Manager

An individual who achieves goals through other people.

Organization
A consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two or more people, that functions on a relatively continuous basis
to achieve a common goal or set of goals.

Planning
A process that includes defining goals, establishing strategy, and developing plans to coordinate activities.
Organizing
Determining what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be grouped, who reports to whom, and
where decisions are to be made.
Leading
A function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting the most effective communication channels,
and resolving conflicts.
Controlling
Monitoring activities to ensure that they are being accomplished as planned and correcting any significant deviation.

MINZTBERG’S MANAGEMENT ROLES

Interpersonal Roles
All managers are required to perform duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature.

Interpersonal
Figurehead
-Symbolic head; required to perform a number of routine duties of a legal or social nature.
Leader
-Responsible for the motivation and direction of employees.
Liaison
-Maintains a network of outside contacts who provide favors and information.

Informational
Monitor
-Receives a wide variety of information; serves as nerve center of internal and external information of the organization
Disseminator
-Transmits information received from outsiders or from other employees to members of the organization
Spokesperson
-Transmits information to outsiders on organization’s plans, policies, actions, and results; serves as expert on
organization’s industry

Decisional
Entrepreneur
-Searches organization and its environment for opportunities and initiates projects to bring about change
Disturbance handler
-Responsible for corrective action when organization faces important, unexpected disturbances
Resource allocator
-Makes or approves significant organizational decisions
Negotiator
-Responsible for representing the organization at major negotiations

MANAGEMENT SKILLS
Technical Skills
-Technical skills encompass the ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise. All jobs require some specialized
expertise, and many people develop their technical skills on the job.
Human Skills
-The ability to understand, communicate with, motivate, and support other people, both individually and in groups,
defines human skills. Many people may be technically proficient but poor listeners, unable to understand the needs of others, or
weak at managing conflicts. Managers must have good human skills because they need to get things done through other people.
Conceptual Skills
-Managers must have the mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations. These tasks require conceptual
skills. Decision making, for instance, requires managers to identify problems, develop alternative solutions to correct those
problems, evaluate those alternative solutions, and select the best one. After they have selected a course of action, managers
must be able to organize a plan of action and then execute it. The abilities to integrate new ideas with existing processes and to
innovate on the job are also crucial conceptual skills for today’s managers.

Organizational Behavior (OB)

-A field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations for the
purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness.
Disciplines That Contribute to OB

Psychology
-Psychology seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other animals. Contributors
to the knowledge of OB are learning theorists; personality theorists; counseling psychologists; and, most important, industrial and
organizational psychologists.

Social Psychology
-Social psychology, generally considered a branch of psychology, blends concepts from both psychology and sociology
to focus on people’s influence on one another. One major study area is change—how to implement it and how to reduce barriers
to its acceptance. Social psychologists also contribute to measuring, understanding, and changing attitudes; identifying
communication patterns; and building trust. They have made important contributions to our study of group behavior, power, and
conflict.

Sociology
-While psychology focuses on the individual, sociology studies people in relation to their social environment or culture.
Sociologists have contributed to OB through their study of group behaviors in organizations, particularly formal and complex
organizations. Perhaps most important, sociologists have studied organizational culture, formal organization theory and structure,
organizational technology, communications, power, and conflict.

Anthropology
-Anthropology is the study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities. Anthropologists’ work on cultures
and environments has helped us understand differences in fundamental values, attitudes, and behavior among people in different
countries and within different organizations. Much of our current understanding of organizational culture, organizational climate,
and differences among national cultures is a result of the work of anthropologists or those using their methods.
Challenges and Opportunities
Economic Pressures
-Managing employees well when times are tough is just as hard as when times are good, if not harder. In good times,
understanding how to reward, satisfy, and retain employees is at a premium. In bad times, issues like stress, decision making, and
coping come to the forefront.

Continuing Globalization
• Increased Foreign Assignments
• Working with People from Different Cultures
• Overseeing Movement of Jobs to Countries with Low-Cost Labor
• Adapting to Differing Cultural and Regulatory Norms

Workforce Demographics
-The workforce has always adapted to variations in economies, longevity and birth rates, socioeconomic conditions, and
other changes that have widespread impact.

Workforce Diversity
One of the most important challenges for organizations is workforce diversity, a trend by which organizations are becoming more
heterogeneous in terms of employees’ gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics.

