The twenty-first century brought many new challenges even in management
field from government agencies, banks, insurance companies, school systems,
universities, online retailers, health-care providers, technology service
providers.
Forces
Shaping Management
In 2001, Ray Kurzweil gave his singularity theory which emphasized that
the evolutioj is exponentially growing and the rate of progress would double
every decade.[1] i.e. the next one hundred years, would bring such changes which
took earlier almost twenty thousand years. Managers need predictability and
stability as well as adaptability and flexibility to respond to
opportunities. The pace of change or this future shock is very important force shaping
management. The primary factor driving change is information
technology which has engulfed us from a smartphone to space programs and
consumer research to entertainment. Many of jobs in works of Frederick Taylor
and the Gilbreths are now done by computers and robots and it si said that
almost 50 percent of current jobs will be done by the computers within twenty
years. Globalization refers to the increasing ease of flow between
countries with economic, political, social, and cultural interactions. it is
easier to conduct business across globe, perform many manufacturing jobs by
subcontracting in low labor-cost countries. And so many leading nations
including US shifted from a manufacturing economy to a service and information
economy. Consider the following comparison:
|
YEAR |
MOST VALUED COMPANY IN THE
U.S. |
MARKET VALUE |
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES |
|
1964 |
American
Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T) |
$267
billion |
759,000 |
|
2015 |
Google |
$370
billion |
55,000 |
Now management has to lead
and control this new knowledge worker and not blue collared worker.
Since the turn of the century, race, gender, ethnicity, and age
differences have merged seamlessly and diversity is the rule now. These
different backgrounds can be an asset and not liability as they bring unique
perceptions, experiences, creativity and innovation that help problem solving.
Now managers have to satisfy not only their customers but also a wider set of
stakeholders, from government agencies to environmental groups to political and
community groups. How such higher and diverse expectations can be met is also a
challenge.
Current
Developments in Management
·
more specific with the formation of
different disciplines. Managers
·
focus on specific aspects of
organizational management: operations management, financial management,
marketing management, human resource management, etc.
·
limiting the number of factors and
issues they must deal with,
·
develop practices that address the
specific issues they face in their discipline.
·
become more general. use a toolbox of
different theories and practices and a need to know what tool to use and how to
use it in different circumstances.
Operations Management is concerned with all aspects of converting
materials and labor into goods and services as efficiently as possible. and to
know that the forces are transforming
organizations and management and are
also transforming all aspects of operations management, from design to
production.
With the initial product design to incorporate features that facilitate
production can have a significant impact on production costs. Design to
Manufacture and Design to Assembly is important today. Using computer-aided
design design plans are directly translated into instructions for
computer-controlled machinery and robotics. Operations managers also manage
the supply chain to find sourcing of high-quality materials at the lowest cost. It
is now an international affair as supplies come from anywhere in the world and
manufacturing can be done anywhere in the world.
Operations managers are also careful about materials inventory to
be used in production or for performing services and also buffer for
contingencies and to prevent delays in production or servicing. To schedule
deliveries and manage with bare minimum inventory using techniques such like
JIT or just-in-time also need long-term, cooperative partnerships with
suppliers and match all this with main function : the manufacturing of products
or the delivery of services. cost, quantities and quality needs to be brought
right from Design to Delivery and service. Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma
practices used to reduce defects or complaints. Marketing and sales finally has
to make sure goods and services are delivered where and when they are needed.
using technology support like integrated ordering systems,
software tools for demand forecasting and effective feedback channels through
the entire system, from ordering materials and supplies to scheduling
production.
Organizations operate as open systems
“The systems approach to management focuses on performance of the whole
production process, including the customers’ process. The process is usually
split by specialties within the company, and each specialist tries to optimize
his contribution. But more efficiency for one function may cause delays or
bottlenecks elsewhere in the process, hurting overall production. The systems
approach analyzes these interactions and makes decisions to improve overall
production.
The system model also shows that companies are open to environmental
influence. Factors such as political instability, economic conditions, consumer
tastes, demographics, legal requirements, and the physical environment all can
affect an organization. Successful organizations must be able to detect,
understand, and respond effectively to changes in the external environment.
