Introduction to Organisations and Management ( Week 1 )

Today's topic is " Introduction to Organisation and Management ".

In fact, what is meant by organisation? An organisation is a socialentity that has a collective goal and is linked to an external environment. It usually has four common features which are targets or objectives, management, structure and people in teams who work in the organisation.

Successful organisations should require good teams of employees to be in order to create ideas and do well in jobs. 





Secondly, the people should set up the objectives for the organisation. Objective is a clearly defined statement of what the organisation want to do and need to to be able to success. The fact, objectives are not just mainly focusing on making profit. Objectives have to be " SMART ". They are ' Specific ', ' Measurable ', ' Achievable ', ' Realistic ' and ' Time based '. As a result of creating " SMART " objectives, the managers will be easier to monitor the progress of the production and to see if they have succeeded. Also the organisations can think about what and why they are doing as they have a plan. 

Structures are important to organisations because adapting organisational structures can improve competitiveness and will in order to increase profitability. Organisational structure is the way in which the roles and responsibilities of management and employees are organised in a business, it determines how decision are made and communication flows. There are few ways of organisational structure which are centralised structure, decentralised structure and delayering. 

Centralisation

Decentralisation

Delayering ( B )

Centralisation, decentralisation and delayering mean all decisions are made by senior managers at the top of the organisation, shares out authority to more junior employees and removing parts of an organisation's hierarchy respectively. 

Centralisational decisions are made by the organisation leaders who have lots of experience of making decisions. Also they are not biased towards any of the department and they don't have to consult anybody else so they can make the best and quickly decisions for the organisation as a whole. As managers get an overview of the whole organisation, so decisions are consistent throughout the organisation. However, not many managers are expert enough to make decisions and excluding employees from decision making can be demotivating. Therefore, there are risks existed.

On the other hand, decentralisation involves in decision making motivations of the employees. Some of the employees can use expert knowledge of their sector in order to make effective decisions. During the decisions are made day to day and without having to ask senior managers so that decisions can be made quickly. Nevertheless, the people who make the decision may not have enough experience and inconsistencies may develop between divisions in an organisation.

Delayering is to reduce the size of an organisation hierarchy, especially in terms of a reduction in management. This creates a flatter ( less layered ) organisational structure. As a result of that, it makes the communication a lot easier and faster. It also motivates staff in having team work and fast responsibilities.

As well as having delayering as one of the examples of management, Henry Mintzberg and Henri Fayal had also stated out the work that managers actually do and managerial activities respectively.

Henry Mintzberg :

1. Informational 

• monitor, dissminator and spokesperson

     2. Interpersonal

•  figurehead, leader and liaison

     3. Decisional

•  entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator and negotiator

Henri Fayal :

1. Forecasting

•  predicting what might happen in the future

      2. Planning

•  making a course of action

    3. Organising

• allocating tasks to separate departments, units, individuals

      4. Commanding

• providing direction

      5. Coordinating

• making sure tasks are being carried out and people are working together

      6. Controlling

• monitoring progress

Management is very important for an organisation because it shows an organisation how to manage its staff and objectives to be able to success. As a good management team deliver good motivations and well organised thus to improve the efficiency of the productivities. For instance, we had an activity of building a tower with marshmallows and spaghetti. We had groups of three to four people in each group and there were four groups. There was a team leader in every groups in order to organise and manage the members in group. A good team leader and management are important because these will make work much easier and will be able to lead to success. As there should be a lot of different ideas of how to build the tower and where to put the marshmallows and spaghetti. Time management is also very important in this activity. As long as the manager was managing the group well, the tower will build up quite strong and tall within a certain time. We can see not many people have this kind of knowledge of managing people because there were only two groups of us was succeed to build up the tower and maintain it.

To conclude, organisations are to satisfy needs by providing people with goods and services. They will try to achieve objectives, use resources, have to be accountable, meet legal requirements and have a formal structure. It is very important that organisations choose a suitable structure such as centralisation, decentralisation and delayering. Each of them have different advantages and disadvantages so organsations should find the best way of being their structure. An effective management is also important for organisations. As long as having good managers, it will be easier for organisations to achieve its objectives.