Management Ch. 1 Terms

First-line managers

At the base of the managerial hierarchy are _______, often called supervisors. They are responsible for daily supervision of the nonmanagerial employees who perform the specific activities necessary to produce goods and services.

The three roles managers take on described by Henry Mintzberg are?

Decisional, interpersonal, informational

Roles and activities in the Informational type:

Monitor: Evaluate the performance of managers in different tasks and take corrective action to improve their performance; watch for changes occurring in the external and internal environments that may affect the organization in the future. Disseminator: Inform employees about changes taking place in the external and internal environments that will affect them and the organization; communicate to employees the organization's vision and purpose. Spokesperson: Launch a national media campaign to promote new goods and services; give a speech to inform the local community about the organization's future intentions.

Conceptual, human, and technical

Research has shown that education and experience help managers acquire and develop three types of skills:

Middle managers

Supervising the first-line managers are ______, responsible for finding the best way to organize human and other resources to achieve organizational goals. To increase efficiency, middle managers find ways to help first-line managers and nonmanagerial employees better use resources to reduce manufacturing costs or improve customer service. To increase effectiveness, middle managers evaluate whether the organization's goals are appropriate and suggest to top managers how goals should be changed. A major part of the _______ 's job is developing and fine-tuning skills and know-how, such as manufacturing or marketing expertise, that allow the organization to be efficient and effective.

Chief executive office (CEO)

The _________ is a company's most senior and important manager, the one all other top managers report to.

superior efficiency, quality, innovation, and responsiveness to customers

The four building blocks of competitive advantage are:

organizational structure

The outcome of organizing is the creation of an ______, a formal system of task and reporting relationships that coordinates and motivates members so they work together to achieve organizational goals. Organizational structure determines how an organization's resources can be best used to create goods and services.

Global organizations

The rise of _______, organizations that operate and compete in more than one country, has pressured many organizations to identify better ways to use their resources and improve their performance.

Core competency

Today the term ______ is often used to refer to the specific set of departmental skills, knowledge, and experience that allows one organization to outperform its competitors. In other words, departmental skills that create a _________ give an organization a competitive advantage.

Who spends more time planning, organizing, leading, and controlling?

Top managers devote most of their time to planning and organizing, the tasks so crucial to determining an organization's long-term performance. The lower managers' positions in the hierarchy, the more time they spend leading and controlling first-line managers or nonmanagerial employees.

Technical skills

_______ are the job-specific skills required to perform a particular type of work or occupation at a high level.

Effectiveness

_______ is a measure of the appropriateness of the goals that managers have selected for the organization to pursue and the degree to which the organization achieves those goals. Organizations are effective when managers choose appropriate goals and then achieve them.

Organizing

_______ is structuring working relationships so organizational members interact and cooperate to achieve organizational goals. Organizing people into departments according to the kinds of job-specific tasks they perform lays out the lines of authority and responsibility between different individuals and groups. Managers must decide how best to organize resources, particularly human resources.

Organizations

________ are collections of people who work together and coordinate their actions to achieve a wide variety of goals or desired future outcomes.

Human skills

________ include the general ability to understand, alter, lead, and control the behavior of other individuals and groups. The ability to communicate, to coordinate, and to motivate people, and to mold individuals into a cohesive team distinguishes effective from ineffective managers.

Organizational performance

________ is a measure of how efficiently and effectively managers use available resources to satisfy customers and achieve organizational goals. Organizational performance increases in direct proportion to increases in efficiency and effectiveness.

Entrepreneurship

________ is noticing an opportunity to satisfy a customer need and then deciding how to find and use resources to make a product or service that satisfies that need.

Conceptual skills

_________ are demonstrated in the general ability to analyze and diagnose a situation and to distinguish between cause and effect. Top managers require this skill because their primary responsibilities are planning and organizing

Entrepreneurs

_________ are individuals who notice opportunities and decide how to mobilize the resources necessary to start a new business venture. They make all of the planning, organizing, leading, and controlling decisions necessary to start new business ventures. However, they may not be successful actually running the day-to-day operations of their new business and hire managers to oversee the business and supervise employees.

Competitive advantage

_________ is the ability of one organization to outperform other organizations because it produces desired goods or services more efficiently and effectively than its competitors.

Management

_________ is the planning, organizing, leading, and controlling of human and other resources to achieve organizational goals efficiently and effectively. An organization's resources include assets such as people and their skills, know-how, and experience; machinery; raw materials; computers and information technology; and patents, financial capital, and loyal customers and employees.

The four essential managerial tasks

planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.

