Is an input measure of the resource costs associated with goal accomplishment?

Simply put, management is organizing, controlling, planning, monitoring, and leading the activities that operate an organization, department, or small office. We all manage, some of us in very large companies, others in hierarchies of complex networks, still others right in the family home. Jim Collins (2001), author of Good to Great, states there are five hierarchies.

These leaders manage change. Mergers and acquisitions are strategic to transforming 21st century companies to industry leaders, and careful attention is directed to creating an alignment with the mission of the organization and the workforce. Charles O’Reilly, author of Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People, and Jeffrey Pfeffer, best known for writingPower: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't, both say they attibute the success of their orgainizations to getting extraordinay results from the people who work for them. The collective brain power or intellectual talent of workforces is largely ignored in corporate America as most still practice a top-down managemnt approach. O’Reilly and Pfeffer recognized the value of intellectual capital.

Intellectual Capital = Competency x Commitment.

Video Summary: In Good Company

Students and faculty can learn a lot by studying the management practices of the companies that have been recognized by Fortune Magazine's list of "100 best companies to work for." Our first video examines two companies that have held that honor for several years: W.L. Gore, maker of GoreTex fabric among other things, and NetApp, a computer data storage company. Interviews with the CEOs and employees provide much opportunity for discussion and application of the concepts in Chapter 1.

http://www.wiley.com/college/schermerhorn/0470530510/videos/index_ch01.html

Transcript

Lecture: Learning From Others: Page 2 of the text discusses how college graduates need to take future employment into their own hands, whether it be using an online job service, such as Monster.com, or starting their own business.

Learning About Yourself: Page 3 discusses self-awareness and how it affects one’s ability to learn, grow, and develop. Utilizing the Johari Window, get students to reflect on how each quadrant can help or hinder self-awareness.

Learning From Others: Page 28 of the text describes the different employment philosophies of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Tony Hsieh of Zappos. Zuckerberg wants employees who join the company to learn and then leave, while Hsieh wants employees who plan to stay long term.

Learning About Yourself: Page 29 explains that every person has a particular way of learning, be it by watching, doing, experimenting, or thinking. Students are asked to think about the implications of their learning style and how it affects their relationships with others.

Today’s managers can draw on management theory to guide their actions; they can learn from the insights of people throughout history who have thought about effective management. David Wren’s The Evolution of Management Thought notes that early management thinking began with the ancient Sumerian civilization in 5000 BCE and evolved through many subsequent civilizations. During the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith established the principles of specialization and division of labor. Henry Ford and others further popularized these principles through their emphasis on mass production.

Today’s working environment has changed dramatically due to the complex world in which we live. No longer can one be complacent and unskilled, or even expect job security. Innovation, cost competitiveness, and technology are the driving forces today. Career advancement today demands initiative and self-awareness, as well as continuous learning.

Talent

• According to management scholars Charles O’Reilly and Jeffrey Pfeffer, high performing companies achieve success by being better than competitors by getting extraordinary results from the people working for them.
• People––what they know, what they learn, and what they do with it––are the ultimate foundations of organizational performance.
• People represent intellectual capital, which is the collective brainpower or shared knowledge of a workforce that is used to create value.
• The intellectual capital equation of intellectual capital = competency x commitment defines today’s workplace. Workers’ talents and capabilities represent competency, while willingness to work hard defines commitment.
• A knowledge worker is someone whose mind is a critical asset to employers and who adds to the intellectual capital of the organization.

Technology

• The world is driven by technology, so one must develop a high tech IQ, that is, the ability to use technology and commitment to stay informed on the latest technological developments.
• We hold meetings in virtual space, eliminating physical distances. Work is done from home or anywhere we might be. We meet as virtual teams, sharing files and information, all without ever meeting face-to-face.

Globalization

• The national boundaries of world business have largely disappeared due in part to globalization, which is the worldwide interdependence of resource flows, product markets, and business competition that characterizes the new economy. As such, countries and peoples are now interconnected through news, travel, lifestyles, and employment, along with financial and business dealings.

