Manager’s Skills in an organization
Question 1: Skills Needed by Managers in Organizations
Management skills are a collection of various abilities, which include things like communication, time management, business planning, delegation, as well as problem-solving and decision making. Besides, these skills are trained to organization managers, and they are essential in running an organization well and achieving the desired objectives of a company. According to Dr. Henry Mintzberg’s theory of management, there are many roles that a manager has in an organization (Mintzberg and Laasch 2020). Mintzberg describes ten specific roles of a manager that are commonly seen in an organization. For a person to be an effective manager, he must be a complete business person who understands the tactical, operational, and strategic responsibilities he or she holds. Mintzberg classified these roles into three groups which include, interpersonal, decisional, and informational roles, which are involved in management functions and the activities involved.
Interpersonal roles
This is the first category that involves behaviors that are associated with human interactions. Furthermore, these roles allow organizational managers to interact with their employees to achieve organizational goals. Under this interpersonal role, there are three roles, which include liaison, leader, and figurehead. For example, an organization like Khind Holding Berhad has Chia Kian Hong as the marketing manager who spends time with his employees to discuss the marketing goals. As the figurehead Chia the manager, has legal and social responsibilities that his employees must fulfill. On the other hand, Chia as a leader, monitors, trains, and evaluates the performance of his employees. Besides, Chia interacts with his customers and learns to understand his needs.
Informational roles
In this category, the manager must generate and share knowledge to achieve the goals of an organization. The informational roles include disseminator, spokesperson, and monitor. Chia, as an example of a manager, ensures that he monitors the organization by researching more about the useful information that will increase the profits of a company. Also, it is the role of Chia to understand the external and internal factors that can affect the organization. Besides, as a disseminator, Chia takes all the information gathered during his research to the appropriate management for approval. When Chia gets support on the information, for example, a proposal on how to improve the company’s sales, as a spokesperson of the organization, he communicates out the information to the outside parties, for instance, the customers.
Decisional roles
This class of roles involves managers in making decisions or choices. The manager’s interpersonal roles lead them to decisional roles. Resources and information gathered by a manager allow them to play the role of making decisions on the responsibilities and roles that he has obligations on. There are four decisional roles, which include negotiator, entrepreneur, and resource allocator, and disturbance handler. In the entrepreneur role, Chai inspires innovation and change in the organization by creating and implementing new ideas. Moreover, he handles any internal and external issues as a disturbance-handler. Also, on allocating resources, Chai, as a manager, assigns and oversees different resources form funding to equipment. Finally, it is the role of a manager in an organization to direct and participate in negotiations held in the organization.
There are four essential functions of management in an organization, which include leading, controlling, planning, and organizing. In plan, the management has to create a specific action that aims at the organizational goals (Serrat 2018). For instance, a marketing manager like Chai must spend time to map on necessary steps of increasing sales. The management also takes a measure of organizing by determining how they will organize their employees and distribute their resources according to the plan. Besides, the management leads an organization by connecting the employees on an interpersonal level. It involves communicating, inspiring, and motivating the employees for higher productivity. Leading is another function of the management that consists of the management to lead its team by coaching, assisting, and solving various problems faced by employees. Finally, it controls the organization by checking results against the company goals regularly and taking any correction that is needed.
Question 3: Types of Organization Structures
Small or large, every organization needs to operate under an organizational structure that is defined. In a strategic business, a structure in an organization configures clarification on support and relationship of excellent communication, which results in an effective and efficient workflow process (Jonathan 2018 p.20). Therefore, there are three different types of organizational structures, which include functional, divisional, and matrix structures. However, each structure in an organization has advantages and disadvantages.
Functional structure
In this structure, an organization is based on being divided up into small groups with particular roles or tasks. For instance, Airtel is a telecommunication company in India that uses this type of structure. The organization has been divided into various departments, such as finance, marketing information technology, as well as the production department. However, each department has a director who oversees the whole department. The benefit of having this structure is that employees are grouped according to their functions and skills, allowing them to work effectively. On the contrary, the challenge is that there is a lack of communication on inter-departmental whereby most discussions and issues take place on a managerial level.
Divisional Structure
This structure is used by large companies that work on horizontal objectives. The structure allows for much more autonomy groups within the firms. An example of an organization that uses this structure is General Electric (Yildizel 2019, p. 613). The company has various divisions that include currents, transportation, aviation, renewable energies, and others. The benefit of this structure is that it is flexible for large companies because each division operates as its organization, in control of their resources. The disadvantage of this structure is that employees who have one role in various divisions may experience communication problems as well as it might raise issues on accounting by having tax implications.
Matrix structure
This is a hybrid structure of projected and functional structures. In this structure, the employees have a choice of reporting to any boss or manager they want depending on the project or situation of work. For example, Starbucks Corporation uses a matrix structure in which it is a hybrid mixture of various features from the necessary organizational structures. The advantage of this structure is that employees have the opportunity to share knowledge, allowing better understanding and communication. On the contrary, the disadvantage is that it is tough to report to a case to multiple bosses, and it can bring conflict between them.
References
Jonathan, G.M., 2018. Influence of organizational structure on business-IT alignment: What we do (not) know. Structure, 19, p.20.
Mintzberg, H., and Laasch, O., 2020. Mintzberg on (ir) responsible management. The research handbook of responsible management. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Serrat, O., 2018. Mintzberg’s model of managing: Random thoughts from an observation. Unpublished manuscript, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
Yildizel, S.A., 2017. Organizational structure: A case study on concrete production sector. Journal of Engineering Research and Applied Science, 6(2), pp.611-614.