The multifaceted role of a manager

The multifaceted role of a manager The role of a manager in modern organization is a multi-faceted one-it involves many duties including planning and controlling budgets. However, it is argued that one of the most important and challenging roles of a modern manager is that of successfully managing PEOPLE. Tapping into peoples creativity, motivating them and providing support and appropriate leadership is vital to the success of the organisation Discuss this statement with a particular focus on exploring what skills are necessary to successfully mange people in todays workplace. The complex systems within which people perform their roles in called an organisation: which is also a coordinated group of people who perform tasks to produce goods and services, colloquially referred to as company (Muchinsky. P M, 2006). Organisational behaviour is thus a study of structure, functioning and performance of organisation, and the behaviour of groups and individuals within them (Pugh, 1971). Studying organisational behaviour is understanding how organisations work as a structure and assess what people accomplish, from the manager to the simple employee. In this present study, we are going to be interested in managers. What is a manager? A definition of a manager could be the one given by Bloisi W et al, who suggested that managers are people responsible for working with and through others to achieve objectives by influencing people and system in a changing environment ( 2003, 50) . This definition gives us a fair insight of what managers do but what are their roles in a modern organisation? Hence, in an attempt to analyse and understand what managers are to accomplish and how, we will subsequently analyse the multifaceted roles of a mangers through the different school of management approach, see why the greatest challenge for a modern manager is to successfully manage people and finally see other skills or competence required for a good manager. Before the issue of mangers role in an organisation is being addressed, it is highly crucial to understand how new organisations operate and what a real manager is. As depicted earlier, a manager can be portrayed as a person operating within the frame work of an organisation and driven by set objectives and through whom the process of effectively and efficiently combination of factors of production could lead to an optimization of output (profit à Ã¢â€š ¬). He/she endorses an economic rational behaviour, in relation with the objectives set by their company: which in a sense is maximising output for given inputs, [bearing in mind the constraints of cost]. Several Streams of thought and theories governing the managers role have emerged since the beginning the twentieth century from the classical perspectives, the human relation approach, the systems approach to the contingency theory. All of which highlighted the legal responsibilities of a manager which has mutated in parallel with the workforce evolution. The Classical perceptive defended by Frederick Taylor and his work on scientific management and Fayol later on with the administrative principles  [1]  of management, both focus on the idea that management can be learned and set in codes systematically. These ideas are mostly concerned with the structural perspectives of management: [focusing] on structuring and design of work and organisation (Gordon, J (1999, 14). For Taylor, a managers role has to be scientifically driven. He believed that managers have the responsibility to organise, plan and determine the best methods for performing jobs ,describing management as a science in which employees have specific and yet different responsibilities within their organisation. He is one of the first to talk about managerial and non-managerial roles and believed that scientific observation of people at work through survey and motions studies [] would be the one and only best way to do non-managerial task (Bloisi W, 2003, 6). Hence after the scientific observation made and the objective set, the manager has to behave in line with the scientific principals whilst recruiting, through the development of work, training and equal division of work between workers and management. However , despite setting a new way of viewing management in an organisation , the scientific approach of Taylor has been acutely criticised because in practice, the theory has said t o be too preoccupied with productivity (Bloisi W, 2003, 7) ,thus not really taking into account the employees welfare. Henri Fayol, a French industrialist for his part developed his own principals of management based of administrative aspect of managers role, in which he believed that businesses are divided into six subsystems and to run them successfully, managers have to exercise several duties which comprises; planning, organising, coordinating activities, commanding employees and controlling performance. For Fayol, managers plan by analysing the future and its outcomes through anticipation, goal setting, forecasting and decisive actions. They organise through the design of a framework/structure to assist the set goals. They coordinate by bringing together