Fundamentele Managementului - Curs Englez

Introduction

1. DEFINING MANAGEMENT

2. ORGANIZATIONS

3. THE PROCESS OF MANAGEMENT

4. THE MANAGEMENT HIERARCHY

5. MANAGERIAL SKILLS

1. DEFINING MANAGEMENT

Management can be defined as "the art of getting things done through people." This definition was expressed in 1918 by Mary Parker Follett, a notable management scholar who studied how work was accomplished in organizations. Although the definition is simple, it captures the essence of management. An expanded definition based on our "functional" approach is that management is the process of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling that encompasses human, material, financial, and information resources in an organizational environment. This expanded definition emphasizes that management is best viewed as a pro¬cess that is employed to accomplish organizational objectives.

2. ORGANIZATIONS

Organizations exist when two or more people mutually cooperate to pursue com¬mon objectives. An organization, therefore, is more than a gathering of individuals; shoppers in a busy supermarket do not constitute an organization, nor do crowds of people at a ball game. An organization consists of people working together to achieve common objectives, and while we often pursue interests independently as shoppers or sporting fans, we are also members of a great many organizations.

Organizations allow us to overcome our individual limitations. Through com¬binations of human effort and resources, we achieve far more than we could acting independently. For example, ten students preparing for a party can coordinate their activities to accom¬plish more with less total effort than the same students could acting independently. This is called synergism. Synergy means that the results of combined efforts are greater than the sum of individual efforts. Industrial nations have prospered through the synergism of well-managed organizations that have developed specialized and well-coordinated systems of work.

Thus we arrive at a more useful definition of organizations: They are formal associations that combine human activities, resources, capital, and infor¬mation for the purpose of providing something of social value.

Formal and Informal Organizations

Formal organizations consist of two or more people involved in a mutual effort with formal authority to achieve common objectives. Informal organizations do have deliberate structures of authority and their members need not work to¬gether to achieve common objectives.

Management focuses on formal organizations because "formality" presumes human effort is deliberately focused on common objectives. Informal or¬ganizations permeate our lives, but they arise spontaneously and are often tempo¬rary. It is important here to note that management is concerned with formal organizations—those that are delib¬erately structured with common objectives, clarity of purpose, and two or more indi¬viduals working together.

3. THE PROCESS OF MANAGEMENT

The activities that make up the managerial process are commonly called the four functions of management. Although these are interrelated activities that separately have little meaning, we can better understand management by studying each activity in isolation. Figure 1-1 shows the model of this process.

Planning

Managers develop organizational objectives by planning. This activity is said to pre¬cede all other managerial functions, but of course it cannot take place in a vacuum. Plans evolve within organizations, usually while people are working and resources are being used and controlled. Planning is the process of defining an organization's objectives and determining how to achieve them. Objectives are benchmarks for measuring future performance. As managers, we plan today based on our assump¬tions about what will happen in the future. We seek direction for current and future actions and solutions to current problems in order to prevent future problems. In other words, managers plan so that organizations can move forward with the best probability of success.

George Steiner, a leading scholar in the field of strategic planning, defines planning as deciding "what is to be done, when it is to be done, how it is to be done, and who is to do it."11 Larger, more complex organizations face more daunting plan¬ning tasks than their smaller counterparts. Managers in large firms frequently tackle heady issues. Major power companies, for example, are currently preparing for the decade of the 2030s because it takes that long to plan, fund, and build a new power plant. Imagine trying to determine the electricity needs of a large city decades from now. What power sources will be used in the year 2030? What sort of computer tech¬nology will be employed to control electric generation?

Smaller entrepreneurial firms seldom face issues as intangible and far-reaching, but their need for planning is equally critical. Clothing store managers who fail to plan for new fashion changes might easily find themselves with outdated inventory. A supermarket manager who makes a 1 percent error in costs may earn no profits because 1 percent is often the total net profit in retail groceries.

So many factors affect organizational performance that is rarely adequate for managers to make decisions solely on inspiration. The planning function implies a formal, structured approach to help them do the right things while keeping clear objectives in mind. Intuition plays an important role, particularly for experienced man¬ners, but effective planning is not a spontaneous exercise. It is the active process of establishing where one wants to be at a specific point in the future.

Organizing

Managers must organize human and material resources to carry out their plans. Re¬sources must be gathered and allocated, and the work of an enterprise must be co¬ordinated. Gathering resources includes staffing, or the organization of human re¬sources. It also includes purchasing materials, securing financing, and providing facilities. Once a firm understands its needs and sets about gathering resources, an allocation process evolves. Human resources are grouped in logical divisions of labor, schedules of operations are defined, and lines of communication are forged to ensure coordination of tasks.

These organizing activities occur within the context of a specifically designed structure. The job of organizing requires a deliberate configuration for the firm that defines how authority is structured, how communication flows, and how tasks are ac¬complished. This configuration differs from organization to organization and de¬pends largely on the nature of each firm's work. For example, a manufacturing com¬pany will choose a structure based on production methods and technology, a university will choose a form of departmentalization that allows groups of profes¬sionals to work somewhat independently, and a hospital may require careful delin¬eation of services within a structure that enhances working relationships among its medical activities.

"Getting organized" obviously means much more than defining structures, as¬signing jobs, and bringing together essential resources. A firm cannot function in an¬archy. "Getting organized" implies the creation of a harmonious work environment, and harmony is largely the result of effective leadership