Introduction to Management

Unit One
Fundamentals of Management

Meaning and Definition of Management

Meaning
The word management has several meanings, the most
important of which are:
 Management is the process of running an organization
(planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling).
 Management is a body of knowledge, a discipline.
 Management is a factor of production; economic resource
as land, labor, and capital.
Defining Management
There are several definitions of management given by
different authorities in the field.
 Management is the art of getting things done through and
with people in a formally organized group.
 Management is the art of knowing what you want to do in
the best and cheapest way.
 Management is the process of planning, organizing,
staffing, directing, and controlling the use of a firm’s
resources to effectively and economically attain its
objectives.
Providing a single, comprehensive, and universally accepted definition of
management is impossible due to the fact that:

 Management has various aspects, that all of which cannot

be represented by a single definition.
 The theorists who gave the definitions had different areas
of interest or training, and all defined management from
their perspective (engineering, sociology, psychology,
mathematics, etc)
 Management as a discipline is young and there is a lack of
clarity of concepts and principles.
Characteristics of Management
Goal Oriented
Dynamic
Decision Making
Universal
A Continuous Process
Working with and through people
Multi – Disciplinary
Not Absolute Principles
Significance of Management

Ensure the coordination of individual efforts.

As many organized groups have become large, the task of
managers has been rising in importance.
Members might do parts of jobs that each thought important
to meet the objectives, while in reality the members might be
working in opposite directions.
Generally, No group activity can succeed without
management.

Q: Discuss the meaning and definition of management

.
Basic Management Functions

Planning
 Planning is the first function
 It identifies the goals and alternatives
 It maps out courses of action
Planning achieves these ends after setting in motion the
following processes:
 Determination of what resources will be needed
 Identification of the number and types of personnel
the organization will need
Cont…
 Development of the foundation for the
organizational environment in which work is to be
accomplished.
 Determination of standard against which the progress
toward the objectives can be measured so that
corrections can be made if necessary.
Cont…
 The length of time and the scope of planning will vary
according to the level in the company.
 Top level management planning may cover a period of
five or ten years and can be considered long range
planning.
 At lower levels of management, the concern may be a
plan for today’s activities or planning tomorrow’s work
schedule.
Cont…
 Lower level managers’ plans are strongly guided by the
directions of the plans of top level managers.

Q: what are the basic feature of planning?

Organizing
Organizing is a management function which is
concerned with:
 Assembling the resources necessary to achieve the
organization’s objectives
 Establishing the activity-authority relationships of the
organization.
N.B:-Planning has established the goals of the company
and how they are to be achieved; now, organizing
develops the structure to reach these goals.
Cont…
 Organizing is not done once and then forgotten.
 Each unit should have clearly defined authority, or a
clearly defined list of duties, and one person to whom
to report.
Staffing
 Staffing is concerned with locating prospective
employees to fill the jobs
 Staffing initially involves the process of recruiting
potential candidates for a job, reviewing the
applicants’ credentials, and trying to match the job
demands with the candidates’ abilities.
Staffing involves orienting the new employee to the
company environment, training the new person for his
or her particular job, and keeping each employee
qualified.
Cont…
 Staffing also involves the development and
implementation of a system for appraising
performance and providing feedback for performance
improvement.
 Staffing is also concerned with determining the proper
pay and benefits for each job.
 Many aspects of the staffing function are the
responsibility of the personnel department.
Directing/Leading
Directing is aimed at getting the members of the
organization to move in the direction that will achieve
its objectives.
Directing builds a climate, provides leadership, and
arranges the opportunity for motivation.
Each boss must plan and oversee the work of each of
his or her subordinates.
The challenge for a manager is to create an
environment in which both the employee and the
organization will achieve their objectives
Cont…
 Expectations need to be communicated and
reinforced.
 Communication needs to be ongoing and
personalized. And each person should be encouraged
to participate in the decision making process.
Controlling
 Controlling deals with establishing standards for
performance, measuring performances against
established standards, and dealing with deviations
from established standards.
 It attempts to prevent problems, to determine when
problems do exist, and to solve the problems that
occur as quickly and effectively as possible.
Cont…
Controlling depends on accurate, reliable, and
enforceable standards and on monitoring
performances by people, machines, and process.
 The best controls ensure that work is performed to
standards as planned.
Levels of Management
 Levels are hierarchical arrangement of managerial
positions in an organization.
 The number of levels of management, among other
things, depends on the size of the organization.
 Generally, there are three managerial levels:
Top level management
Middle level management
First level(operating/supervisors level) management
Top level Management
 Top level management includes the board of directors,
executive committee, and chief executive, or president, or
general manager, etc, of an organization.
 Functions of top level management include:

