Special Topics in Management

Abstract

This article will focus on special topics in management that cut across management fields and areas of expertise. The special topics of this article, which include human-resource management, information management, crisis management, and issues management within organizations, will be of special interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of management. An overview of the field of management, including the history of management, management careers, and management roles and skills, will be provided and serve as the foundation for the discussion of special topics in management.

Keywords Crisis Management; Human Resources Management; Information Management; Issues Management; Management; Organization

Management > Special Topics in Management

Overview

Management refers to the work or act of directing and controlling a group of people within an organization for the purpose of accomplishing shared goals or objectives. People in management positions control and coordinate organizational activities, employees, processes, resources, goals, and objectives in every field and industry. Managers of all kinds work within organizations. The structures of organizations, from financial investment firms to industrial production facilities to colleges and universities to hospitals and medical facilities, have similarities in areas such as established work flow, clear leadership, and shared objectives. The study of management reveals that managers in all industries must handle employees, information, change, crisis, and ethical issues. Special topics in the study of management reveal what unites managers in their work and what issues unite the field of management studies.

The following sections — history of management, management careers, and management roles and functions — will serve as the foundation for a discussion of the management issues of human-resource management, information management, crisis management, and issues management that cut across all fields and industries. These special topics may be of critical interest to all those concerned with the effective management of people, information, material resources, time, and money.

The History of Management

The focused study of management began during the late 19th century in an effort to increase the efficiency of the labor force. The Industrial Revolution, a period characterized by the adoption of large-scale factory production, changed labor practices throughout the world. The creation of large-scale production facilities necessitated the creation of the role of manager to coordinate the efforts and labors of large groups of people.

The study of management during the late 19th to mid-20th century was conceived of as an applied science intended to increase worker and organizational efficiency. Classics in the study of management include Frederick Taylor's scientific management, Henri Fayol's theories of administration and labor, Max Weber's classical organization theory and bureaucracy model, the Hawthorne studies' human-relations model, Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y, and Abraham Maslow's model of hierarchy of human needs.

Management, as defined and understood by classical management theorists such as Fayol and Taylor, leads, enforces, and plans in the interest of efficiency and profit. Fayol, along with Taylor and other classical management theorists, developed a deeply entrenched theory, approach, and practice of management appropriate for hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations. Classic management, as defined by Fayol, consists of five main functions, roles, or actions:

• Planning: forecasting, strategizing, and deciding what needs to happen in the future.
• Organizing: making efficient use of human and material resources.
• Leading: motivating, commanding, and exhibiting skills to inspire and lead employees.
• Coordinating: unifying and harmonizing all organizational activity and effort.
• Controlling: monitoring and checking employee performance for conformity and uniformity.

The study and practice of management from 1960 to 1990 was characterized by psychologically focused management strategies such as the management grid and job-enrichment programs. Management theory, practice, and scholarship since 1990 has been characterized by a focus on issues of leadership, group dynamics, and employee motivation. Managers in modern organizations must respond to new technologies, new organizational models, the economic forces of globalization, and increased diversity in the workforce (Zuidema, 1994).

Management: Functions, Roles, & Skills

The field of management includes numerous areas of expertise and influence. Managers work in business, industry, education, and social-service organizations. Examples of management occupations, as described by the US Department of Labor, include the following:

• Administrative services managers
• Advertising, marketing, promotions, public relations, and sales managers
• Computer and information systems managers
• Construction managers
• Education administrators
• Farmers, ranchers, and agricultural managers
• Financial managers
• Food service managers
• Human resources managers
• Industrial production managers
• Lodging managers
• Medical and health services managers
• Property, real estate, and community association managers
• Social and Community Service Managers
• Top executives (Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2014)

What is a manager's job? While the exact skill set required of a manager varies by industry, there are similarities in designated managerial functions, roles, and skills. Management theory, as described in the previous section, was first defined in the early 1900s. Classic theories and approaches to management continue to influence both management curriculum and practice.