Ethics

Ethics set moral standards of what is “good” and “right” in the conduct of a person or group.

Every week, we learn about the unethical behavior of business executives who cause great harm to those who entrust them to do the right thing. Much of this is due to the lack of active oversight of management decisions and company actions by boards of directors. As such, it is imperative that students realize integrity is the key to leadership and the responsibility for setting the ethical tone of the organization comes from the top.

REAL ETHICS: Page 7 of the text describes a scenario where a young executive at a competitor of Coca-Cola was offered the secret formula but has to decide what to do. Have some students play the part of the young executive making the decision, and then discuss the behavior in terms of being ethical or not.

Diversity

Workforce diversity describes the composition of the workforce in terms of differences among members. Today’s increasingly diverse and multicultural workforce should be an asset that, if tapped, creates opportunities for performance gains.

Unfortunately, positive diversity messages do not always reflect work realities due to prejudice, discrimination, and the glass ceiling effect.

• Prejudice is the display of negative, irrational attitudes toward members of diverse populations.
• Discrimination actively denies minority members the full benefits of organizational membership.
• The glass ceiling effect is an invisible barrier or “ceiling” that prevents women and minorities from rising above a certain level of organizational responsibility.

Careers

College students who are looking for their first full-time job in a tight economy will find the task challenging. To improve one’s chances, however, internships are often the pathway to success.

British scholar Charles Handy uses the analogy of the shamrock organization to describe the career implications for employees in today’s dynamic environment. Each leaf of the shamrock has a different career implication. Workers must be prepared to prosper in any of the shamrock’s three leaves.

1. The first leaf is a core group of full-time employees who follow standard career paths. This group is shrinking.
2. The second leaf consists of contract or freelance workers, who provide specialized skills and talents on a contract basis and then change employers when projects are completed. This group is replacing a part of those in the first leaf.
3. The third leaf contains part-time workers who are hired only as needed and for only the number of hours needed. Even though these workers replace some in the first leaf, they are also the first to lose their jobs during economic downturns.

Should current trends continue, as a member of the free-agent economy, job changing and flexible contracts will become a staple of everyday life.

MANAGEMENT SMARTS 1.1: Page 9 of the text describes critical skills for the new workplace.:

• Mastery: You need be good at something; you need to be able to contribute something of value to your employer.
• Networking: You need to know people; links with peers and others within and outside the organization are essential to get things done.
• Entrepreneurship: You must act as if you are running your own business, spotting ideas and opportunities and acting to embrace them.
• Love of technology: You have to embrace technology; you must be willing and able to fully utilize what becomes newly available.
• Marketing: You need to be able to communicate your successes and progress, both yours personally and those of your work team.
• Passion for renewal: You need to be continuously learning and changing, always updating yourself to best meet future demands.

What Are Organizations Like in the New Workplace?

An organization is a collection of people working together to achieve a common purpose.

The broad purpose of any organization is to provide quality products and services to customers in a socially responsible way, while ensuring customer satisfaction.

Orrganizations as Systems

Organizations are open systems that interact with their environments in the continual process of transforming resource inputs into product outputs in the form of finished goods and/or services.

Figure 1.1 on page 10 of the text illustrates organizations as open systems.

The external environment is a critical element of the open systems view of organizations because it is both a supplier of resources and the source of customers, and has a significant impact on the organization’s operations and outcomes. Feedback from the environment tells an organization how well it is doing in meeting the needs of customers.

Organizational Performance

Using resources well and serving customers is a process of value creation through organizational performance. When operations add value to the original cost of resource inputs, then

• a business organization can earn a profit—that is, sell a product for more than the cost of making it; and
• a nonprofit organization can add wealth to society—that is, provide a public service that is worth more than its cost (e.g., fire protection in a community).

A common way to describe how well an organization is performing overall is productivity, which is a summary measure of the quantity and quality of work performance with resource utilization taken into account.

Performance effectiveness is an output measure of task or goal accomplishment.