the activities taking place in the organisation. They command by directing the organisation on the path they want it to follow through leadership and motivation of employee Jack Duncan (1990,97 ) and finally they control by making sure that everything is undertook as planned and in occurrence keeping an eye on the budget. Fayol also added to his five management function his fourteen principles of management which calls for Specialization, unity of control unity of command and coordinating activities Gordon, J (1999, 16). Managers roles a quite diverse but yet, while the obligation of economic results is a necessity for managers nowadays effective managers are those who manage their employees. The structural perspectives of management through the classical theories of management held a quite limited view of people as employees. This is why the behavioural approaches were then suggested. In these approaches we have a shift where workers were no more viewed as passive and driven by economical self-interest (which was a rather mechanical point of view) to a more human-centred orientation where they to have their word to say in the organisational efficiency. These approaches set the structure that alimented the human relations school of thought where mainly Elton Bayo and Abraham Maslow believed that social attitude, relationship with employees and group work were the key for a successful organisation. In 1924, Elton Bayo undertook a research project to determine the relationship between physical working condition and productivity and came out with the Hawthorne effect that suggest that by simply paying attention to the experimental subjects causes their behaviour to change (Bloisi W et al , 2003, 7) and thus their productivity would increase. This approach is in reality very different from the classical approach because it inspires a variety of ideas that had no scientific justification. Hence manager should then be aware of the impact they could have if they pay more attention to their employees. Maslow for his part elaborated his theory of motivation where he defines human motivation as the study of ultimate human goals in his 1954 bo ok Motivation and personality (Bloisi W et al, 2003, 12). This suggests that if a manager motivates effectively his crew, this could lead undoubtedly to an increase of both welfare in the organisation and also output. From the human relations and classical approach came the system approach elaborated by Bernard and the contingency theory, who believed in the social and technical integration of human relations and classical for one and that other that they is no best streams of thought and they were all circumstantial. Moreover, Henry Mintzberg following his observation of the various streams of though believed that there is a disparity between managers role in the classical theories and the reality. He then came out with two contrasting view of managers: the rational heroic view and the chaotic realistic view. For him managers actually fill a series of ten roles that he point out in his book. The Managers job: Folklore and Fact. For him the rational heroic view implies that the manager know what he and his staff are doing, how and accept responsibility for the problems that can occur and evaluate his performance. The chaotic view implies the way todays managers flourish (Bloisi W et al, 2003, 53) preferring action over reflection. In his ten roles of managers Mintzberg says managers formal authority and status comprises interpersonal roles, information roles and decisional roles. For the interpersonal roles, managers have to stand as figureheads of the organisation, as the leaders and as the first liaison officers. For the information roles, they have to be the monitors, the disseminators and the spokesmen. For the decisional role, managers have to be the entrepreneurs, the disturbance handlers, the resource allocators and the negotiators. They must therefore be aware of environment in which they operate and understand how external factors could influence performance of internal subsystem (Bloisi W et al, 2003, 53) Aside from successfully managing the people in the organisation, effective managers are also those who embrace an ethical behaviour whilst working in an organisation, meaning that they have to be aware that legal requirements mandate certain ethical behaviours and have to ask themselves some questions like: What is morally just or right? And what is likely to benefit our own careers.(R.Gordon, 1999, 7). In conclusion, management is a very complex job because of the multifaceted role a manager has to encompass to successfully run a company. Being a manager means, knowing how to plan, to organize, to coordinate activities in the organization, to command the staff and finally to control performances. Aside from all these attributes given to a manager, a manager has also the responsibility to manage his employees effectively by motivating them, providing them support so they can achieve their individual needs, and give them appropriate leadership so they could identify themselves in the organization. Effective manager are also those who know about their biases and try to correct them if possible. After seeing what made a good manager,