Department

A ______ is a group of managers and employees who work together because they possess similar skills and experience or use the same kind of knowledge, tools, or techniques to perform their jobs. Within each ________ are all three levels of management.

Strategy

A ________ is a cluster of decisions about what organizational goals to pursue, what actions to take, and how to use resources to achieve these goals.

Top management team

A central concern of the CEO is the creation of a smoothly functioning _________, a group composed of the CEO, the COO, and the vice presidents most responsible for achieving organizational goals.

Vision

An organization's _____ is a short, succinct, and inspiring statement of what the organization intends to become and the goals it is seeking to achieve—its desired future state.

Roles and activities in the Decisional type:

Entrepreneur: Commit organizational resources to develop innovative goods and services; decide to expand internationally to obtain new customers. Disturbance handler: Move quickly to take action to deal with unexpected problems facing the organization from the external environment, such as dealing with a crisis like an oil spill, or from the internal environment, such as producing faulty goods or services. Resource allocator: Allocate organizational resources among different tasks and departments of the organization; set budgets and salaries of middle and first-level managers. Negotiator: Work with suppliers, distributors, and labor unions to reach agreements about the quality and price of input, technical, and human resources; work with other organizations to establish agreements to pool resources to work on joint projects.

Controlling

In _______, the task of managers is to evaluate how well an organization has achieved its goals and to take any corrective actions needed to maintain or improve performance. The outcome of this process is the ability to measure performance accurately and regulate organizational efficiency and effectiveness. To exercise this process, managers must decide which goals to measure—perhaps goals pertaining to productivity, quality, or responsiveness to customers—and then they must design control systems that will provide the information necessary to assess performance—that is, determine to what degree the goals have been met. This task also helps managers evaluate how well they themselves are performing the other three tasks of management and take corrective action.

Intrapreneurs

Many employees, including managers, scientists, and researchers, who are employed by companies engage in entrepreneurial activity, and they are an important source of organizational creativity and success. They are involved in innovation, developing new and improved products and ways to make them. Such employees identify opportunities for product creation or product improvements and may be responsible for managing the product development process. These individuals are known as _______.

Conceptual and human

One of the biggest problems that people who start small businesses confront, for example, is their lack of appropriate ______ and _______skills.

Planning

________ task, managers identify and select appropriate organizational goals and courses of action; they develop strategies for how to achieve high performance. The three steps involved in planning are (1) deciding which goals the organization will pursue, (2) deciding what strategies to adopt to attain those goals, and (3) deciding how to allocate organizational resources to pursue the strategies that attain those goals. How well managers plan and develop strategies determines how effective and efficient the organization is—its performance level.

Efficiency

_________ is a measure of how productively resources are used to achieve a goal. Organizations are efficient when managers minimize the amount of input resources (such as labor, raw materials, and component parts) or the amount of time needed to produce a given output of goods or services.

Roles and activities in the Interpersonal type:

Figurehead: Outline future organizational goals to employees at company meetings; state the organization's ethical guidelines and principles of behavior employees are to follow in their dealings with customers and suppliers. Leader: Provide an example for employees to follow; give them direct commands and orders; make decisions about the use of human and technical resources; mobilize employee support for specific organizational goals. Liaison: Coordinate the work of managers in different departments; establish alliances between different organizations to share resources to produce new goods and services.

Leading

In ________, managers articulate a clear organizational vision for the organization's members to accomplish, and they energize and enable employees so everyone understands the part he or she plays in achieving organizational goals. Leadership involves managers using their power, personality, influence, persuasion, and communication skills to coordinate people and groups so their activities and efforts are in harmony. Leadership revolves around encouraging all employees to perform at a high level to help the organization achieve its vision and goals. Another outcome of leadership is a highly motivated and committed workforce.

Top managers

In contrast to middle managers, _______ are responsible for the performance of all departments. They have cross-departmental responsibility. They establish organizational goals, such as which goods and services the company should produce; they decide how the different departments should interact; and they monitor how well middle managers in each department use resources to achieve goals. They are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of an organization, and their performance is continually scrutinized by people inside and outside the organization, such as other employees and investors

Innovation

__________, the process of creating new or improved goods and services that customers want or developing better ways to produce or provide goods and services, poses a special challenge. Typically ________ takes place in small groups or teams; management decentralizes control of work activities to team members and creates an organizational culture that rewards risk taking.

Turnaround management

___________ is the creation of a new vision for a struggling company using a new approach to planning and organizing to make better use of a company's resources and allow it to survive and eventually prosper