Performance efficiency is an input measure of the resource costs associated with goal accomplishment.

Changing Nature of Organizations

Among recent trends in changes in organizations, the following organizational transitions are especially relevant to your study of management.

• Renewed belief in human capital
• Demise of “command-and-control”
• Emphasis on teamwork
• Pre-eminence of technology
• Importance of networking
• New workforce expectations
• Valuing sustainability

What Is a Manager?

A manager is a person in an organization who directly supports, supervises, and helps activate the work efforts and performance accomplishments of others.

The people who are supported and helped by managers are usually called direct reports, team members, work associates, or subordinates. These people are the essential human resources whose tasks represent the real work of the organization.

Levels of Managers

At the highest levels of business organizations, as shown in Figure 1.3 on page 13 of the text, we find a board of directors whose members are elected by the stockholders to represent their ownership interests.

Below the board level, top managers are responsible for the performance of an organization as a whole or for one of its larger parts.

1. Common job titles for top managers are chief executive officer (CEO), president, and vice president.
2. Top managers scan the environment, create and communicate long-term vision, and ensure that strategies and performance objectives are consistent with the organization’s purpose and mission.

Reporting to top managers are middle managers, who are in charge of relatively large departments or divisions consisting of several smaller work units.

1. Common job titles for middle managers are clinic directors in hospitals; deans in universities; and division managers, plant managers, and regional sales managers in businesses.
2. Middle managers work with top managers and coordinate with peers to develop and implement action plans to accomplish organizational objectives.

The first job in management is typically a team leader or supervisor, who is in charge of a small work group composed of nonmanagerial workers. Though job titles for these managerial positions vary greatly, some of the more common ones are department head, group leader, and unit manager.

The ultimate “bottom line” in every manager’s job is to help an organization achieve high performance by best utilizing its human and material resources.

Functions of Management

Figure 1.5 on page 16 of the text illustrates the four functions of management.

The management process of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling is the use of resources to accomplish performance goals.

• Planning is the process of setting objectives and determining what should be done to accomplish them.
• Organizing is the process of assigning tasks, allocating resources, and coordinating work activities.
• Leading is the process of arousing enthusiasm and inspiring efforts to achieve goals.
• Controlling is the process of measuring performance and taking action to ensure desired results.

Managerial Activities and Roles

Figure 1.6 on page 19 of the text lists Henry Mintzberg’s 10 different managerial roles. These managerial roles are organized as follows.

• Interpersonal roles (i.e., figurehead, leader, and liaison) involve interactions with people inside and outside the work unit.
• Informational roles (i.e., monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson) involve giving, receiving, and analyzing information.
• Decisional roles (i.e., entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator) involve using information to make decisions in order to solve problems or address opportunities.

There is no doubt that managerial work is a busy, demanding, and stressful type of work. A summary of research on the nature of managerial work finds the following about managerial work:

• Managers work long hours.
• Managers work at an intense pace.
• Managers work at fragmented and varied tasks.
• Managers work with many communication media.
• Managers accomplish their work largely through interpersonal relationships.

How Do You Learn Managerial Skills and Competencies?

Workers everywhere are expected to become involved, participate fully, demonstrate creativity, and find self-fulfillment in their work. These expectations place a premium on lifelong learning, which is the process of continuously learning from our daily experiences and opportunities.

Essential Managerial Skills

A skill is the ability to translate knowledge into action that results in desired performance.

A technical skill is the ability to use expertise to perform a task with proficiency.

A human skill is the ability to work well in cooperation with other people.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage ourselves and our relationships effectively.

A conceptual skill is the ability to think analytically and solve complex problems. It is based on cognitive intelligence—a competency to think systematically, identify cause and effect links, and recognize patterns in events and data.

What is an input measure of resource costs associated with goal accomplishment?

What is an output measure of task or goal accomplishment called?

What is an input measure of a task or goal?

Which of these measures the quantity and quality of outputs relative to the cost of inputs?