Antebellum America (Educational Reform) Essay

During the Antebellum period, education was not a primary focus. Education was not all that important because everything seemed to be set in stone. The children of the wealthy would get the best possible education in private schools and academies, and would learn about business. This would prepare them for their inherited future. The children of the poor on the other hand would go to public schools which taught trade and industrial skills, which would prepare them to work in jobs at factories and such. However, educational reformers saw that in order for the country to succeed, the poor had to be taught, or democracy would not succeed. During the antebellum period, the north was in a very good position. They were manufacturing on a large scale and urbanizing. These two characteristics are they key role in educational reform. The south however was neither urbanized nor manufacturing. The south, which at the time was still heavily into slavery, could not be educationally reformed as well as the north because slavery was contradicting with the reform process. There were many reform struggles in the south, all due to slavery. The north was reforming nicely, with new schools being built, the wealthy paying higher taxes in order to educate the poor and such. The antebellum period gave birth too many education advocators. They fought for different people, but they shared one purpose, to provide education. For example, the most renowned education reformer was Horace Mann. As secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann fought for higher teacher qualifications, better pay, newer school buildings, and better curriculum. He believed that education was a child’s â€Å"natural right,† and that moral education should be the heart of the curriculum. Mann was firmly convinced that public education had the power to become a stabilizing as well as an equalizing force in American society. Educational reform during the antebellum period was not only an effort to get better education for the poor white men, but also the women and African Americans. Women took this as their chance to try and gain some rights and become equal with men, in education. They fought for their right to get the same education opportunities as men. The women who did faced yet another obstacle. For example, the women who got into the colleges were given rigorous and challenging schedules. This was an effort to undermine their confidence, and keep them from graduating college. The women however didn’t falter, and did very well. African Americans also used this as an opportunity to get educated. However, only free African Americans had a chance, because it was forbidden for slaves to receive education. This reform and slight education gave the African Americans hope and some light in their future. The educational reform during the antebellum period was very significant. It educated the poor, because the wealthy knew what needed to be done. Since working men were allowed to vote, and the majority of men were in the low middle classes, their vote made a big difference. Since most of them were uneducated, they would be ignorant and dangerous when it came time to elections. Education reformers knew that the poor needed to be educated in order for democracy to succeed.

The Impacts of Economics Crisis in Indonesia

The economic crisis, which hit Indonesia, began in Thailand in June 1997. It rapidly spread, causing stocks to tumble and many Asian currencies to fall, the worst of all the Indonesian Rupiah. Indonesia†s worsening economic situation is mainly due to the sharp depreciation of Rupiah against the US dollar. Being out of our government†s control, the Rupiah keeps on sliding further and at its lowest point touched a level of Rp. 17,000 against the US dollar. Realizing that the economy will not recover overnight, it takes time and serious effort to bring back the economy on the right track. In order to cover the budget deficit, the Indonesian government asked the assistance from the International Monetary Fund. As for the revival of the economic crisis, Indonesia needs massive aid. The crisis has caused the banking sector to collapse dramatically. The large number of banks in my country might be one of the main problems as there are more than 265 units. The recent economic crisis has put more burdens on the banking sector so the government decided to close down 16 ailing private banks without a full guarantee on the return of their deposit funds. This has forced depositors to draw their savings and moved to foreign and government banks which resulted in a big rush for several private banks. Due to this, The Central Bank has to print new money for injection and bailing out the insolvent banks caused by the rush. By printing money, the government unintentionally prompted the outbreak of hyperinflation. Panicked by this, the Central Bank decided to raise interest rates. As a result, companies that were highly dependent on loans are forced to close down. Many Indonesian factories are facing financial difficulties due to the huge and extensive overseas debts