Customer Service
-Service employees include technical support representatives, fast-food workers, salesclerks, nurses, automobile repair
technicians, consultants, financial planners, and flight attendants. The shared characteristic of their jobs is substantial interaction
with an organization’s customers. OB can help managers increase the success of these customer interactions by showing how
employee attitudes and behavior influence customer satisfaction.

Networked Organizations
-Networked organizations allow people to communicate and work together even though they may be thousands of miles
apart. Independent contractors can telecommute via computer and change employers as the demand for their services changes.
Software programmers, graphic designers, systems analysts, technical writers, photo researchers, book and media editors, and
medical transcribers are just a few examples of people who can work from home or other nonoffice locations.

Employee Well-Being at Work

-The typical employee in the 1960s and 1970s showed up at a specified workplace Monday through Friday and worked
for clearly defined 8- or 9-hour chunks of time. That’s no longer true for a large segment of today’s workforce because the definition
of the workplace has expanded to include anywhere a laptop or smartphone can go. Even if employees work flexible hours at
home or from half a continent away, managers still need to consider their well-being at work.
Positive Work Environment
-A real growth area in OB research is positive organizational scholarship (also called positive organizational behavior),
which studies how organizations develop human strengths, foster vitality and resilience, and unlock potential. Researchers in this
area say too much of OB research and management practice has been targeted toward identifying what’s wrong with organizations
and their employees. In response, they try to study what’s good about them.

Ethical Behavior
-Organization faces ethical dilemmas and ethical choices, in which they are required to identify right and wrong conduct.

Coming Attractions: Developing an OB Model

Inputs
-Variables like personality, group structure, and organizational culture that lead to processes.

Processes
-Actions that individuals, groups, and organizations engage in as a result of inputs and that lead to certain outcomes.
Outcomes
-Key factors that are affected by other variables.

Attitudes and Stress

-Employee attitudes are the evaluations that employees make, ranging from positive to negative, about objects, people,
or events. For example, the statement “I really think my job is great” is a positive job attitude, and “My job is boring and tedious” is
a negative job attitude. Stress is a psychological process that occurs in response to environmental pressures.

Task Performance
-The combination of effectiveness and efficiency at doing your core job tasks reflects your level of task performance. If
we think about the job of a factory worker, task performance could be measured by the number and quality of products produced
in an hour. The task performance of a teacher would be the level of education that students obtain. The task performance of
consultants might be the timeliness and quality of the presentations they offer to the client. All these types of performance relate
to the core duties and responsibilities of a job and are often directly related to the functions listed on a formal job description.

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB)

-The discretionary behavior that is not part of an employee’s formal job requirements, and that contributes to the
psychological and social environment of the workplace, is called organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), or simply citizenship
behavior.

Withdrawal Behavior
The set of actions employees take to separate themselves from the organization.

Group Cohesion
 -Is the extent to which members of a group support and validate one another at work. In other words, a cohesive group
is one that sticks together. When employees trust one another, seek common goals, and work together to achieve these common
ends, the group is cohesive; when employees are divided among themselves in terms of what they want to achieve and have little
loyalty to one another, the group is not cohesive.

Group functioning
-Refers to the quantity and quality of a group’s work output. Similar to how the performance of a sports team is more
than the sum of individual players’ performance, group functioning in work organizations is more than the sum of individual task
performances.

Productivity The combination of the effectiveness and efficiency of an organization. Effectiveness the degree to which an
organization meets the needs of its clientele or customers while efficiency is the degree to which an organization can achieve its
ends at a low cost.

Employability Skills
Critical thinking involves purposeful and goal-directed thinking used to define and solve problems and to make decisions or form
judgments related to a particular situation or set of circumstances. It involves cognitive, metacognitive, and dispositional
components that may be applied differently in specific contexts.

Communication is defined as effective use of oral, written, and nonverbal communication skills for multiple purposes (e.g., to
inform, instruct, motivate, persuade, and share ideas); effective listening; using technology to communicate; and being able to
evaluate the effectiveness of communication efforts—all within diverse contexts.

Collaboration is a skill in which individuals can actively work together on a task, constructing meaning and knowledge as a group
through dialogue and negotiation that results in a final product reflective of their joint, interdependent actions.
Knowledge application and analysis is defined as the ability to learn a concept and then apply that knowledge appropriately in
another setting to achieve a higher level of understanding.

Social responsibility includes skills related to both business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Business ethics includes
sets of guiding principles that influence the way individuals and organizations behave within the society that they operate. Corporate
social responsibility is a form of ethical behavior that requires that organizations understand, identify, and eliminate unethical
economic, environmental, and social behaviors.