Indeed, quality culture starts with top management. There need to be top management leadership to drive this culture of quality across the organization. For this to happen, business leaders and managers must have the commitment in setting up quality control programmes, strategic planning for quality and provide resources for quality. In addition, top management leadership role is also a distinguishing element of a quality culture. Adopting a democratic leadership style where workers are not punished for errors and failures and that continuous learning is what prevails in the organization. Management attitudes should be towards treating employees as members and remove barriers of superiors or subordinates. This suggests to everyone that the work of all members of the company is important and adds value to the final outputs. Members of the organization should focus on the purpose for which they are all here to get better and better at creating that Continue reading
Modern Management Practices
Green and Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Environmental changes across the world have generated a movement to identify the causes of global warming and develop solutions to end it before it is too late. In an effort to achive this, many countries are creating laws and regulations with the specific aim to reduce carbon emissions and greenhouse gas effect. The truth is that environmental change is upon us. Not only do we have climate problems but we are also dealing with a resource depletion issue. With economies like India and China growing at near double digit rates, the population of the world continues to grow creating shortages of many resources that we use to take for granted. Many consumers, stakeholders and businesses are becoming more involved in the growing green movement. Influenced by customer loyalty shifting towards environmentally friendly products, businesses are trying more and more to make their supply chains greener by introducing sustainability strategies throughout Continue reading
Sensitivity Training – Meaning, History, and Stages
Sensitivity training is a method of laboratory training where an unstructured group of individuals exchange thoughts and feelings on a face-to-face basis. Sensitivity training helps give insight into how and why others feel the way they do on issues of mutual concern. Training in small groups in which people develop a sensitive awareness and understanding of themselves and of their relationships with others. Sensitivity training is based on research on human behavior that came out of efforts during World War II to ascertain whether or not an enemy’s core beliefs and behavior could be modified by the application of certain psychological techniques. These techniques have been gradually perfected over the years by efforts of business and industry leaders to persuade people to buy products, including the radio and television industry to ascertain how an audience might be habituated to certain types of programming. Kurt Lewin is credited with being the Continue reading
Successful Change Management: Principles and Processes
Managing the changes in an organization requires a broad set of skills like political skills, analytical skills, people skills, system skills, and business skills. Having good analytical skills will make you a good change agent. You should evaluate the financial and political impacts of the changes that can take place. You should know that following a particular process at that instant would fetch you immediate financial effects and start that process so that the change process is noted by the management. The workflow has to be changed in such a manner to reflect the financial changes that are taking place. Operations and systems in the organization should be reconfigured in such a manner that you get the desired financial impact. Successful management improvement efforts require the active involvement of managers and staff throughout the organization to provide ideas for improvements and supply the energy and expertise needed to implement changes. Continue reading
Managerial Grid Model
The Ohio studies led to two dimensions of leadership behavior-concern for tasks and concern for relations. Almost in the same style, the Michigan University studies made the distinction between job-centered and production-centered leaders. Blake and Mouton rated these concepts in a framework called the Managerial Grid. They interpreted the concepts in a broad way. Blake and Mouton have used “Concern for Production” and “Concern for People’” in their Managerial Grid on horizontal and vertical axes respectively. Managers may be concerned for their people and they also must also have some concern for the work to be done. The question is, how much attention do they pay to one or the other? Managerial Grid Model is a model defined by Blake and Mouton in the early 1960s.It included Impoverished management Authority-compliance Country Club management Middle of the road management Team management Leadership Grid The Managerial Grid was the original name; the Continue reading
Diversity Management
The world’s increasing globalization trend demands more interaction between people from a vast diverse of cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds than the past. Today, people no longer live and work in an insulated marketplace. The reality is they are now part of a worldwide (or commonly mentioned as flatten) economy with competition coming from nearly every angle of the globe. For this reason, businesses need to be open to change and accept the concept of diversity to become more creative. In daily conversation, the word of “diversity” has the meaning of differences or variety. However, in the business world and in the business textbook, diversity often refers to the many differences present among people today in workplace as well as marketplace that were not aware of by most people in the past. Diversity management is often referred as acknowledging, understanding, accepting, valuing, and celebrating differences among people with respect to age, Continue reading