitude orientations’ of organizational behavior and give an example for each. In your answer discuss why it is helpful for managers to be aware of these orientations.:

They include: job satisfaction, job involvement and organizational commitment.

Job satisfaction is a collection of positive and negative feelings that an individual holds towards his/ her job. Example, how satisfied are people in their jobs? Job satisfaction has declined to 51% due to less control over work.

Job involvement involves identifying with the job, actively participating in it and considering performance important to self-worth.

Organizational commitment: involves identifying with a particular organization and it’s goals and wishing to maintain membership in the organization.

Managers should be aware of these orientations since satisfied workers are more friendly and responsive and helps to build long term relationship between customers and also this may help increase the productivity of the organization.

2. ‘Instead of worrying about job satisfaction, companies should be trying to create environments where performance is enabled.’ Discuss the implications of this statement for managers.

Job satisfaction has a great effect on employee performance, therefore, managers should take actions to retain high performers and weed out low performers. Thus employees who feel fairly treated by and are trusting of the organization are more willing to engage in behaviors that go beyond their normal expectations of their job.

3. Explain the challenges facing managers in managing generational differences and negative behavior in the workplace

i. Diversity

Employers may feel challenged to hire a more diverse work force while at the same time being concerned about the impact the diversity can have hence extra training is required and this may raise expenses.

ii. Employment interaction

Teams working together under the same roof there is bound to be friction from time to time. Introducing training to help employees learn how to manage work stress and get along with other people can be very beneficial.

iii. Handling customers

Customers also bring another level of challenge into the mix. Most employees get frustrated by the customers in situations where it is difficult to deal with on the notion that the customer is always right hence it becomes a challenge to managers to deal with this.

4. Describe the two approaches of perception and the categories in each approach. Discuss why it is important for individuals to be aware of these approaches and the barriers to accurate perception that can occur.

Perception is a cognitive process. People’s individual differences and uniqueness are largely the result of the cognitive process they use in processing the information they receive and conclusions they make.perception is the interpretation of the situation by a person and it is not an exact recording of it.

The approaches to perception, are classical approach and system approach.

Classical approach.

It professes the body of management based on the believe that employees have only economical and physical needs and the social needs and need for job satisfaction either does not exist or not important. It advocates high specialization of labor, centralized decision making and profit maximization. The categories of classical approach are: scientific, administrative and bureaucratic management.

Scientific management focuses on the best way to do a job.

Administrative management focuses on the manager and basic managerial functions.

Bureaucratic management focuses on the guidelines for structuring with formalization of rules, procedures and a clear division of labor.

Merits

i. Offers convenient framework for education and training.

ii. Helpful in drawing common principles out of past experiences

iii. Focuses attention on what managers actually do.

iv. Provides scientific basis for management practice.

System approach

It is a collection of interrelated parts acting together to achieve so goal which exists in the environment. It is also defined as a set of objects working together with relationships between the objects and their attributes related to each other and the environment.

Merits

i. This approach reflects the interests of all parties and it is not based on desires of one group alone.

Demerits

i. Broader than management and its practices

ii. Overlooks many management concepts, techniques and principles.

TOPIC 3: GROUPS AND TEAMS Lecture + Robbins Ch. 9 1. Explain the impact of work teams on productivity in countries such as the United States and Australia, whose national cultures place a high value on individualism.

Many countries use the word team in either one sense or the other that is, production and marketing processes. Examples are management team, production team or an entire organization can be referred to as a team. Work teams improves the overall results in an organization’s productivity in countries such as USA and Australia in the following ways.

· Work teams retain valuable organizational knowledge that comes with the continuity of staff and sharing of information

· Enhance the power and feeling of satisfaction of individuals working on the team

· Establish trust relationships that lead to better sharing of knowledge and understanding

· Achieve objectives because individuals are working together

· Hold team members accountable to one another accountable

Combine the talents of many individuals and therefore contribute more than the sum of its parts

- Create an environment where the input from people at all levels is valued

- Create new knowledge through working and learning with others

- Provide a process and place for multiple perspectives to be applied to complex problems and issues

- Generate new ideas and insights

- Turn knowledge into practical results that improve the organization´s services

-Use a variety of communication processes (including technology) to support the sharing of information, knowledge and experience

- Create a climate where innovation and new ideas are supported and members listen to diverse points of view

- Multiply impacts while maintaining or reducing the resources needed to do the job

- Promote a culture that questions the status quo and looks for innovative ways to improve services and reach goals

- Empower individuals, the team and the organizations

2. Compare how early scientific management theorists and behavioural science theorists might react to the increased use of teams in contemporary organiZations.

Scientific management, theories analyzes work flows to improve economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. Important components of scientific management include analysis, synthesis, logic, rationality, empiricism, work ethic, efficiency, elimination of waste, and standardized best practices. Behavioral science relies on the notion that managers will better understand the human aspect to workers and treat employees as important assets to achieve goals. Management taking a special interest in workers makes them feel like part of a special group.

3. Discuss ways in which norms and conformity can affect group behavior. In your answer provide an explanation of what is meant by ‘norms’ and ‘conformity’.