As described by Henri Fayol's 14 principles of management, first published in General and Industrial Management (1917), classical management theory of the 20th century was characterized by proscribed rules, expectations, demeanor, and values as described below:

• Division of work: specialization of work and labor will increase personal and organizational productivity.
• Authority: management has the right to give orders and the power to expect obedience.
• Discipline: employees must obey, and management must provide good leadership.
• Unity of command: each employee has only one boss, with no challenges to lines of reporting and command.
• Unity of direction: workers engaged in the same activities must receive the same direction and objectives.
• Subordination of individual interests: workers and managers must work for and toward the goals of the organization.
• Remuneration: payment for services is required for reasons of ethics and motivation.
• Centralization: management functions are generally centralized and consolidated at one level of the organization.
• Chain of authority: a formal and hierarchical chain of command should structure the organization.
• Order: formal organization of material and human (or personnel) resources is required.
• Equity: employees of an organization should receive equitable treatment.
• Personnel tenure: stability of employment and limited turnover of personnel strengthen an organization.
• Initiative: employees should be allowed opportunities to demonstrate initiative within the organization.
• Esprit de corps: morale, harmony, and cohesion should be facilitated and encouraged within the organization.

While modern approaches to management still include these 14 principles, they also require the ability to manage change, information, and organizational values. Modern management, particularly in information technology (IT) and service sector fields, is characterized by adaptability, flexibility, and responsiveness.

Modern business organizations, responding to new technology, increased competition, and changes in trade regulations around the world, are transitioning from hierarchical and centralized forms to group-model and decentralized organizations. In response to the new forms of business organizations, such as high-tech companies and multinational corporations, managers and management theory have evolved their skill sets to include greater facility for managing change, information, and human differences.

Ultimately, the job of management includes planning, organizing, staffing, directing, controlling, motivating, communicating, coaching, problem solving, decision making, and leading. In any of the common modern branches of management, including clinical management, financial management, facility management, operations management, human-resource management, information management, information systems management, and general retail, business, and industry management, managers will be challenged by the special issues described in the following section (Wartenberg, 1996).

Issues

Managing Employees, Information, Crises, & Ethical Issues

There are numerous topics and issues that cut across management fields and careers. In particular, managers in all industries encounter issues associated with managing employees, information, crises, and ethical issues. These management challenges belong to established fields of management study:

• Human-resource management
• Information management
• Crisis management
• Issues management

The following sections analyze these special topics in management.

Human-Resource Management

Human-resource management (HRM), also called personnel management, refers to how organizations manage the valuable resource of human capital. HRM is considered to be a source of competitive advantage for organizations and is linked to increased productivity and employee performance. Organizations that explicitly value employees as a source of competitive advantage have been found to have better performance than other firms.

Organizations may choose between traditional and high-involvement human-resource strategies. High-involvement HRM strategy emphasizes the value of employees as a source of competitive advantage in the marketplace. HRM strategies are employed by multinational corporations and local firms alike in organizations around the world. The field of strategic human-resource management (SHRM) focuses on the relationship between motivation and employee performance (Bae & Lawler, 2000).

The management of employee performance centers on the organizational gains created from extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Employees vary in their inclination and ability to be satisfied from extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Savvy human-resource managers match the motivation and reward to the employee's temperament and disposition. Extrinsic motivation occurs when employees are able to satisfy their needs indirectly from rewards such as monetary compensation. Organizations that link employees' monetary motivation to the goals and objectives of the organization are said to have achieved extrinsically motivated coordination. Intrinsic motivation occurs when an activity is undertaken for the sole purpose of satisfying one's needs. Intrinsic motivation is self-sustaining and generated by commitment to work itself. Human-resource managers who wish to generate intrinsic motivation in employees will match employee intellect and abilities to appropriately challenging and structured work opportunities.

Employee motivation must be managed in order to create the necessary and desirable balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation, if not monitored and nurtured, risks being obscured and squashed by strong monitoring and incentives such as piece rates and bonuses. Complex jobs require intrinsic motivation to allow the creative and intellectual leaps that produce invention, ingenuity, and growth in organizations (Osterloh, 2003).