Organizations today thrive on the availability and accuracy of
information to make decisions at every level. hence the collection,
preservation, storage, processing, and delivery of information such that
‘information is available to the right people at the right time in a form that
they can apply.’
A recent development in information management is the Big data or
very large amounts of data available today and is to be analyzed for useful
information. Big data comes from social
media, business transactions, government interactions, and education and health
experiences, and is in a variety of formats from structured, numeric data to
unstructured text data, social media, and telephone calls. Data mining from
this data to extract useful information about individual behaviors.
The implicit assumptions that management concepts were universal is
rejected in the contingency view as every situation is considered unique.
“ managers today need to adapt and modify theory and practice to meet
today’s conditions. Understanding the historical concepts in management
provides a foundation for developing new practices and methods.”
1.
Kurzweil, R. (2001, March 7). The
Law of Accelerating Returns. Retrieved August 01, 2017, from http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns ↵
2.
McMillan, Graeme. (2011, August 23).
Man Uses Twitter to Get Free Morton’s Steak Dinner Delivered to Airport.
Retrieved August 01, 2017, from http://techland.time.com/2011/08/23/man-uses-twitter-to-get-free-mortons-steak-dinner-delivered-to-airport/ ↵
The Future of Management
Theory and Practice and How It Applies To
Russia, This blog
post was featured in the Huffington Post on December 19,
2016.
What is the future of
management theory and practice?
How will it impact Russia, if at all?
“Change is accelerating and getting increasingly multi faceted; A change
in political conditions has almost instant repercussion on economic conditions
which in turn impact social conditions and legal regulations which in turn
impact back political and economic conditions …It is like a closed
loop that one finds difficult to predict the outcomes and successfully analyze.”
Faculty of Social
Sciences
Department of Political
Science and Public Administration
Definition of Management
Management is the art, or science, of achieving goals through people. Since managers also supervise, management
can be interpreted to mean literally
“looking over” – i.e., making sure people do what they are supposed to
do. Managers are, therefore, expected
to ensure greater productivity or, using the current jargon, ‘continuous improvement’.
More broadly, management is the process of designing and maintaining an environment in which individuals, working together in groups, efficiently accomplish selected
aims (Koontz and Weihrich 1990, p. 4).
It means What? Some of the meanings are as
follows: (MODERN
MANAGEMENT THEORIES AND PRACTICES By Dr. Yasin Olum, Lecturer, Department of
Political Science and Public Administration, Makerere University. Contact
Address: Makerere University )
1. First people carry out the managerial functions
of planning, organizing, staffing,
leading, and controlling.
2.
Second, management applies to any kind of organization.
3.
Third, management applies to managers at all organizational levels.
Fourth, the aim of
all managers is the same – to create surplus.
Finally, managing is concerned with productivity – this implies effectiveness and efficiency.
4.
Management refers to the development of bureaucracy
5. It derives
its importance from the need for strategic planning,
co-ordination, directing and
controlling of large and complex decision-making process.
6. Management involves
the acquisition of managerial
competence,
7.
It
includes effectiveness in
the following key areas: problem solving, administration, human resource
management, and organizational
leadership.
8. solving problems that keep emerging all the time in the course of an organization struggling to achieve its goals and
objectives.
Management Objectives are ensuring organizational goals and targets
are met – with least cost and minimum
waste, looking after health and welfare, and safety of staff,
protecting the machinery and resources of the organization,
including the human resources.
Managerial functions,
namely; planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. We can see these functions one by one : wherin Planning involves
selecting missions and objectives
and the actions to achieve them, with proper decision-making – i.e., decide the course of action from among alternatives. People
are given a role and it is defined and structured in such a way as to maximize
their contribution in a specific
way to group effort. Organizing,
is establishing a structure of roles for people to accomplish goals assigned to people.
Staffing involves filling the positions
in the organization
structure: this is done through recruiting, selecting, placing, promoting, appraising,
planning and training the manpower. Leading
is the influencing of people so that they will contribute to organization and
group goals; and it involves motivation,
leadership styles and
effective communication. Controlling,
is about measuring and correcting of activities of subordinates to ensure conformance to plans.
Coordination is about achieving harmony among individual efforts toward
the accomplishment of group goals. Apart from these functions managers
also need to be sensitive to and responsive to
external environment – which includes economic, political, technological, social and ethical factors.
