Week 5 - POLC

Question 1

What is planning?

Answer 1

• • Defining the organisation’s goals
• • Establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals
• • Developing plans to integrate and coordinate activities
• • Concerned with both ends (goals) as well as means (strategy)

Question 2

What are the types of planning?

Answer 2

informal & formal

Question 3

Why plan?

Answer 3

• Provides direction
• Reduces uncertainty
• Minimises waste and redundancy
• Establishes goals and standards used for controlling

Question 4

What are Goals

Answer 4

(ie ends)

• Desired outcomes for individuals, groups, or entire organisations
• Provide direction and performance evaluation criteria
• Multiple (e.g. financial, environmental, social)
• Stated vs. real

Question 5

What are Plans

Answer 5

• Documents how goals are to be accomplished and how resources are to be allocated
• Provides a map to arrive at a given destination with provision for detours

Question 6

Types of Plans

Answer 6

See image

Question 7

What is Organising?

Answer 7

Arranging and structuring work to accomplish the organisation’s goals

The process of creating an organisation’s structure - the formal arrangement of jobs within an organisation

Question 8

Elements of Organising

Answer 8

Work specialisation
- Dividing work activities into specific job tasks

Departmentalisation
- Grouping of jobs by function, location, product, process, customer

Chain of Command
- Authority, responsibility, unity of command

Span of Control
- Number of subordinates a manager can manage efficiently and effectively

Centralisation/de-centralisation
- Degree to which decision making is controlled by a few vs. delegated to many

Formalisation
- The degree to which jobs within an organisation are standardised and the extent to which employee behaviour is guided by rules & procedures

Question 9

Types of Organisations

Answer 9

Mechanistic

• High specialisation
• Rigid departmentalisation
• High chain of command
• Narrow spans of control
• High formalisation
• Centralised

Organic

• Cross functional teams
• Cross hierarchical teams
• Free flow of information
• Wide spans of control
• Low formalisation
• Decentralised

Question 10

What is Leading?

(Leader & Leadership)

Answer 10

A leader is:

• someone who can influence others who may or may not possess managerial authority

Leadership is:

• the process of influencing a group to achieve goals

Because leading is one of the four management functions, ideally all managers should be leaders

Question 11

Leadership theories

Answer 11

Trait theories

Behavioural theories

Contingency theories

Question 12

Trait leadership theories

Answer 12

• Leaders are born and cannot be trained
• ‘Traits’ differentiate leaders from non-leaders: drive, desire to lead, honesty and integrity, self confidence, intelligence etc.

Question 13

Behavioural leadership theories

Answer 13

• Leadership is more than possessing a few generic traits
• Leaders are not born, but trained
• Iowa, Ohio State, Michigan, Managerial Grid
• Duality of leadership: focus on task vs. focus on people

Question 14

Contingency leadership theories

Answer 14

• Effective leadership requires more than an understanding of traits and behaviours
• Ability to ‘read’ and ‘adapt’ to situational circumstances as important
• Fiedler’s contingency model (leader-member relations, task, power)
• Situational leadership model (employee readiness)

Question 15

What is controlling?

Answer 15

The process of monitoring, comparing and correcting work performance

Question 16

The control process

Answer 16

1. Measuring

How?

• A combination of approaches (i.e. personal observation, statistical reports, oral reports, and written reports) increases both the number of input sources and the probability of getting reliable information

What?

• More critical to the control process than how we measure
• Control criteria - employee satisfaction, turnover and absenteeism rates, budgets
• Objective and subjective measures

2. Comparing

• Acceptable range of variation
• Deviations that exceed this range become significant and need the manager’s attention

3. Taking managerial action

• Correct actual performance
  
  • Immediate corrective action corrects problems at once to get performance back on track
  • Basic corrective action looks at ‘how’ and ‘why’ performance deviated prior to taking corrective action
• Revise the standard
• Goal may have been too high or too low