International Management Practices Quiz

Introduction to Management

• Learning changes everything.
• The exceptional manager understands what to do and how to do it.
• Learning objectives of the chapter are detailed.
• Key functions of management such as planning, organizing, leading, and controlling are covered.
• Learning objectives focused on rewards, levels, areas, and challenges faced by managers are explained.
• Core competencies, knowledge, soft skills, attitudes needed are described.
• Process of managing your career readiness is defined.

Management: What it is and its benefits

• Exceptional management is a learnable art.
• Management is the act of getting things done through people.
• Good managers are task-oriented, achievement-oriented, and people-oriented.
• Efficiency and effectiveness are crucial in management.
• Definition of management as the pursuit of organizational goals efficiently and effectively by integrating the work of people through planning, organizing, leading, and controlling the organization's resources.

What is Management?

• Individuals responsible for supervising the use of organizational resources to meet the goals of the organization.
• Resources include people, skills, experience, machinery, raw materials, IT, financial capital, loyal customers and employees.
• Organizations are collections of people who work together and coordinate their actions to achieve wide varieties of goals.

Achieving High Performance

• A measure of how efficiently and effectively managers use available resources to satisfy customers and achieve organizational goals.
• Efficiency measures the productivity of resources in achieving a goal.

Why Organizations Value Managers: The Multiplier Effect

• As a manager, influence multiplies far beyond personal achievement.

What are the Rewards of Studying and Practicing Management?

• Studying management offers an insider's understanding of organizations.
• It helps relate to supervisors, co-workers, and manage your career.
• It might lead to higher income.
• Practicing management fosters a sense of accomplishment, stretches abilities and builds a catalog of successful products or services.

What Managers Do: The Four Principal Functions

• Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling
• Planning is the process of identifying/selecting appropriate goals and courses of action.
• Organizing structures working relationships to achieve organizational goals.
• Leading includes articulating a clear vision and energizing organizational members.
• Controlling evaluates how well an organization achieves its goals and takes corrective action to maintain/improve performance.

The Management Process

• Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling are cyclical.
• Planning includes setting goals and planning how to achieve them
• Controlling includes monitoring performance, comparing to goals, and taking corrective action.
• Organizing includes arranging tasks, people, and resources.
• Leading involves motivating and directing people.

Levels of Management

• CEO, top managers, middle managers, first-line managers
• First-line managers supervise nonmanagerial workers and make short-term operating decisions.
• Middle managers supervise first-line managers, responsible for efficient use of resources to achieve organizational goals, and implementing policies/plans of top managers.
• Top managers establish organizational goals, monitor middle managers, and make long-term decisions.

Areas of Management: Functional Managers Versus General Managers

• Functional managers are responsible for one organizational activity (e.g., VP of production, director of finance)
• General managers are responsible for several organizational activities.

Managers for Three Types of Organizations

• For-profit organizations seek profits.
• Non-profit organizations serve clients without seeking profit.
• Mutual-benefit organizations serve members' interests.

Different Organizations, Different Management?

• Management functions (planning, organizing, leading, and controlling) remain constant across different organizations.
• Measures of success vary across organizations, profit/loss for-profits vs. effectiveness of services for non-profits/mutual-benefits.

Roles Managers Must Play Successfully

• Interpersonal (figurehead, leader, liaison), informational (monitor, disseminator, spokesperson), and decisional (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, negotiator) roles.

The Manager's Roles: How Do Managers Spend Their Time?

• Today's managers work an average of 9.7 hours weekdays, with rare true breaks.
• Managers spend a significant part of their time communicating with others.
• Managers must be purposeful and proactive about managing their time.

Skills Exceptional Managers Need

• Technical skills (ability to perform a specific job), conceptual skills (ability to think analytically and visualize an organization), human skills (interaction skills).

Challenges to Being an Exceptional Manager

• Managing for competitive advantage, managing for technological advances, managing for inclusion and diversity, managing for globalization, managing for ethical standards, managing for sustainable development, and managing for happiness and meaningfulness.

Developing Career Readiness

• Build self-awareness, learning from activities, model others.
• Learn from on-the-job activities and seek management positions.
• Three keys to career success include: personal responsibility, motivation, commitment, experimentation.
• Steps for developing career readiness are to examine career readiness competencies, consider text material, experiment with small steps, and evaluate results.
• Process for developing career readiness includes identifying competencies, evaluating experimental steps, assessing relevant concepts, experimenting with implementing steps.
• Make it a habit by identifying desired accomplishments and implementing incremental progress.

