Approaches to management

By peit14121951

All organizations have objectives. However in a market economy the prime motive of any organization is to maximize owners wealth or to earn a rate of return, which is in line with the risk. In addition, all business have stakeholders such as suppliers, workers, government, community, interest groups such as trade uniions, employer associations and other interest groups such as environmental groups in the contemporary world.

This requires management of a business to plan, organize, control, coordinate and motivate all levels of employees to meet the set and agreed objectives. However, the managment can use appropriate management theories to accomplish the main functions of business. They also provide the requisite knowledge to understand human behavior and feasible human resource policies to control and motivate employees to maximize the potential of all the employees to improve the efficiency and effctiveness of the organization as whole on a continuous basis.

The main management theories are classical managment theories, human relation theories, systems theories, political perspectives of managment and modern contingency theory of managment. The classical managment theories focus is on the principle of specialization or division of labor, specifiic authority and resposibility, prescibed rules and procedures, pyramid structure of organization, low span of control, top down communication channel, less employee direction in the decison making process, mostly authoritiave managment style in planning, organizing, coordinating, control and motivating emplyees. They beleived employees are primarily has to be directed and they are primarily motivated only by money.

They also belived that this theory can be applicable to any organization irrespective of size, nature of activities, nature of employees. the nature of external environment, cultural factors and political factors, group behavioral factors. However, it has been found that even though classical managment theories are used in varying degrees the oversigt of the complex factors at work in organizations may create conflict and dysfunction in organizations particularly in large organizations, where the external and internal enviornment is dynamic and nature of tasks are complex in nature.

The other theories of managment have evolved over a period of time due to the weaknesses observed by organizational theorists in the 19th and 20 th century. In the modern thought, all theories have some relevance, however the choice of these theories is contingent on internal and external environment in terms of dynamics, nature of tasks, nature of managment, nature of employees, motivational factors, political activity, importance of leadership, approriate mangement style development, change managment issues, decentralization vesus centralization, organizational culture. That is in most organizations the size, and the issues as mentined above will determine, which mix of theories are useful in accomplishing the functions of management and management roles in modern organizations. That is managment theories, without context will not work and may create more dysfuctions than improve the organizational effectivess in achieving its set goals.

As mentioed above, the theories of managment are one of the essential store house of knowledge to management. If used wisely, will enable the top managment in undertaking their main fucntions of managment to meet organizational goals in their specific internal and external environment. That is, the contingency approach is the best possible world combined with the insights in to human behavior by other management schools of thought.

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