Goals of All Managers
is to be productive, effective and efficient.
It is worth distinguishing
management theory from management
techniques. Techniques normally reflect theory and are a means of helping managers undertake activities most effectively with
some road map, to enable them some scaffolding,
The role of theory is to provide
a means of separating significant from insignificant, to thereby
classify significant and pertinent management knowledge. Theories provide a stable focus for understanding
what we experience, a theory provides criteria for what is relevant, theories enable us to communicate or
articulate things more efficiently and thus
move into more and
more complex relationships with other people. However, theories are boundaries and they
by their practice challenge us to cross them and keep exploring further.
Scientific Management School
Frederick Taylor started the era of modern management to overcome, “awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed
movements of men”
as
national loss. Taylor consistently sought
to overthrow management “by rule of
thumb” and replace it with actual timed observations leading to “the one best”
practice : the concept
of breaking a complex
task down into a number of subtasks, and optimizing
the
performance of the subtasks;
However
many critics both historical and contemporary, have pointed
out that Taylor’s theories
tend to “dehumanize” the
workers.
The theory was strongly influenced by social/historical period (1856-1917) during the Industrial Revolution and was positive in applying a
science of work in the midst of chaotic and autocratic exploitative atmosphere prevalent
then. Alongside Taylor’s postulates is Gilbreth’s motion study
which found standard time to do any task and then led to the centrality
of efficiency in organizations.
Classical Organizational
Theory School
Max Weber’s bureaucratic theory and Henri Fayol’s administrative theory. According to Weber “western civilization was shifting from “wertrational” (or value oriented)
thinking, affective action (action derived from emotions), and traditional action
(action derived from past precedent) to
“zweckational” (or technocratic)
thinking.” Civilization was changing to seek technically optimal results at the expense of emotional or humanistic content according to
him. Weber then developed an “ideal” bureaucracy as follows:
fixed and official jurisdictional areas, a firmly
ordered hierarchy of super and subordination, management based on written records, thorough and expert
training, official activity
taking priority over other activities
and that management of a given organization follows
stable, knowable rules. The
bureaucracy was envisioned as a large machine for attaining its goals in the most
efficient manner possible.
However Weber also mentioned that the more bureaucracy “depersonalizes” itself – i.e., exclusion
of love, hatred, purely
personal, irrational and incalculable, feeling
from any decision making: this has both positive as well as negative
repercussiions.
Henri Fayol’s administrative
theory focuses on the personal
duties of management at a much more detailed
level: i.e. the duties are to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to co-ordinate,
and to control. Fayol developed fourteen
principles of administration with these five
primary roles. which
include specialization/division of labor, authority with responsibility, discipline, unity of command, unity of direction,
subordination of individual interest to the general
interest, remuneration of staff, centralization, scalar
chain/line of authority, order, equity, stability of tenure, initiative, and esprit de corps. Fayol emphasized that personal effort and team dynamics
were part of an “ideal” organization.
Behavioral School
Elton Mayowas one of the key persons in the human relations movement that was a result of the Hawthorne
Works Experiment carried out at the Western Electric
Company, in the United States of America in 1927-32and they proved that it is wrong to say that science dictated the highest productivity and there is ‘the one best way’ and that way could be
obtained by controlled experiment.
He proved that work satisfaction and hence performance is basically not economic
– it depends more on working conditions and attitudes on communications, positive management response
and encouragement, working environment. It proved that the expressions of thanks and encouragement as opposed to coercion from managers
and supervisors. Also the
influence of the peer group was found to be decisive.
The major breakthrough was when they
emphasized that society is not just a horde of unorganized individuals (acting) in
a manner calculated to secure his or her
self-preservation or self-interest.
Recent
Developments in
Management Theory
Under this category of theory are the Systems Approach, Situational
or
Contingency theory, Chaos theory,
and Team Building theory.
A system is a collection
of part unified to accomplish an overall goal. If one part of
the system is removed,
the nature of the system is changed
as well. The effect of systems
theory in management is organization are seen more broadly, managers are enabled
to interpret patterns and events in the workplace – i.e.,
The situational or contingency theory asserts that while decision making managers must take into account all aspects of the current situation and act
on those aspects that are key to the situation at hand.