Human-resource managers shape the organizational culture in ways that promote pro-social behavior by employees. They work to promote organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) as a means of facilitating organizational effectiveness. OCB, also known as pro-social organizational behavior (POB), refers to the helpful, cooperative behaviors that are not explicitly required of employees. Examples of pro-social behaviors in the workplace include assisting new employees and self-limiting sick days. There are three key management issues related to OCB:

• Perceptions of fairness and trust in the workplace
• Norms of helpfulness and cooperation in the workplace
• Fair reward systems based on broad contributions. (Schneider, 1994)

In addition to the focus on employee motivation and pro-social behavior, HRM acknowledges and incorporates differences in employee values, ethics, and perceptions. In all fields and industries, HRM works within a given organizational set of values. Managers have the job of mediating the relationship between these organizational values and diverse and sometimes opposing employee values.

Information Management

Managers in all fields and industries are responsible for information and knowledge management. What do managers do with company information or knowledge such as data, company history, production processes, and financial reports? Information management, or knowledge management (KM), is a relatively new area of study about an age-old process and need. KM refers to the systematic and explicit management of vital information. The work of KM includes the creation, organization, diffusion, and use of information within an organization. Knowledge sharing is vital to the operation of the self-directed work-group models that characterize many modern organizations.

Managers in modern organizations are increasingly applying information technologies (IT) to the problems and challenges of KM. IT helps organizations create knowledge-management systems (KMS) that structure information storage, use, and distribution within an organization. Organizational KMSes include elements such as data mining, learning tools, intranets, e-mail, telecommunication and video-conferencing technologies, knowledge directories, decision support tools, expert systems, workflow systems, social network analysis tools, and knowledge codification tools. KMSes create searchable digital storage to facilitate the retrieval and distribution of an organization's information.

KM tools must be matched to the technological interests and abilities of the organization. The primary difficulty of using IT to create KMSes may be the multiplicity of knowledge. Much contemporary research in IT and KM focuses on developing a core set of KM tools for use across organizations, fields, and industries (Butler & Murphy, 2007).

Crisis Management

Organizational crises and vulnerabilities, such as extortion, hostile takeovers, product tampering, copyright infringement, security breaches, bribery, information sabotage, sexual harassment, plant explosions, counterfeiting, boycotts, or natural disasters that destroy production facilities, affect all types of organizations. An organizational crisis is an unlikely yet possible event that would threaten the viability of the organization. It is characterized by uncertainty of cause, effect, and method of solution as well as by the certainty that decisions must be made expeditiously to save the organization.

Organizational crisis management refers to an attempt by organizational members with external stakeholders to both avoid crises and effectively solve any crises that do happen. An organization's crisis-management framework or model for analyzing often includes the 4C frame of causes, consequences, caution, and coping:

• Causes: the immediate failures that triggered the crisis.
• Consequences: the immediate and long-term results.
• Caution: the procedures taken to avoid or curtail the impact of a possible crisis.
• Coping: the responding actions to a crisis that has happened.

Criteria for evaluating crisis-management effectiveness centers on evaluating the perceptions of key stakeholders. The effectiveness of organizational crisis management is demonstrated when potential crises are averted or when the major stakeholders of an organization believe that the success outcomes of short-term impacts outweigh the failure outcomes. Crisis-management outcomes are often evaluated on a success-failure continuum based on the idea that all organizational crises result in degrees of success and failure.

The predominant trend in developing crisis-management models for organizations is a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates psychological, socio-political, and techno-structural perspectives. Multidisciplinary models of crisis management explicitly recognize the objective, subjective, and perceptual components of organizational crises and acknowledge the complexity of crisis outcomes (Pearson & Clair, 1998).

