Management Principles
Chapter 1 MANAGING AND PERFORMING
PowerPoint Image Slideshow
Dr. Al Taccone
Learning Outcomes
After studying this chapter, you should be able to answer
these questions:
1. What do managers do to help organizations achieve top
performance?
2. What are the roles that managers play in organizations?
3. What are the characteristics that effective managers
display?
The Four Functions of Management
Managers “spend most of their
time interacting with others—
both inside and outside the
organization”.
View this brief video and note
how the activities of managers
for every size and industry
appear to be divided into four
main categories.
1. Are most of these four all
related to the inside of an
organization or company, the
outside, or perhaps both?
Exhibit 1.4 The Roles Managers Play
(Attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC-BY 4.0 license)
Mintzberg's Managerial Roles
Section 1.2 discusses something that
is called a “role”. The outcome of
Mintzberg’s study of managers and
their jobs mentioned in the text was
to define three broad approaches or
kinds of tasks in which a manager
would typically be involved as part
of their jobs: Interpersonal,
Informational and Decisional, which
Mintzberg termed “roles.
After reviewing this Section, and
watching the video, do you agree
with the way the video summarized
each of these roles?
Mintzberg's Managerial Roles
1. What about the specific layers of managerial activities introduced in the video
for each of these three, and described in detail in Exhibit 1.4, would it be
reasonable for one person to exemplify all of these many secondary roles?
2. Would it be more likely that an individual could be skilled at one of
Mintzberg’s three broad categories, but highly unlikely that one person could
even be an expert in some many areas?
3. In smaller organizations that lack the financial and human resources to bring in
specialists in each of these roles poses challenges; wouldn’t they of necessity
need to compromise and thus settle for a staff that lacks some of these? What
could a smaller company do, if anything, to overcome this staffing skill
obstacle?
Managerial Skills: Elizabeth Lyle
Review the material in chapter 1
Section 1.3 which details both the
skills and responsibilities of
managers need to be effective, and
then view this TED Talk video
presentation from leadership expert
Elizabeth Lyle.
Section 1.3 describes what
managers do as outlined using nine
major types of activities under the
heading Managerial
Responsibilities.
Managerial Skills Elizabeth Lyle
1. What pitfalls does Lyle explain in the video which could apply to the nine
managers’ responsibilities categories outlined in the chapter (pp. 13-14)?
2. Lyle speaks about failing to empower the people reporting to a leader due to a
lack of trust. For which of the nine categories of managerial responsibility
would this bad habit be a definite barrier?
3. Lyle also stresses that building good management practices with middle
managers is key to these folks developing into great leaders someday when
they move up into positions of more substantial leadership. Do you agree?
4. Why are bad habits so difficult to break? What do you think about the
quotation Elizabeth Lyle attributes in this video to Warren Buffet: “The chains
of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken”?
Apollo 13
Events like the financial crisis in 2008 and the
COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 require
managers to react to unexpected events. For
instance during the pandemic, many
restaurants had to reconfigure their
operations to cater to take out and delivery
rather than a dine-in experience for their
customers while retailers like Best Buy
focused on their website sales and pick up at
their stores.
This scene from Apollo 13 depicts a NASA
mission to the moon that almost had a mid-
mission disaster. The ground control team and
the astronauts collaborated on innovative
decision making and problem solving in their
plans to save the crew and return them safely.
The first scene depicts the team leader
galvanizing the team and stating that "failure is
not an option" that focuses the team on the
problem(s) at hand.
Apollo 13
In the second scene the team has to
determine how to create an air
filter to reduce the amount of CO2
in the space capsule. After the
ground team builds a prototype of
the filter on the ground, the crew
is able to replicate it in flight.
Apollo 13
1. What are the unique problems that face the ground crew and flight
crew?
2. Describe the managerial traits and roles that the team leader displays in
these scenes.
Exhibit 1.5 Levels in the Management Hierarchy
(Attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC-BY 4.0 license)
Exhibit 1.6 Difference in Skills Required for Successful Management
According to Level in the Hierarchy
(Attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC-BY 4.0 license)