Establishing broad objectives

Designing major objectives
Outlining principal policies
Cont…
Providing effective organizational structure that
ensures integration
Providing overall leadership and direction
Making overall control of the organization
Dealing with external parties such as the government,
community, business etc by representing the
organization
Analyzing the changes in the external environment
and respond to it.
Middle level Management
 Middle level management includes heads of the different areas
and their assistants, divisional heads, department managers,
section heads, plant managers, branch managers, etc.
 Managers in this level are specialists and their activities are
limited to a particular area of operation or to a section or
department.
 The major functions of middle level management are:
Acting as intermediary between top and operating level
management
Translating long-term plans of top management into medium
range plans
Cont…
Developing specific targets in their areas of responsibility
Develop specific schedules to guide actions and facilitate
control
Coordinating inputs, productivity and outputs of operating
level managements.
First level (Operating level) Management
 This is the last step of the ladder in the hierarchy of
management.
 The subordinates of operating level managers are non-
management workers.
 Operating level managers direct a small team of
workers and keep a check on their performance so that
short-term production and work targets are achieved.
 The typical titles in this level are section chief, office
manager, supervisor, etc.
The major functions of operating level
management are:
 Planning daily and weekly activities and accomplishments
based on the monthly, quarterly, and yearly plans.
 Assigning operating employees to specific tasks
 Issuing instructions at the workplace, following-up,
motivating, and evaluating workers and reporting to their
superiors.
Types of Managers
 Based on the scope of the activities they manage,
managers are classified into functional and general
managers.
Functional Managers
 Functional managers supervise with specialized skills in a
single area of operation, such as accounting, personnel,
finance, marketing, and production.
Cont…
General Managers
 General Managers are responsible for the overall
operations of a more complex unit, such as a company, or
a division.
 General Managers hold functional managements
accountable for their specialized areas and usually
coordinate two or more departments.
Managerial Roles and Skills

