Management Essentials: Decisions, Planning, Motivation, Teams
Key Decision Types in Management
There are three primary types of decisions managers face:
Programmed Decisions
These involve using solutions already available from past experience to address routine problems. Examples include:
- HR Management: Handling common issues arising from decisions like pay raises or vacation day requests. Since these situations are frequent, managers typically have established procedures for addressing related complaints or conflicts.
- Retail Scheduling: A store manager developing a weekly work schedule for part-time employees. The manager considers predictable factors like store busyness (including seasonal fluctuations) and employee availability (considering vacation requests and other obligations like school).
Non-Programmed Decisions
These require crafting a specific solution for a unique, unstructured problem. Examples include:
- Strategic Moves: Decisions such as entering a new market, anticipating and preparing for the impact of new technology (like artificial intelligence), acquiring another company, or outsourcing a department.
- Addressing Performance Issues: If profits decline despite efforts like increased advertising, effective salesmanship, upgraded technology, quality controls, brand image enhancement, and reasonable prices, it signals a unique problem requiring immediate, non-programmed decision-making.
Crisis Decisions
These involve responding to unexpected problems that could lead to disaster if not resolved quickly and effectively. Crises often originate externally but can dramatically alter a company’s operating context. Examples include:
- Major Threats: Events like terrorism, mass shootings, or direct threats to harm the company and its employees.
- Operational Crises: Less severe, but still critical situations such as a financial crisis or a technological crisis. While differing in severity, both types necessitate decisive action from leadership to navigate the company through the challenge.
Benefits of Planning in Organizations
Planning offers significant advantages for both individuals and organizations:
Focus and Flexibility
Planning is crucial for performance in highly competitive and dynamic environments, helping maintain direction while allowing for adaptation.
Action Orientation
Planning keeps individuals and organizations focused on necessary actions to remain competitive and improve. It fosters an orientation towards results, priorities, advantages, and managing change.
Coordination
Planning helps align the efforts of individuals, groups, and departments, ensuring their specific tasks contribute meaningfully to the organization’s overall goals.
Control
Planning facilitates control by defining objectives, setting desired performance results, and identifying the specific actions needed to achieve them, making progress measurable.
Time Management
Managers face numerous tasks, interruptions, and unexpected events daily. Planning helps them stay focused on objectives and avoid wasting time, improving overall effectiveness.
Applying Motivation Theories: Maslow & Herzberg
Understanding motivation theories provides valuable guidance for managers. Here are two examples:
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s theory proposes a five-level hierarchy of human needs. A need at any level typically becomes a motivator only when the next lower-level need is reasonably satisfied. The hierarchy includes:
- Physiological Needs: The most basic needs for biological maintenance (e.g., food, water, shelter).
- Safety Needs: The need for security, protection, and stability in life and work.
- Social Needs: The need for love, affection, and a sense of belonging.
- Esteem Needs: The need for respect, prestige, recognition, self-esteem, and a sense of mastery.
- Self-Actualization Needs: The need for self-fulfillment; to grow and use one’s abilities to the fullest and most creative extent.
Maslow’s theory implies that managers who understand and help employees satisfy their important needs at work will likely achieve higher productivity. For instance, non-profit managers must create work environments satisfying volunteers’ diverse needs (especially social, esteem, and self-actualization), as monetary compensation isn’t the primary driver. If the work isn’t fulfilling, volunteers may lose interest. Similarly, for paid employees, unmet needs can lead them to seek employment elsewhere. Effective leadership requires understanding how to motivate people. This theory helps managers recognize employee expectations and foster a successful workplace.
Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory
Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory argues that two distinct sets of factors influence workplace motivation:
- Motivators (Satisfiers): These factors are intrinsic to the job and encourage employees to work harder and perform better. They include: achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement, and growth. Providing opportunities for these can lead to job satisfaction and increased motivation. For example, a job should provide a sense of achievement and recognition for successes from both superiors and peers.
- Hygiene Factors (Dissatisfiers): These factors are extrinsic to the job itself but surround it. Their absence or inadequacy can cause dissatisfaction and demotivation, though their presence doesn’t necessarily motivate employees to work harder—it merely prevents dissatisfaction. Hygiene factors include: company policies, supervision, relationships (with peers, superiors, subordinates), work conditions, salary, status, and security. For example, company policies should be fair, clear, and competitive. Supervision should be fair and allow reasonable autonomy. Work conditions must be safe and adequate. Salary structures should be fair and competitive. Healthy relationships and maintaining employee status are also important.
This theory guides managers to focus not only on motivators but also on ensuring hygiene factors are adequately addressed to prevent dissatisfaction.
Common Team Structures in Organizations
Organizations utilize various team structures. Three basic types include:
Cross-Functional Teams
These teams consist of members drawn from different functional units or departments within an organization (e.g., marketing, finance, operations) to work on a specific project or task, leveraging diverse expertise.
Self-Managing Teams
Often called autonomous work groups, these teams possess the authority to make decisions about how they manage and complete their work, including task assignments, scheduling, and problem-solving, with minimal direct supervision.
Virtual Teams
Members of virtual teams collaborate and solve problems primarily through computer-based interactions (e.g., email, video conferencing, shared documents), often geographically dispersed.