History of Management Practices

The history of management is a long-standing one, with human life comes the need to manage and control. Looking back through time, one can easily see from where the idea of management developed, grew, and turned into what people know as the modern form of management. In current time, managers are often thought of as sitting in a cushy office wearing a suit and tie, but little do most know that today’s managers have stemmed from ancient Egypt, China, and even back to the paleolithic times. Management has existed for as long as humanity and it will most likely only continue to further evolve, grow with the time, and fit into more modern aspects of managing. The origins of management are quite a long historical timeline. The earliest recorded occurrence of information related to management dates to the world’s first civilization, Sumer. Sumer was a thriving civilization that created a Continue reading

14 Secrets of Successful Team Building

A team is where a group of individuals work together and help to all achieve the same goal or outcome. A team is an organized group of people who work together cooperatively and collaboratively. They coordinate their efforts to the same purpose and work towards achieving shared goals. All team members share joint accountability, mutual trust, and respect, and work to achieve shared goals. In a team, there tends to be a common team purpose where individual team members’ talents are put together to achieve a common purpose or goal. When building a team, you need to make sure individuals are aware of their job role and responsibilities and if so, who’s taking leadership and who’s accountable for each task. There need to be clear lines of responsibility and authority. Individuals must be aware of what task needs to be achieved, when and how they are going to accomplish this. Continue reading

An Analysis of Decision Making Process in Organizations

In today’s business world, the main task of any manager is to take decision; these decisions are impacting the firm, the employees and the environment. As the world is developing and transitioning into a globalized unit, decision making is becoming a complicated task. Manager takes thunders of decisions every day, some decisions are done consciously and other are done subconsciously. More the manager has experiences, more often he will take subconscious decision for recurrent problem, due to it knowledge of the firm, the environments and it past experiences. Other decisions that are not as usual, need to be analyzed on every angle, before being able to build solutions for it, this would be a conscious decision. Decision making is defined as the process of deciding about something important, especially in a group of people or in organization. Decision-making is a six steps processes, no matter if the decision is taken Continue reading

Different Types of Stress

Stress has often been misunderstood to be negative, with few people acknowledging the importance and usefulness of positive stress. In our everyday lives, stress is everywhere and definitely unavoidable; hence our emphasis should be on differentiating between what is good stress, and what is bad. This will help us to learn to cope with negative stress, and harness the power of positive stress to help us achieve more. Read: What is Stress? There are 4 main categories of stress, namely eustress, distress, hyper stress and hypo stress. Negative stress can cause many physical and psychological problems, whilst positive stress can be very helpful for us. Here’s how we differentiate between them. Eustress: This is a positive form of stress, which prepares your mind and body for the imminent challenges that it has perceived. Eustress is a natural physical reaction by your body which increases blood flow to your muscles, resulting Continue reading

Types of Plans Commonly Used in Management

The term plan refers to a course of action determined in advance by the management. It has always a time frame in other words it is a package of decisions to make efforts to achieve some results in a specified term of period. Goals (Target): goal is a desired state of affairs, which an organization wants to achieve. Overall goals are the collective ends for which the whole organization makes efforts to achieve. Goals may be of short term or long term in nature. E.g. goal of an automobile company may be to provide low cost and higher quality of automobiles to the public. Objectives: objective is the ends towards which activity is aimed. In other words it is desired and end result of an activity. There must be a time frame for the achievement of predetermines objectives. Objectives may differ from one organization to another. E.g. business organization will Continue reading

Problems with Management Control Systems

Despite of the benefits, there are some issues with the implementation of management control system in an organization.They are: Magnitude of Change. Management control system is designed to cope with changes of a limited magnitude. While designing the control system certain as assumptions are made concerning the variables expected to change and the degree of change. Corrective actions are decided on the basis of-these-assumptions. For example, overtime may be decided on the assumption that five per cent of the employees will on an average be absent. When the magnitude of change is too high, the corrective action cannot work. For example, if 90 per cent of the employees remain absent, on a particular day due to a strike, management can do little to correct the change. Thus, the control system fails when the variables go outside the range, which the system was designed to handle. Time Rate of Change. Control Continue reading