Issues Management

Managers in all fields and industries must handle ethical issues that arise in the workings of an organization. Issues managers are responsible for integrating business decisions and ethical decisions. The field of issues management, which is based loosely on Emmanuel Kant's (1724–1804) philosophy of ethics, refers to the "executive function of strategic public relations that deals with problem solving, organizational policy, long-range planning, and management strategy as well as communication of that strategy internally and externally" (Bowen, 2005). Strategies for handling ethical dilemmas in organizations involve the identification of issues, research, analysis, and the creation of responsive organization-wide policies. Issues management provides a framework for analysis of ethical dilemmas and situations that arise in the workplace. Managers committed to ethical issues management operate with a working definition of Kantian concepts such as ethics, autonomy, principle of reversibility, duty, intention, respect for others, and symmetrical communication.

One of the main challenges of ethical issues management involves the practical implementation of strategies and policies. Issues managers must match the degree of ethics formality to the style of organization. They may strengthen their ethical issues-management process by adopting a formal code of ethics for the organization and conducting issues-management meetings. Ethics statements articulate the values with which employees should make work-related decisions. In addition to an ethics code, issues managers may work with employees to evaluate work-related decisions prior to making definitive and final decisions. This decision-making model is a less formal approach to ethical decision making than an ethics code (Bowen, 2005).

Conclusion

The relevance of the special topics introduced in this article extends to managers in almost every field and industry. Managers who work in a variety of roles, such as operations managers, sales managers, financial managers, merchandising managers, management analysts, corporate planners, human-resource managers, and small-business operators, have common challenges and similar concerns. What unites them is the need to handle and embrace organizational change. The economic climate is shifting. The competition created by the globalization of economic markets challenges business organizations to produce rapid product innovation, cost efficiency, and increased customer responsiveness.

In response to new market demands, old models of hierarchical organizations are being replaced by new forms of organizations, such as self-managed teams, cross-functional teams, and self-directed work groups. These new team-based work groups are increasingly restructuring and distributing management responsibilities, such as production schedules, budgeting, and problem solving, throughout the work group and organization. Examining special topics in management that cut across industry differences and apply to all types of managers may provide a competitive advantage for modern managers in the global marketplace.

Terms & Concepts

Crisis Management: An attempt by organizational members with external stakeholders to both avoid crises and effectively solve any crises that do happen.

Human Capital: The skills that an employee acquires through job training and work experience that benefit the employer.

Human-Resource Management: The ways in which an organization manages employees.

Information Management: The systematic and explicit management of vital information in an organization.

Issues Management: "The executive function of strategic public relations that deals with problem solving, organizational policy, long-range planning, and management strategy as well as communication of that strategy internally and externally" (Bowen, 2005).

Knowledge Management System (KMS): A system for structuring information storage, use, and distribution within an organization.

Management: The work or act of directing and controlling a group of people within an organization for the purpose of accomplishing shared goals or objectives.

Organization: A formal arrangement of people committed to shared goals and objectives.

Organizational Change: An organization-wide transformation due to factors such as a change in mission, restructuring operations, new technologies, mergers, major collaborations, rightsizing, or re-engineering.

Organizational Crisis: An unlikely yet possible event that would threaten the viability of the organization, characterized by uncertainty of cause, effect, and method of solution as well as by the certainty that decisions must be made expeditiously to save the organization.

Principle of Reversibility: An ethical principle based on whether or not a decision maker would approve and support a decision if he or she were on the receiving end of the decision.

Symmetrical Communication: A strategy used by issues-management practitioners to bring about symbiotic changes in the ideas, attitudes, and behaviors of both their organizations and the public.

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Suggested Reading

Atkinson, S. (2014). The business book. New York, NY: Dorling Kindersley, 2014.

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Gerhart, B. (2005). Human resources and business performance: findings, unanswered questions, and an alternative approach. Management Revue, 16, 174–185. Retrieved March 22, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=17110699&site=ehost-live

Gherardi, S., & Murgia, A. (2014). What Makes a "Good Manager"? Positioning Gender and Management in Students' Narratives. Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, 33, 690–707. Retrieved December 3, 2014. Retrieved December 3, 2014, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=99410366

Giannoccaro, I. (2013). Behavioral issues in operations management: New trends in design, management, and methodologies. London: Springer. Retrieved November 21, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database eBook Collection. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=564874&site=ehost-live

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