and a tremendous dependence on importing raw material and supplies. We know that most factories have been too dependent on imports and their owners much too attracted to foreign capital without hedging. They are facing problems with loan repayment due to the drastic depreciation of the Rupiah. Even medium and small enterprises are facing the same problem. They have difficulty in running their businesses since they could not afford to pay the high interest rate. Meanwhile, the economy continues to deteriorate with the annual inflation rate once rising more than 100%. A lot of factories are closing down and the number of unemployed people increase. The increasing numbers of companies that went bankrupt and the factories, which are closing down, have intensified the quantity of jobless people and unemployment. To anticipate the long crisis, most companies have to restructure their management systems. It is important in the crisis era for companies to achieve efficiency and stick to market oriented operation. For efficiency, companies cannot avoid but reducing the operation cost and working hours. This resulted in the huge number of lay-off and cutting down number of employees. According to prediction, this crisis has caused at least 20 million people to become jobless, 20% of the school children are at serious risk of dropping out of school as a result of shrinking family incomes, soaring unemployment, and hyperinflation. Along with the severe drought, which threatened to push as many as 50 million people into poverty, increasing unemployment, hunger and poverty has also been created. This serious problem has incited crime, chaos, and social unrest. Poor people can no longer afford to buy staple food and basic essential commodities. Even subsidies could no longer assist with the people becoming more easily tempted and incited to commit crime. Stealing, robbing, looting, destroying, and burning could no longer be avoided. The tragedy was on May 14, 1998, when the mass riots started in Jakarta. The angry mobs started to loot, destroy and burn down shops, supermarkets, cars, housing complexes and even the Chinese minority became the target by being physically assaulted and abused. The reason is because most Chinese dominate the business factor. Direct losses are approximately US$ 909 million. This resulted in a stagnation of the business, transportation and distribution sector since most Chinese have fled the country. This mid-May riot has left a traumatic effect on me. I am deeply grieved that these things should happen to my own country and people. Motivated by this tragedy, I promise that I will contribute with my knowledge to help my country in difficult time like now. My strong commitment is to try to minimize the impact of the economic crisis.

The Early Development of the Nazi Party

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party took control of Germany in the early 1930s, established a dictatorship and started the Second World War in Europe. This article examines the origins of the Nazi Party, the troubled and unsuccessful early phase, and takes the story to the late twenties, just before the fateful collapse of Weimar. Adolf Hitler and the Creation of the Nazi Party Adolf Hitler was the central figure in German, and European, history in the middle of the twentieth century, but came from uninspiring origins. He was born in 1889 in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, moved to Vienna in 1907 where he failed to get accepted at art school, and spent the next few years friendless and drifting around the city. Many people have examined these years for clues as to Hitler’s later personality and ideology, and there is little consensus about what conclusions can be drawn. That Hitler experienced a change during World War One - where he won a medal for bravery but drew skepticism from his fellows - seems a safe conclusion, and by the time he left the hospital, where he was recovering from being gassed, he already seemed to have become anti-Semitic, an admirer of the mythic German people/volk, anti-democratic and anti-socialist – preferring an authoritarian government – and committed to German nationalism.   Still a failed painter, Hitler searched for work in post-World War One Germany and found that his conservative leanings endeared him to the Bavarian military, who sent him to spy on political parties they considered suspect. Hitler found himself investigating the German Workers Party, which had been founded by Anton Drexler on a mixture of ideology which still confuses to this day. It was not, as Hitler then and many now assume, part of the left wing of German politics, but a nationalist, anti-Semitic organization which also included anti-capitalistic ideas such as workers rights. In one of those small and fateful decisions Hitler joined the party he was meant to be spying on (as the 55th member, although to make the group look bigger they had started numbering at 500, so Hitler was number 555.), and discovered a talent for speaking which allowed him to dominate the admittedly small group. Hitler thus co-authored with Drexler a 25 Point program of demands, and pushed through, in 1920, a change