Management Functions Quiz

Management Functions

• Planning: defining goals, establishing strategies, and developing plans to coordinate activities.
• Organizing: determining tasks, assigning responsibilities, and establishing communication channels.
• Leading: motivating employees, directing others, selecting effective communication channels, and resolving conflicts.
• Controlling: monitoring activities to ensure they are being accomplished as planned and correcting deviations.

Managerial Roles

• Intrapersonal Roles:
  • Figurehead: represents the company in social or civic functions.
  • Leader: motivates and directs employees, acts as a role model and mentor.
  • Liaison: maintains a network of outside contacts for information and favors.
• Informational Roles:
  • Monitor: receives and screens information inside and outside the organization.
  • Disseminator: transmits information received from outside contacts to organization members.
  • Spokesperson: transmits information to outsiders on organization plans, policies, and results.
• Decisional Roles:
  • Entrepreneur: looks for opportunities, initiates projects for improvement.
  • Resource Allocator: approves organizational decisions on purchases, supplies, and raw materials.
  • Negotiator: represents the organization in major business deals and negotiations.

Managerial Activities

• Traditional Management: decision making, planning, budgeting, and controlling.
• Communication: exchanging routine information, processing paperwork.
• Human Resource Management: motivating, disciplining, managing conflicts, staffing, and training.
• Networking: socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders.

Types of Managers

• First Line Management: supervisors responsible for basic work of the organization.
• Middle Management: supervisors' immediate superiors who organize, lead, and control subordinates.
• Top Management: responsible for the performance of the entire organization.

Management Skills

• Analytical skills
• Decision-making skills
• Computer skills
• Human Relations skills
• Communication skills
• Conceptual skills

Leadership

• Defined as the process of influencing others to facilitate the attainment of organizationally relevant goals.
• Likert's Job-centered and Employee-centered Leadership:
  • Job-centered: uses legitimate power and force to influence employee behavior.
  • Employee-centered: uses a more liberal leadership style, creating a supportive work environment.
• Lewin's Leadership Styles:
  • Autocratic: uses strong, direct, and controlling actions to enforce rules and regulations.
  • Democratic: takes collaborative, reciprocal, and cooperative actions of followers.
  • Laissez-faire: leader does not want to take responsibility.

Structure and Consideration

• Structure: establishing well-defined patterns of job assignments and communication channels.
• Consideration: involves a more approachable leadership style, building mutual trust, warmth, and rapport with subordinates.

Fiedler's Contingency Leadership Model

• Assumes that group performance can only be achieved through the interaction between leadership style and situational favorableness or compatibility.

Path Goal Model

• Asserts that leaders can be effective by influencing their subordinates through motivation, performance ability, and satisfaction.

Leadership Styles

• Directive Leader: informs subordinates of expectations.
• Supportive Leader: treats subordinates equally.
• Participative Leader: gets suggestions from followers before reaching a decision.
• Achievement-oriented Leader: seeks challenging goals, provides training, and sets high expectations for followers.

Situational Leadership Theory

• Asserts that leaders' ability to determine follower's maturity and adapt the most appropriate leadership style.

Vroom-Jago Leadership Model

• Assumes that no single leadership style is appropriate for a particular situation.
• Autocratic: leader makes the decision without input from subordinates.
• Consultative: followers have some input, but the leader makes the final decision.
• Group: the entire group makes the decision with the leader as an ordinary group member.
• Delegated: leader authorizes the group to make the decision.

Attribution Theory

• Views the leader as an information processor who classifies the causes of follower's behavior as one of the following: person, entity, and context.

Charismatic Leadership

• Asserts the emergence of leaders with exceptional qualities, charisma that motivates employees to achieve outstanding performance.

Transactional Leadership

• Emphasizes that leaders help followers to identify what must be accomplished to get the desired results.

Transformational Leadership

• Helps followers to achieve long-term rather than short-term self-interest and for self-actualization rather than for security.

Coaching

• An everyday transaction between a leader and a follower where the manager helps the subordinate to improve their performance.

Emotional Intelligence

• Components:
  • Self-awareness: ability to read one's emotions.
  • Self-management: ability to control one's emotions.
  • Motivation: passion to work for reasons beyond money and status.
  • Social Awareness: uses empathy and intuition.
  • Relationship Management: ability to communicate clearly and convincingly.

Management and Leadership

• Management: coping with complexity.
• Leadership: coping with change.

Leadership as Cultural Bound

• Leadership styles are affected by national culture.
• Leaders cannot choose their style at will; they must adapt to cultural aspects of a country and are bounded by the practices, values, and traditions of their followers.

Empowerment

• Defined as a process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy among organizational members through the identification of conditions that foster powerlessness and their removal.
• Stages in the Empowerment Process:
  1. Remove conditions/hindrances for empowerment.
  2. Enhance conditions for empowerment.
  3. Perception of employees on the empowerment process.
  4. Performance is improved.

Impression Management

• Defined as the process by which individuals attempt to control the impression.
• People who are concerned with impression management are high monitors who are good at reading situations and molding their appearance to fit each situation.
• Techniques:
  • Conformity: agreeing to the opinions of others to gain their approval.
  • Excuses: giving excuses or alibis to minimize the severity of the alternative not chosen.
  • Apologies: admitting accountability for a mistake and immediate giving an apology.
  • Self-promotion: downplaying weaknesses, emphasizing strengths, and highlighting one's best qualities by comparing achievements with someone else's.
  • Flattery: giving compliments to others in an attempt to be more likable and pleasing.
  • Association: enhancing or protecting one's image and providing information that will highlight one's association with someone who has influence.

Approaches to Decision Making

• Inquiry: a very open process that generates multiple alternatives, fosters exchange of ideas, and produces a well-tested solution.
• Advocacy: involves participants who are passionate about their preferred solutions and stand firm in the face of disagreement.

Types of Decision

• Programmed: definite procedure for handling decisions.
• Nonprogrammed: unstructured with no established procedure for handling decisions.

Group vs. Individual Decision Making

• Groups can better establish goals and objectives than individuals.
• Individuals are required in identifying alternative courses of action as compared to groups.
• Groups can evaluate alternative solutions better because of a collective judgment.
• Groups can take more risks than individuals in the selection of the best alternative.

Creativity Tools

• Brainstorming: generates ideas.
• Delphi Technique: gathers and compares unknown solutions to a problem through a questionnaire.
• Nominal Group Technique: each participant writes on a sheet of paper, then presents to the group in a round-robin fashion.