The Chaos theory is advocated by Tom Peters (1942) to recognize that events are rarely controlled and systems naturally go to more
complexity, they become more volatile
and must, therefore, expend more
energy to maintain that complexity. thereby they seek more structure to maintain stability. This trend continues till the system splits, combines with another complex system or falls apart entirely.
The Team
Building approach
or theory
emphasizes on quality circles, best practices,
and continuous improvement. and hinges on teamwork.
It advocates flattening of management pyramid,
and consensus management – i.e., involving maximum
number of people at all levels in decision-making.
Other Management Theories
Edward Deming gave his famous 14 points which alonwith
Juran’s triology and theory revolutionized Japanese management in 1950’s : His
points seem so simple and human and yet so tough to practice. Some of them
were: create constancy of purpose for continual
improvement of products and service; adopt
the
new
philosophy
created in Japan;
cease dependence on mass inspection; build quality
along with price; improve constantly and forever
every process planning, production, and service; institute modern methods
of
training
on-the-job
for
including management; adopt and institute
leadership aimed at helping people to do a better job; drive out
fear, encourage effective
two-way communication; breakdown barriers between departments and staff areas; eliminate exhortations for the workforce – they only create
adversarial
relationships; eliminate quotas and
numerical
targets; remove barriers to pride of workmanship, including annual appraisals and Management by Objectives; encourage education
and self-improvement for
everyone; and define top management’s permanent commitment
to ever- improving quality
and productivity and their obligation
to implement all these principles.
Douglas McGregor
(1906-1964) postulated management ideas as contained in “Theory X” and “Theory
Y”.
“Theory X” gives a negative view of human behavior and management that most people
are basically immature, need direction and control, and are incapable
of taking responsibility. They are viewed as lazy, dislike
work and need a mixture
of financial inducements and threat of loss of their
job to make them work (‘carrot and stick’ mentality).
“Theory Y”, the opposite of “Theory X”, argues that people want to fulfill
themselves by seeking
self-respect,
self-development, and self-fulfillment at work as in life in general. It
assumed that work is as natural as play or rest – the average human
being does not inherently dislike
work, whether work is a source of
pleasure or a punishment (to be avoided) depends on nature of the work and its management,
effort at work need not
depend on threat of punishment – if committed to objectives then self- direction and self-control rather than external
controls, commitment to
objectives is a function
of the rewards associated with their achievement.
Taking clue from Abraham Maslow’s works it also said that Satisfaction of ego and self-actualization needs can be directed towards
the objectives of the organization. The average human being learns, not
only
to
accept
but to seek responsibility. High degrees of imagination, ingenuity and creativity are not restricted to a narrow group but are widely distributed in the population. Finally it said that under the conditions of modern industrial life, the intellectual potentials of the average human being are being only partly utilized.
Management as Practice
For practical purposes,
all managers must develop three sets of skills, namely; conceptual, technical,
and
human (see Fleet and Perterson 1994, p. 25).
Conceptual skills : to develop relationships between factors that other people may not see. Technical
skill : to act professionally.
Professionalism demands that the manager
performs his or her duties
within
established procedures, rules
and regulations. Human skills means the needs and feelings must be positively harnessed for the good of the organization; motivation of the employees,
therefore, becomes a critical
factor in increasing productivity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Homans G.
C. (1958) The Human Group
(New York: Harcout, Brace and World).
Fleet David D. Van and Peterson Tim O. (1994)
Contemporary Management
(Houghton
Mifflin Company), Third Edition.
Koontz
Harold (1961) “The Management Theory Jungle”, in Journal of the
Academy of Management, December.
Koontz
Harold
(1962)
“Making
Sense
of
Management
Theory”,
in
Harvard
Business Review, July-August.
Koontz
Harold
(1980)
“The
Management
Theory
Revisited”, in Academy of Management Review, April.
Koontz
Harold
and
Weihrich
Heinz (1990) Essentials of Management,
Fifth
Edition, McGraw-Hill.
Stoner James A. F., Freeman R. Edward, and Gilbert,
Jr.
Daniel
R.
(2003)
Management (New Delhi: Prentice-Hall
of India), Sixth Edition.
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