of name: the National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP, Nazi. There were socialist-leaning people in the party at this point, and the Points did include socialist ideas, such as nationalizations. Hitler had little interest in these  and kept them to secure party unity while he was challenging for power. Drexler was sidelined by Hitler soon after. The former knew the latter was usurping him and tried to limit his power, but Hitler used an offer to resign and key speeches to cement his support and, in the end, it was Drexler who quit. Hitler had himself made ‘Fà ¼hrer’ of the group, and he provided the energy – mainly via well-received oratory - which propelled the party along and bought in more members. Already the Nazis were using a militia of volunteer street fighters to attack left-wing enemies, bolster their image and control what was said at meetings, and already Hitler realized the value of clear uniforms, imagery, and propaganda. Very little of what Hitler would think, or do, was original, but he was the one to combine them and couple them to his verbal battering ram. A great sense of political (but not military) tactics allowed him to dominate as this mishmash of ideas was pushed forward by oratory and violence. The Nazis try to Dominate the Right Wing Hitler was now clearly in charge, but only of a small party. He aimed to expand his power through growing subscriptions to the Nazis. A newspaper was created to spread the word (The People’s Observer), and the Sturm Abteiling, the SA or Stormtroopers / Brownshirts (after their uniform), were formally organized. This was a paramilitary designed to take the physical fight to any opposition, and battles were fought against socialist groups. It was led by Ernst Rà ¶hm, whose arrival bought a man with connections to the Freikorps, the military and to the local Bavarian judiciary, who was right-wing and who ignored right-wing violence. Slowly rivals came to Hitler, who would accept no compromise or merger. 1922 saw a key figure join the Nazis: air ace and war hero Hermann Goering, whose aristocratic family gave Hitler a respectability in German circles he had previously lacked. This was a vital early ally for Hitler, instrumental in the rise to power, but he would prove costly during the coming war. The Beer Hall Putsch By mid-1923, Hitler’s Nazis had a membership in the low tens of thousands  but were limited to Bavaria. Nevertheless, fuelled by Mussolini’s recent success in Italy, Hitler decided to make a move on power; indeed, as the hope of a putsch was growing among the right, Hitler almost had to move or lose control of his men. Given the role he later played in world history, it is almost inconceivable he was involved with something that failed as outright as the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, but it happened. Hitler knew he needed allies, and opened discussions with Bavaria’s right-wing government: political lead Kahr and military leader Lossow. They planned a march on Berlin with all of Bavaria’s military, police, and paramilitaries. They also arranged for Eric Ludendorff, Germany’s de facto leader throughout the later years of World War One, to join in. Hitler’s plan was weak, and Lossow and Kahr tried to pull out. Hitler wouldn’t allow this and when Kahr was making a speech in a Munich Beer Hall – to many of Munich’s key government figures - Hitler’s forces moved in, took over, and announced their revolution. Thanks to Hitler’s threats Lossow and Kahr now joined in reluctantly (until they were able to flee), and a two thousand strong force tried to seize key sites in Munich the next day. But support for the Nazis was small, and there was no mass uprising or military acquiescence, and after some of Hitler’s troops were killed the rest were beaten and the leaders arrested. An utter failure, it was ill-conceived, had little chance of gaining support across German, and may even have triggered a French invasion had it worked. The Beer Hall Putsch might have been an embarrassment and the death knell for the now banned Nazis, but Hitler was still a speaker and he managed to take control of his trial and turn it into a grandstanding platform, aided by a local government who didn’t want Hitler to reveal all those who’d helped him (including army training for the SA), and were willing to give a small sentence as a result. The trial announced his arrival on the German stage, made the rest of the right wing look to him as a figure of action, and even managed to get the judge to give him the minimum sentence for treason, which he in turn portrayed as tacit support. Mein Kampf and Nazism Hitler spent only ten months in prison, but while there he wrote part of a book which was supposed to set out his ideas: it was called Mein Kampf. One problem historians and political thinkers have had with Hitler is that he had no ‘ideology’ as we’d like to call it, no coherent intellectual picture, but a rather confused mishmash of ideas he had acquired from elsewhere, which he melded together with a heavy dose of opportunism. None of these ideas were unique to Hitler, and their origins can be found in imperial Germany and before, but this