Norm: A norm is informal guideline about what is considered normal social behavior in a particular group or social unit. Norms form the basis of collective expectations that members of a community have from each other, and play a key part in social control and social order by exerting a pressure on the individual to conform. Conformity: This is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms. Norms are implicit, unsaid rules, shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others. This tendency to conform occurs in small groups and/or society as a whole, and may result from subtle unconscious influences, or direct and overt social pressure

Norms and conformity affect group behavior in the following ways

i. Individuals who breach norms that they accept may experience a range of negative emotional consequences, such as extreme self-consciousness, embarrassment, guilt, and shame.

ii. Breaches upset uncertainty-reducing activity, so organizations in these cultures may adopt structural formalization and centralization, thus reducing the degree of sharing of important information and decision making with subordinates.

iii. Individuals may obey norms to fulfill their own expectations about proper behavior. Individuals often feel duty bound to adhere to norms because, as responsible members of the group, they accept the legitimacy of the established norms and recognize the importance of supporting these norms.

iv. Not conforming to social norms and values is likely to make followers quickly perceive a leader as incompetent and not deserving of that position, regardless of his or her personal achievements. On the other hand, for most individuals, small breaches that reflect personal idiosyncrasies, if kept private, will likely be overlooked.

v. By conforming to group norms, idiosyncrasy credits can be earned, and if enough idiosyncrasy credits are earned, the person can, on occasion, breach norms without retribution from the group. Individuals who breach norms but cannot provide an acceptable explanation for their violation are often evaluated negatively and may experience peer aggression, violence, and lesser forms of mistreatment.

4. Discuss the challenges that managers face with managing global teams. In your answer provide a solution for overcoming each challenge.

a) Lack of clarity.

When working with team members who have different native tongues, it’s common for key messages to get lost in translation. Add poor phone connections and multitasking team members while on conference calls, and you start to realize why communication doesn’t always sink in the first time around.

Remedy: Put action items and key decisions in writing. Follow up conference calls with clear, written communication of the outcomes of the meeting. This ensures everyone walked away from the meeting with the same key takeaways.

b) Slow decision making

When there are only a few hours a day, it can take weeks to get a meeting scheduled that works for everyone’s calendar.

Remedy: Communicate strategy and direction face to face whenever possible. A regular in-person meeting is also a must to boost team morale and increase collaboration.

c) Disjointed conflict resolution.

Working predominantly through email makes it difficult to deal with tough issues and get everyone on the same page.

Remedy: Never communicate tough messages via email, as written messages can easily be misunderstood. By speaking live to the individual in a one-on-one conversation, you are much more likely to understand one another and communicate effectively.

d) Conflicting corporate culture.

Great company culture depends on constant interaction and team bonding among employees.

Remedy: invest in cultural training. hire a consultant to spend a day with the management team for cultural training.

5. Discuss the impact of group size on group behaviour, group cohesiveness, and productivity

The ideal size of a small group working on a shared task is of interest to both researchers that wish to understand fundamental processes and those who wish to design more effective work groups. Research has shown that larger groups generate more accurate answers to problems, are more likely to retain important information and generally have higher performance.

Sub-groups may form to reduce this stress that promote conflict between group members and harm group productivity. Individual level stressors may reduce group cohesion, which has been found to undermine group success and increases the likelihood that schisms will develop between group members.

Increasing group size has a negative impact on group member trust, cohesion, and commitment. Increasing group size likely reduces how aware group members are of one another, affecting cohesion and trust between group members. As cohesion is reduced, group members are more likely to focus on interactions with people they feel are more aware of them.

Increasing group size may make it more difficult to coordinate group member contributions, and may reduce people’s motivations to contribute to shared tasks. Such problems as within group coalition formation may result partly because increasing group size limits group members’ mutual awareness, the ability to monitor each other’s behavior, and leads to a reduction in the frequency of one-on-one interaction.

TOPIC 4: MANAGERIAL COMMUNICATION Lecture + Robbins Ch. 12

1. Explain why it is important to understand the different communication styles when communicating with people. In your answer discuss the barriers to communication that managers need to be aware of when communicating with culturally diverse teams.

i. Understanding different communication styles promotes individual awareness.

ii. It increases self-esteem and self-confidence.

iii. Helps to create good and lasting impressions on others

Barriers to communication that need to be aware include;

i. Close minded

ii. Poor listening

iii. Difficulty seeing the other person's point of view

iv. Interrupts

v. Monopolizing

2. You are a manager who is trying to get support from your colleagues for a new idea. Describe the three principles of communication as well as three influencing tactics you might use.

Principles of communication include:

1. Aggressiveness. I will be aggressive in delivering of the message by pointing frowning, shaking fingers and produce a loud yelling voice.

2. Passiveness. I will be passive by not expressing my true feelings, allowing others to make decision for me, being apologetic and self-conscious.

3. Assertiveness; I will be assertive by handling the situations as effectively as possible,being confident, open and flexible when communicating with my colleagues.