Managerial Roles
 Managers perform the basic managerial functions by
playing a variety of managerial roles.
 A role is an organized set of behaviors.
 Henry Mintzberg studied a variety of managerial jobs
and arrived at the ten most common roles of top
managers.
 The ten roles are classified into three categories:
interpersonal roles, informational roles, and
decisional roles.
Cont…
 Every manager’s job consists of some combination of roles.
 These roles often influence the characteristic of managerial
work.
 Although we describe them separately for simplicity, these
roles actually are highly interrelated.
 The relative importance of each role varies considerably by
managerial level of function.
Interpersonal Roles
Interpersonal roles, which arise directly from a
manager’s formal authority, involve interpersonal
relationships.
Managers play the following three interpersonal roles.
1.Figurehead role
 The manager represents the organizations at ceremonial
and symbolic functions.
 It’s the most basic and the simplest of all managerial roles.
E.g. The supervisor who attends the wedding of the machine
operator, the sales manager who takes an important
customer to lunch – all are performing ceremonial duties
important to the organization’s image and success.
Cont…
 These duties may not seem important, they are expected
of managers.
 They symbolize management’s concern for employees,
customers, and the community.
2.Leadership role
 The leadership role involves responsibility for directing
and coordinating the activities of subordinates in order to
accomplish original objectives.
 Some aspects of the leadership role have to do with
staffing: hiring, promoting.
 Other aspects involve motivating subordinates to meet
the organization’s needs.
3.Liaison role
 The liaison role refers to dealing with people outside the
organization, such as clients, government officials,
customers, and suppliers.
 It also refers to dealing with managers in other
departments, staff specialists, and other departments’
employees.
 In the liaison role, the manager seeks support from people
who can affect the department’s and the organization’s
success.
Informational Roles
 Effective managers build networks of contacts for sharing
information.
 Because of these contacts, managers emerge as the nerve
system centers of their organizations.
 Many contacts made while performing figurehead and
liaison roles give mangers access to a great deal of
important information.
 The following three roles describe the informational
aspects of managerial work.
1.Monitor role
 The monitor role involves seeking out, receiving, and
screening information.
 Managers scan their environments for information
that may affect their organization.
 Since much of the information received is oral (from
gossip and hearsay, as well as formal meetings),
managers must evaluate and decide whether to use
this information.
2.Disseminator role
 In the disseminator role, the manager shares
information with subordinates and other members of
the organization.
 Sometimes the manager passes along special or
“privileged” information to certain subordinates who
would not originally have access to it and who can be
trusted not to let it go further.
 In practice passing information along to subordinates
is often difficult and time consuming.
Cont…
 Therefore, the manger must decide which and how
much information will be useful.
3.Spokesperson role
 In the spokesperson role, managers transmit
information to others, especially those outside the
organization, as the official position of the company.
 The manager is the person who speaks for his or her
work unit or organization to people outside the work
unit or organization.
Decisional Roles
 Managers use information to make decisions about
when and how to commit their organization to new
objectives and actions.
 Decisional roles are perhaps the most important of the
three categories of roles.
 Managers are the core of the organization’s decision
making system since they play the following four
decisional roles.
1.Entrepreneurial role
 Involves designing and initiating planned change in
order to improve the organization’s position.
 Managers play this role when they initiate new
projects, launch a survey, test a new market, or enter a
new business.
2.Disturbance handler role
 Managers play this role when dealing with problems
and changes beyond their immediate control.
 Typical problems include strikes by labor, bankruptcy
of major suppliers, or breaking of contracts by
customers.
 Sometimes disturbances may arise because a poor
manager ignores the situation until it becomes a crisis.
3.Resource allocator role
 Involves choosing among competing demands for
money, equipment, personnel, and other’s demands
on manager’s time.
 Should she/he add a second shift or pay overtime to
handle new orders?
4.Negotiator role
 Closely linked to the resource allocator role is the
negotiator role.
 In this role managers meet and discuss their
differences with individuals or groups for the purpose
of reaching an agreement.
 They are especially tough when a manager must deal
with others (such as unions or political action groups)
who don’t share the manger’s objectives.
Managerial Skills
 Skill is ability to do something expertly and well.
 It is meant ability related to performance that is not
necessarily in born but which can be developed/
acquired.
 For the purpose of discussion, managerial skills are
classified into four distinct categories: technical,
conceptual, interpersonal and communication skills
Technical Skills
 Technical skills involve the ability to apply specific
methods, procedures, and techniques in a specialized
field.
 It is easy to visualize the technical skills of design
engineers, market researchers, accountants, and
computer programmers.
 Technical skills are often given emphasis in schools
and universities and on-the-job training programs.
Interpersonal Skills
 Human skill refers to the ability to interact effectively
with people.
 Managers interact and cooperate with employees.
 It is simply managers’ ability to work well with people
both individually and in a group.
 It involves patience, trust and genuine involvement in
interpersonal relationships.
Cont…
Interpersonal or human skills include the ability to
lead, motivate, manage conflicts, and work with
others.
Technical skills emphasize working with things
(techniques or physical objects).
Interpersonal skills focus on working with people.
Conceptual Skills
 Conceptual skills involve the ability to view the
organization as a whole and recognize its relationships
to the larger environment.
 In other words, conceptual skill involves visualizing
the different parts of an organization as one big whole
and to understand the wholes interaction with its
relevant environment.
Cont…
 More specifically:
 How the organization’s various parts and functions
depend on each other and thus, how changes in one
area can affect other areas.
 How each part contributes to the achievement of the
overall organizational goal?
 The manager uses conceptual skills to diagnose and
assess different types of management problems.
Communication skills
 Refers to the manager’s abilities both to convey ideas and information
effectively to others and to receive ideas and information effectively
from others.
 Classified in to verbal (writing and oral) and non-verbal
The relation ship b/n managerial level and skills

Communication skills : Equally important at all level.

Interpersonal (Human) Skills : More important to top and
middle levels than lower level managers.
Conceptual skill : More important to upper level of
management.
Technical skills : Very important at the operating level.
Universality of Management
Management is universal for the following reasons;
 Managers in all levels of organizational hierarchy
perform the same basic managerial functions. What
varies from level to level is that the various
management levels require different amounts of time
for each function, and the points of emphasis in each
function are different.
 It is applicable for all human efforts; be it is business,
non business, governmental, private. It is useful from
individual to institutional efforts.
Cont…
 The principles of management are universal. They are
applicable to any kind of organization wherever there
is the coordinated effort of human beings. The type of
enterprise is not significant.
 All managers operate in organizations with specific
objectives.
 Management, in all organizations, helps to achieve
organizational objectives.