Chapter 1 Notes Essay example

Maxwell Lewis
Professor Dave Robino
BA 475/575: Organizational Behavior
4/1/14
Chapter 1 Notes
The Importance of Interpersonal Skills
Until the 1980’s Business schools curricula that focused on management only focused on three things:
Economics
Accounting Finance
Quantitative Techniques
Human behavior and work skills received less attention
Developing managers’ interpersonal skills also helps organization attract and keep high performing employees.
Social relationships among co-workers and supervisors were strongly related to overall job satisfaction.
Positive social relationships also were associated with lower stress at work and lower intentions to quit.
The Managers Functions, Roles and Skills
Managers can’t succeed on their technical skills alone.
They also have to have good people skills.
Managers get things done through other people.
They make decisions, allocate resources and direct the activities of others to attain goals.
Managers do work through an organization—a consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two or more people, that function on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or sets of goals.
Technically manufacturing firms, service firms, schools, hospitals, churches, military units, retail stores, police departments and local, state and federal government agencies.
French Industrialist, Henri Fayol stated that all managers perform five management functions: planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling.
We’ve condensed it to four: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.
A manager must also plan. Planning is defining an organizations goals and establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals.
As managers move from lower-level to mid-level management, managers tend to increase their planning.
Managers are also responsible for designing an organizations structure—organizing.
This includes determining what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be grouped, who reports to whom and where decisions are to be made.
Every organization contains people and its management job is to direct and coordinate those people, this is called leading.
Leading consists of motivating employees, directing their activities, selecting the most effective communication channels and resolving conflict among members.
Managers must also monitor, compare, and potentially correct employees. This is the controlling function.
To sum what a manager does is they plan, organize, lead and control.
Henry Mintzberg in the late 1960’s studied five executives to determine what they did on their jobs.
Interpersonal: All managers are required to perform duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature.
Figurehead: Symbolic head, required to perform a number of routine duties of a legal or social nature
Leader: Responsible for the motivation and direction of employees
Liaison: Maintains a network of outside contacts who provide favors and information.
Informational: All managers to some degree, collect information from outside organizations and institutions, typically by scanning the new media and talking with other people to learn changes.
Monitor: Receives a wide variety of information, serves as a nerve center of internal and external information of the organization
Disseminator: Transmits information received from outsiders or from other employees to members of the organization
Spokesperson: Transmits information to outsiders an organization plans, policies, actions, and results; serves as an expert on organizations industry.
Decisional: Four roles that require making choices.
Entrepreneur: Searches organization and its environment for opportunities and initiates projects to bring about change.
Disturbance handler: Responsible for corrective action when organization faces important, unexpected disturbances.
Resource Allocator: Makes or approves significant organizational decisions.
Negotiator: Responsible for representing the

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Chapter 1 Notes 1 Essay

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