The influencing I might use are:

i. Being clear and keeping it simple by expressing myself directly and honestly.

ii. Being consistent so as I don’t confuse people.

iii. By stating observations, no labels or judgement.

4. Describe the foundations of good communication and how these can help minimise toxic communications in the workplace. In your answer discuss contemporary communication issues facing managers.

Good communication must possess the following features;

Be concrete. The details help the audience to picture in minds how something should be carried out. This means that communications about important initiatives should move beyond abstract statements to specific action items with detailed instructions. Include visual aids where possible.

Find new creative ways of expressing core values. With each new idea, event or project find ways to tie it back to a key company value and don’t be shy about explicitly stating the connection.

Being a leader in collaboration world. As there are more ways for employees to get information through collaborative technology and the web, it is important for managers to be able to capture people attention in order to effectively compete with other influences.

The contemporary communication issues facing managers include:

i. Wasting time and energy over supervising others

ii. Fostering resistance and defiance

iii. Building dependency relationships

iv. Giving up being him/ herself.

4).“’Silence’ can be a powerful language”. Describe four characteristics of nonverbal communication and how these can assist managers when communicating with others

Characteristics of non-verbal communication

i. Nodding of head comes across as pleading

ii. Smiles and nods in agreement

iii. Rigid posture

iv. Squints eyes critically

v. Fast, when anxious; slow, hesitant, when doubtful

These nonverbal cues helps in catching the attention of the audience that the message is being passed to hence it improves effective communication among people.

5.) ‘Ineffective communication is the fault of the sender.’ Discuss the communication process and three ways to ensure effective communication.

Communication process

Communication process consists of some interrelated steps or parts through which messages are sent form sender to receiver. The process of communication begins when the sender wants to transmit a fact, idea, opinion or other information to the receiver and ends with receiver’s feedback to the sender. The main components of communication process are sender, message, channel, receiver and feedback.

Communication process consists of the following eight steps

1. Developing idea by the sender: In the first step, the communicator develops or conceptualizes an idea to be sent. It is also known as the planning stage since in this stage the communicator plans the subject matter of communication.

2. Encoding: Encoding means converting or translation the idea into a perceivable form that can be communicated to others.

3. Developing the message: After encoding the sender gets a message that can be transmitted to the receiver. The message can be oral, written, symbolic or nonverbal. For example, when people talk, speech is the message; when people write a letter, the words and sentences are the message; when people cries, the crying is the message.

4. Selecting the medium: Medium is the channel or means of transmitting the message to the receiver. Once the sender has encoded his into a message, the next step is to select a suitable medium for transmitting it to the receiver. The medium of communication can be speaking, writing, signaling, gesturing etc.

5. Transmission of message: In this step, the sender actually transmits the message through chosen medium. In the communication cycle, the tasks of the sender end with the transmission of the message.

6. Receiving the message by receiver: This stage simply involves the reception of sender’s message by the receiver. The message can be received in the form of hearing, seeing, feeling and so on.

7. Decoding: Decoding is the receiver’s interpretation of the sender’s message. Here the receiver converts the message into thoughts and tries to analyze and understand it. Effective communication can occur only when both the sender and the receiver assign the same or similar meanings to the message.

8. Feedback: The final step of communication process is feedback. Feedback means receiver’s response to sender’s message. It increases the effectiveness of communication. It ensures that the receiver has correctly understood the message. Feedback is the essence of two-way communication.

Ways of Effective communication

1. Open meeting

It is easier to communicate your passion and how you feel to your team via open meetings. In this kind of forum, they will not only hear what you are saying, they will also see and feel it. This approach still remains one of the best approaches to communicate effectively with a team.

2. Emails

In official settings, communication via email remains potent. It will enable you to pass messages to members of your team without pulling them out of their work stations.

3. One on One

Experts have been able to prove that some people understand better when you take them aside and talk to them on a one-on-one basis. Ensure that you maintain eye contact with them to enable the message to sink in.

4. Use Presentations

Some people grasp messages easily when pictures and sounds are involved. Using presentations like Microsoft Power Point to communicate with your team will give them the opportunity to refer back to it if they aren’t clear about certain things.

5. Communication via Training

Your training should be tailored towards communicating certain information to your team members. Most employees take training serious, especially when it’s part of their appraisal.

6. Display Confidence and Seriousness

Ensure that you display confidence and seriousness to ensure that you will not be taken for granted. When your team members notice any uncertainty and lack of seriousness when you’re communicating with them, they are likely to treat the information with disdain or disregard.

7. Use Simple Words

The truth is that everybody cannot be on same page when it comes to vocabulary. Therefore, to be effective in your communications with your team members, use words that can be easily understood. When ambiguous words are used, you can be misunderstood and/or waste precious time having to explain yourself.

TOPIC 5: MANAGING CSR AND ETHICAL BEHAVIOUR Lecture + Robbins Ch. 2 1. Taking a systems view of organisations, discuss the influence of systems culture and values on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The following are as a result of influence of systems culture and values on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

· Profits efficiently earned may not constitute a sufficient CSR standard.