Пойгина Л.Б., Туринова Л.А. - English for Masters. Management Part 1 (1175658), страница 3
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Find the least important sentences and eliminate them.The remaining sentences should present the most important ideas of the text. Producea well-written, clear, and concise summary.6. Abstract Writing exerciseWrite an abstract of Text 2 paying attention to the major points under discussing. Keep theabstract short (a 200-word limit). Focus on the basic aspects under analysis.9 Text 31. Pre-reading exerciseSkim through Text 3 which is divided into several logical parts. Define the topic of eachlogical part.Managers : what they are and what they doAll organizations have several characteristics in common, including the need formanagement.
Not surprisingly, managerial work also has many common characteristics. Amanager is a manager. Though their organizations and responsibilities are different, the workof the president of the United States has much in common with that of an assembly linesupervisor at Honda's plant in Ohio.
The aspects of managerial work shared by all managersin all organizations are far less obvious than the differences.The Nature of Managerial Work. A good example of a hard-to-perceivecommonality is the nature of managerial work: what the work of managing is like on a day-today basis. Most people, practicing managers included, assume that the work routine of a plantsupervisor is not very different from that of the operations supervised. This seems reasonablesince the supervisor and operatives interact continually and earn about the same amount ofmoney.
But research studies show that managerial work is radically different in nature fromnonmanagerial work. In fact, the work of a plant supervisor has much more in common withthat of a company president than it does with the work of the people supervised. Commentingon this, Mintzberg, who synthesized previous research and in-depth, original studies of fivechief executives in his book The Nature of Managerial Work, states:“Most work in society involves specialization and concentration. Machine operatorsmay learn to make one part, and then spend weeks doing so; engineers and programmersoften spend months designing a single bridge or a computer program; salesmen often spendtheir working lives selling one line of products. The manager can expect no suchconcentration of efforts.
Rather, his activities are characterized by brevity, variety, andfragmentation. Guest. whose foremen averaged 583 incidents each day comments;"interestingly enough, the characteristics of a foreman's job— interruption, variety,discontinuity—are diametrically opposed to those of most hourly operator jobs, which arehighly rationalized, repetitive, uninterrupted, and subject to the steady, unvarying rhythm ofthe moving conveyor”.Roles of the Manager. Tackling the question of what managers do, Mintezbergdescribes another area of commonality in managerial work, the roles of the manager. A role,as he defines it, "is an organized set of behaviors belonging to an identifiable office orposition." Just as characters in a play have specific parts that call for them to behave in certainways, managers have an identifiable position as designated head of an organizational subunitthat specifies their work behavior.
"Individual personality may affect how a role is performed,but not that it is performed. Thus, actors, managers, and others play roles that arepredetermined, although individuals may interpret them in different ways."Through his studies Mintzberg identified 10 roles that he believes all managers play atvarious times to varying degrees. He classified them within three broad categories:interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles.As Mintzberg points out, these roles are not independent of one another. Instead, theyare interdependent and interact to form an integrated whole. The interpersonal roles arise outof the manager's authority and status in the organization and involve interactions with peopleThese interpersonal rotes may make the manager a focal point of information, enabling and10 compelling the manager to play the informational roles and act as an information-processingcenter.
By playing interpersonal and informational roles, the manager is able to play thedecisional roles: allocating resources, resolving conflict, seeking out opportunity for theorganization, and negotiating on behalf of the organization. Taken together, the 10 rolescomprise and define the work of the manager, whatever the organization.For example, a department manager at a Sears store interacts with sales-people everyday. The workers come to their supervisor for specific instructions about customer problems,with work problems, and often simply to socialize. The supervisor receives a great deal ofinformation on how the department is running.
Much of this information, such as a customer'scomments about merchandise, could not be obtained from formal sources, such as salesreports. This information helps the supervisor make sound decision to resolve existing orpotential problems. When the department manager sees the store manager, he or she will passon particular important parts of this information. This provides a basis for managerialdecisions on upper levels.Managerial Functions: Management Defined. Mintzberg's well-received analysis ofmanagerial work is a useful explanation of what managers do. However, not all writers agreewith Mintzberg's definitions and categories.
There is, in fact, no description of the manager'sjob, roles, and functions that is. universally accepted. Even in the seemingly simple matter ofdefining what management is, there are no answers in management.However, it is widely accepted that there is a process of management, applicable toany organization, consisting of functions that every manager should perform. The currenttrend in management literature is to define management in terms of these functions.There is no uniform agreement on exactly what these functions are, but much of thedisagreement is semantic. The following definition is acceptable in principle to mostmanagement experts:Management is the process of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling inorderto formulate and attain organizational objectives.Peter F. Drucker, whom many consider to be the world's leading thinker onmanagement and organization, offer another definition.
"Management is the specific practicethat converts a crowd into an effective, purposeful, and productive group.As such,management is both an agent for social change and an example of a major social innovation.Finally, it is management that in large measure accounts for this century's mostextraordinary social phenomenon: the education explosion. The more highly schooled peopleare, the more depended they then became on organizations."Although all managers perform certain, general roles and functions, the manymanagers of a large organization obviously do not all do the same work. Organizations largeenough to make a clear distinction between managers and nonmanagers usually have so muchmanagerial work that it, too, must be divided.
One form of dividing managerial labor ishorizontal—placing a specific manager charge of each major subunit. For example, manybusinesses designate department heads of Finance, Production, and Marketing. Like thehorizontally divided work at the task level, this managerial work must be coordinated for theorganization to succeed. Some managers must spend time co-ordinating the work of othermanagers, who in turn co-ordinate the work of yet more managers, until one reaches themanager who co-ordinates the task of nonmanagers who actually produce goods or provideservices. This extension of vertical division of labor results in levels of management.There are many examples of highly successful organizations with far fewer levels,than some much smaller ones.
The Roman Catholic Church, an organization with millions ofmembers, has only four levels between the pope and the parish priest. Both Sears andMitsukoshi, the world's largest retail firms, also are famous for having just a few levels of11 management. In contrast, another successful organization—the U.S. Army—has about 7distinct levels and as many as 20 ranks between general and private in a battalion of 1000people.No matter how many actual levels there are, managers are traditionally classifiedwithin three categories.
Talcott Parsons, a sociologist, described these levels in terms offunctions they fulfill for the organization. According to Parsons, people at the technical levelare primarily concerned with day-to-day operations and activities required for efficient,smoothly flowing production or services. Those at the managerial level are primarilyconcerned with internal administration and coordination of diverse organizational activitiesand subunits. Managers at the institutional level concern themselves primarily with makinglong-range plans, formulating objectives, adapting the organization to change, and monitoringthe relationship between the organization and the community and society in which it operates.A more common way of describing the levels of management is to call themsupervisory or operating management, middle management, and top management.(from “Management” by M.H.
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