chapter - Pearson

Organizational effectiveness
The ability of an organization to
achieve its goals.
Management
The process of planning, organizing,
leading, and controlling an
organization’s human, financial,
material, and other resources to
increase its effectiveness.
Manager
Any person who supervises one or
more subordinates.
Top-management team
High-ranking executives who plan
a company’s strategy so that the
company can achieve its goals.
Chapter 1
Organizational Behavior and Management
11
behavior researchers, and the tools and techniques they have developed, to increase
organizational effectiveness, the ability of an organization to achieve its goals.
Management is the process of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling
an organization’s human, financial, material, and other resources to increase its
effectiveness. A manager is anybody who supervises one or more subordinates. Lou
Gerstner, CEO of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), for example,
is IBM’s top manager; he has ultimate responsibility for all 150,000 of IBM’s
employees. The sales manager of IBM’s southern region, who controls 300 salespeople,
is also a manager, as is the manager (or supervisor) in charge of an IBM computer
service center who supervises five service technicians.
Managers at all levels confront the problem of understanding and managing
the behavior of their subordinates. Gerstner has to manage IBM’s top-management
team, high-ranking executives who plan the company’s strategy so that it can achieve
its goals. The sales manager has to manage the sales force so that it sells the mix of
mainframe, mini, and personal computers that best meet customers’ informationprocessing
needs. The service manager has to manage technicians so that they
respond promptly and courteously to customers’ appeals for help and quickly solve
their problems. (Traditionally, IBM has been well known for its high-quality customer
service and responsiveness.)
Each of these managers faces the common challenge of finding ways to help
the organization achieve its goals. A manager who understands how individual,
group, and organizational characteristics affect work attitudes and behavior can begin
to experiment to see whether changing one or more of these characteristics might
increase the effectiveness of the organization and the individuals and groups that
comprise it. The study of organizational behavior helps managers meet the challenge
of improving organizational effectiveness by providing them with a set of tools:
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A manager can work to raise a worker’s self esteem or beliefs about his or
her ability to accomplish a certain task in order to increase the worker’s
productivity or job satisfaction.
A manager can change the reward system to change workers’ beliefs about
the extent to which their rewards depend on their performance.
A manager can change the design of a person’s job or the rules and procedures
for doing the job to reduce costs, make the task more enjoyable, or
make the task easier to perform.
Managerial Functions and Roles
As we mentioned earlier, the four principal functions or duties of management are
planning, organizing, leading, and controlling human, financial, material, and other
resources to allow an organization to achieve its goals. 7 And, as our examples
showed, managers knowledgeable about organizational behavior are in a good position
to improve their ability to perform these functions (see Figure 1.3).
Planning
Deciding how best to allocate and
use resources to achieve organizational
goals.
Planning. In planning, managers establish their organization’s strategy—that is,
they decide how best to allocate and use resources to achieve organizational goals. At
Southwest Airlines, for example, CEO Herb Kelleher’s strategy is based on the goal
of providing customers with low-priced air travel. 8 To accomplish this goal,
Southwest uses its resources efficiently. For example, Southwest uses only one kind
of plane, the Boeing 737, to keep down operating, training, and maintenance costs;
employees cooperate and share jobs when necessary to keep down costs; and its use
of the Internet is state of the art and one of the easiest to use in the industry.