The Manager's Changing Work Environment & Ethical Responsibilities Doing the Right Thing

• Recent incidents highlight the importance of ethical standards.
• Six key ethical misconduct considerations are: conflicts of interest, abusive behaviors, violations of health and safety regulations, corruption, discrimination, sexual harassment.
• Values provide a foundation for ethical behavior.

Major Questions You Should Be Able to Answer

• Questions about profit, stakeholders inside/outside the organization, ethics and values, social responsibility, and trust in a company.

The Triple Bottom Line: People, Planet, & Profit

measuring an organization's social, environmental, and financial performance.

Younger Workers' Search for Meaning

• Millennials and Gen Zers prioritize meaningful work and products aligned with personal values.

The Community of Stakeholders Inside the Organization

• Stakeholders are individuals whose interests are affected by the organization's actions.
• Stakeholders include internal (employees, owners, board of directors) and external (customers, suppliers, government, community members).

The Community of Stakeholders Outside the Organization

• External stakeholders are people or groups impacted by the organization's external environment.
• The external environment includes the task environment (customers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, strategic allies, employee organizations, local communities, financial institutions, government regulators, special-interest groups) and the general environment (international, economic, technological, sociocultural, demographic, political-legal forces).

The General Environment

• Includes six forces: economic, technological, sociocultural, demographic, political-legal, and international.
• These forces shape opportunities and threats.

The Task Environment

• 10 groups that an organization regularly interacts with such as customers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, ,strategic allies, employee organizations, local communities, financial institutions, government regulators, and special-interest groups.

Government Regulators

• Agencies that determine ground rules for organizations. This can influence operational activities.

Special Interest Groups

• Groups that influence specific issues, such as environmental or animal rights concerns. This can effect issues relevant to an organization.

Ethical Responsibilities Required of You as a Manager

• Ethical standards widely vary according to region and culture.

The Ethical Responsibilities Required of You as a Manager (cont.)

• Ethical dilemmas arise when choosing a course of action that benefits the organization and is unethical or illegal
• Four perspectives to resolving ethical dilemmas: Utilitarian, Individual, Moral-rights, and Justice
• Ethics and values are standards of right vs wrong behaviors.

Common Decision-Making Biases

• Availability, Representativeness, Confirmation, Sunk Cost, Anchoring and Adjustment, Escalation of Commitment, Hindsight, Framing, Escalation of Commitment.

Group Decision Making

• Group decision making is a situation of collective decision making by multiple individuals.
• Benefits of group decision making include: greater pool of knowledge, different perspectives, intellectual stimulation, better understanding of decision rationale, commitment.
• Drawbacks include: few people dominating/intimidating, groupthink, satisficing decision, goal displacement.
• Guidelines and techniques for group decision making include: consensus (exploring reasons behind arguments, involving many members, avoiding log rolling/horse trading/making agreement for relation, dont put questions to a vote)

Implementation Principles of Evidence-Based Decision Making

• Treat organization as prototype
• No bragging and facts
• An outside perspective
• Evidence-based management is for ALL levels.
• Sell it.

Analytics

• Sophisticated business data analysis that includes portfolio analysis and time-series forecast.

Key Attributes Among Analytics Competitors

• Modeling (predictive modeling), multiple applications, strong leadership support.

The Uses of "Big Data"

• Includes data from corporate databases, web browsing, social media, sensor, and surveillance data.
• Big data analytics reveals hidden patterns, and unknown correlations, for better information.

General Decision Making Styles

• Decision style reflects how someone perceives and responds to information
• Value orientation: task focus vs people/social concerns
• Tolerance for ambiguity: High structure vs no structure preference

Decision Making Styles (cont.)

• Directive: efficient, systematic, logical, fact-based.
• Analytical: considers lots of info, alternatives
• Conceptual: broad perspective, future options, intuition-based.
• Behavioral: supportive, receptive to suggestions, verbal preferred.

Ineffective Responses to Decision Situations

• Relaxed avoidance, relaxed change, defensive avoidance, panic

Three Effective Reactions to Decision Situations

• Importance, credibility, urgency

Common Decision-Making Biases (cont.)

• Availability, Representativeness, Confirmation, Sunk Cost, and Anchoring and Adjustment, Escalation of commitment and hindsight