Getting started a bit late. Ten minutes or so. Several people in the class are concerned because the professor never emailed his powerpoint slides to us, as he indicated he would. I don’t particularly care; I never actually use those slides for anything when the professors do make them available. Some folks find them handy, though.Some recapping of last week’s material.
Discussion of what management should be doing at various levels.
- Top, or corporate level, managers should be setting goals and making plans for 4 years out to forever.
- Middle, or business level, managers should be planning for 11 months to 4 years.
- Low, or functional level, managers should be planning and controlling from the present to 11 months.
Not sure I like that breakdown. It pushes all the time frames out very far. At Video Insight, there was no manager who could pay attention to things beyond four years out exclusively. Everyone had to look at the present as well as the future. For that matter, what would be happening five or ten or fifteen years out was so unpredictable that any plans for that time-frame were almost nonsense. That may be more of a function of the size of the business than anything else, however.
New stuff:
Fundamental Assumptions of OB.
- OB recognizes that organizations are dynamic. Businesses are open systems which get input from the environment and transform it into output which is returned to that environment.
- OB assumes that there is no one perfect or best approach. Organizational behavior is affected by a large number of interacting factors. How a person or organization behaves is contingent upon many variables acting at the same time.
A working business system will have five steps forming a cycle.
- Input
- Transformation
- Output
- Control Features — Managers are control features. Evaluate output to make sure it matches desires.
- Feedback — generated by the control features
The feedback is then used to affect the new input. A system with all these characteristics is called a cybernetic system.
History of OB
Scientific Management was invented by Frederic Tayler. Emphasized designing jobs to be as efficient as possible.
Human Relations Movement rejected the economic focus of scientific management and emphasized the importance of social processes and work settings.
Classical Organizational Theory was an early approach to the study of management focusing on the most efficient way to structure an organization. Division of Labor focused on dividing work into specialized tasks enabling people to specialize in what they did best. Bureaucracy was a design by Max Weber that attempted to make organizations work efficiently by having a clear hierarchy of authority and well-defined jobs for people to perform.
Globalization
Globalization is the process by which disparate portions of the world are becoming connected politically, economically, and socially. Expected to increase.
When managing people in different countries, there are two general theories.
- The convergence hypothesis assumes that the principles of good management are universal, and that good management practices in one place will work equally well in other places. Generally discredited.
- The divergence hypothesis suggests that effective management practice varies by culture, and clear understanding of the culture is required to manage people in that culture effectively.
For next Tuesday, read chapters 2 and 3 in the book.