benefitted Hitler. He could bring the ideas together within him and present them to people already familiar with them: a vast amount of Germans, of all classes, knew them in a different form, and Hitler made them into supporters. Hitler believed that the Aryans, and chiefly the Germans, were a Master Race which a terribly corrupted version of evolution, social Darwinism and outright racism all said would have to fight their way to a domination they were naturally supposed to achieve. Because there would be a struggle for dominance, the Aryans should keep their bloodlines clear, and not ‘interbreed’. Just as the Aryans were at the top of this racial hierarchy, so other peoples were considered at the bottom, including the Slavs in Eastern Europe, and the Jews. Anti-Semitism was major part of Nazi rhetoric from the start, but the mentally and physically ill and anyone gay were considered equally offensive to German purity. Hitler’s ideology here has been described as terribly simple, even for racism. The identification of Germans as Aryans was intimately tied into a German nationalism. The battle for racial dominance would also be a battle for the dominance of the German state, and crucial to this was the destruction of the  Treaty of Versailles  and not just the restoration of the German Empire, not just the expansion of Germany to cover all European Germans, but the creation of a new Reich which would rule a massive Eurasian empire and become a global rival to the US. Key to this was the pursuit of  Lebensraum, or living room, which meant conquering Poland and through into the USSR, liquidating the existing populations or using them as slaves, and giving Germans more land and raw materials. Hitler hated communism and he hated the USSR, and Nazism, such as it was, was devoted to crushing the left wing in Germany itself, and then eradicating the ideology from as much of the world as the Nazis could reach. Given that Hitler wanted to conquer Eastern Europe, the presence of the USSR made for a natural enemy. All this was to be achieved under an authoritarian government. Hitler saw democracy, such as the struggling Weimar republic, as weak, and wanted a strong man figure like  Mussolini  in Italy. Naturally, he thought he was that strong man. This dictator would lead a Volksgemeinschaft, a nebulous term Hitler used to roughly mean a German culture filled with old fashioned ‘German’ values, free of class or religious differences. Growth in the Later Twenties Hitler was out of prison for the start of 1925, and within two months he had started to take back control of a party which had divided without him; one new division had produced Strasser’s National Socialist Freedom Party. The Nazis had become a disordered mess, but they were refounded, and Hitler started a radical new approach: the party could not stage a coup, so it must get elected into Weimar’s government and change it from there. This wasn’t ‘going legal’, but pretending to while ruling the streets with violence. To do this, Hitler wanted to create a party which he had absolute control over, and which would put him in charge of Germany to reform it. There were elements in the party which opposed both these aspects, because they wanted a physical attempt on power, or because they wanted power instead of Hitler, and it took a full year before Hitler managed to largely wrestle back control. However there remained criticism and opposition from within the Nazis and one rival leader,  Gregor Strasser, didn’t just remain in the party, he became hugely important in the growth of Nazi power (but he was murdered in the Night of the Long Knives for his opposition to some of Hitler’s core ideas.) With Hitler mostly back in charge, the party focused on growing. To do this it adopted a proper party structure with various branches throughout Germany, and also created a number of offshoot organizations to better attract a wider range of support, like the Hitler Youth or the Order of German Women. The twenties also saw two key developments: a man called Joseph Goebbels switched from Strasser to Hitler and was given the role of  Gauleiter  (a regional Nazi leader) for the extremely difficult to convince and socialist Berlin. Goebbels revealed himself to be a genius at propaganda and new media, and would assume a key role in the party managing just that in 1930. Equally, a personal bodyguard of blackshirts was created, dubbed the SS: Protection Squad or Schutz Staffel. By 1930 it had two hundred members; by 1945 it was the most infamous army in the world. With membership quadrupling to over 100,000 by 1928, with an organized and strict party, and with many other right-wing groups subsumed into their system, the Nazis could have thought themselves a real force to be reckoned with, but in the 1928 elections they polled terrible low results, winning just 12 seats. People on the left and in the center began to consider Hitler a comic figure who wouldn’t amount to much, even a figure who could be easily manipulated. Unfortunately for Europe, the world was about to experience problems which would pressure Weimar Germany into cracking, and Hitler had the resources to be there when it happened.