BUS208 Study Guide

Unit 1: What Is Management?

1a. Define the functions of managers

The four functions of managers (The P-O-L-C Framework – see diagram below) are:

Planning: managers set goals and determine the best way to achieve them. Because of the planning process, everyone in the organization knows what should be done, who should do it, and how it should be done.

Three Types of Planning

Strategic planning has a longer time frame, often three years or more, and includes the entire organization and includes the formulation of objectives. It is often based on the organization's mission, which is its reason for existence.
Tactical planning is one to three years of planning designed to develop relatively concrete means to implement the strategic plan.
Operational planning is short-range (less than a year) planning designed to develop specific action steps that support the strategic and tactical plans.

Organizing: managers allocate resources (people, equipment, and money) to achieve a company's plans. Successful managers make sure all activities identified in the planning process are assigned to some person, department, or team that everyone has the resources needed to perform their assigned jobs.

Leading/Directing: managers provide focus and direction to others and motivate them to achieve organizational goals.

Controlling: managers monitor their team's operations to make sure everything is going according to plan and taking corrective action where necessary.

Five-Step Control Process:

Set standards by which performance will be measured
Measure performance
Compare actual performance with standards and identify any deviations
Determine the reasons for the deviations
Take corrective action if needed

The P-O-L-C Framework

Different types of managers

Top Managers are responsible for developing the organization's strategy and being a steward for its vision and mission. A second set of managers includes functional, team, and general managers.

Functional managers are responsible for the efficiency and effectiveness of an area, such as accounting or marketing.

Supervisory or team managers are responsible for coordinating a subgroup of a function or a team composed of members from different parts of the organization.

Line managers lead a function that contributes directly to the products or services the organization creates.

Staff Managers lead a function that creates indirect inputs.

Project Managers have the responsibility for the planning, execution, and closing of any project. Project managers are often found in construction, architecture, consulting, computer networking, telecommunications, or software development.

General Managers are responsible for managing a clearly identifiable revenue-producing unit, such as a store, business unit, or product line. They typically must make decisions across different functions and have rewards tied to the performance of the entire unit (stores, business units, product lines, etc.). General managers take direction from their top executives.

1b. Discuss and analyze the purpose of management

A summary of the purpose of management is:

Management is the organizational function responsible for using all available resources efficiently to achieve the best possible results.
Management manages others and oneself.
Besides decision-making, managers also act as facilitators, coaches, problem solvers, and developers of human capital.
Effective managers work with people to support a collaborative and innovative environment.
Ineffective managers tend to make decisions and solve problems on their own without group participation.
The way we think about management needs to be updated for the 21st century; our new definition should include basic people skills such as nurturing, supporting, encouraging, and developing.
Managers versus Leaders: managers leverage positional power to manage subordinates, whereas leaders inspire others to achieve their goals.

What differentiates a manager from a leader?

Managers:

Managers leverage their positional power to facilitate others
Managers command authoritarian power instilled by an organization
The title "manager" signifies an individual's capacity to establish the tasks and duties that their subordinates must follow.
Managers are typically salaried employees who are given responsibilities and a time frame to accomplish established goals.
A manager's power is transactional – their authority is derived from the incentives to provide their employees, such as salaries, raises, bonuses, paid time off, promotions, and other means of official recognition.

Leaders:

Leaders use personal influence to convince others to follow them.
Leaders do not require subordinates, but rather, they maintain power by wielding strong influence over followers. Following is a voluntary behavior – you cannot lead others by simply telling them what to do.
A leader might appeal to their followers using skillful prose, eloquent or inciting speech, or by way of successful debate.
Leaders rally people toward a specific cause. Leaders need to be charismatic, proactive, and generally good at interacting with other people.

The Changing Roles of Management and Managers

Mintzberg's influence is his observation that the nature of managerial work has changed very little through time, aside from the shift to a more empowered relationship between top managers and other managers and employees. Changes in technology and the large increase in information overload contributes to this. The diagram below indicates his ideas.

Mintzberg's Ten Managerial Roles

Mintzberg identified 10 roles common to the work of all managers. The diagram below summarizes the 10 roles, and they are divided into three groups: interpersonal, informational, and decisional. The informational roles link all managerial work together. The interpersonal roles ensure that information is provided. The decisional roles make significant use of the information. The performance of managerial roles and the requirements of these roles can be played at different times by the same manager and to different degrees, depending on the level and function of management.

Manager Personality and Values

When researchers analyzed people's personality characteristics and traits, they realized that many different words were pointing to a single dimension of personality. The words were grouped, forming five dimensions that emerged, and these explain various personalities. These five are not necessarily the only traits out there. Other, specific traits represent other dimensions not captured by the Big Five. But understanding the Big Five helps us understand better and gives us a good start for describing personality.

The Big Five Personality Traits are:

Source: Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative "description of personality": The big-five factor structure. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 59, 1216–1229.

Unit 1 Vocabulary

Management: the coordination of work activities through and with other people to accomplish an organization's goals; management involves not only coordination but also planning, organizing, leading, and controlling
Empowerment: the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, act, and control work and decision making in autonomous ways
Environmental scanning: planners must be aware of their organization's critical contingencies in terms of economic conditions, their competitors, and their customers
Organizational design decisions: decisions made about the structure of an organization
Leadership: the social and informal sources of influence that you use to inspire action taken by others; it means mobilizing others to want to struggle toward a common goal
Management: getting things done through others
Principles of management: how you manage and get things done through others – individually, in groups, or in organizations
Self-enhancement bias: a tendency to overestimate our performance and capabilities and see ourselves in a more positive light than others see us; people who have a narcissistic personality are particularly subject to this bias, but many others also have this bias to varying degrees
Self-effacement bias (or modesty bias): a tendency to underestimate our performance and capabilities and to see events in a way that puts ourselves in a more negative light; we may expect that people with low self-esteem may be particularly prone to making this error
False consensus error: overestimation of how similar we are to other people
Stereotypes: generalizations based on a group characteristic
Self-fulfilling prophecy: when an established stereotype causes one to behave in a certain way, which leads the other party to behave in a way that confirms the stereotype
Selective perception: we pay selective attention to parts of the environment while ignoring other parts, which is particularly important during the planning process; our background, expectations, and beliefs shape which events we notice and which events we ignore