Writing Assignment help on : Bruce Stone was not totally ineffective manager
DISCUSSION
In this essay it is argued that Bruce Stone was not totally ineffective manager, rather he was partially effective and partially ineffective manager.
Katz(1955) argued that what a manager accomplishes is based on the skills he possesses. Those skill shows ability which mostly presented instruments in performance and rarely hidden in potentiality. According to Katz’s theory (1991), a successful manager has triplet managerial skills and these skills include Technical skills, Human skills and Conceptual Skills.
Technical skills
It is defined as understanding of or proficiency in specific activities that require the use of special tools, methods, processes, procedure and is considered as special need to perform any task(Katz 1955)
Human skills
These skills are defined as ability to work cooperatively with others to communicate effectively to resolve conflicts.
Conceptual skills
Conceptual skills are defined as ability to see the organization as a whole or to have a systematic view point.
The human skill is considered effective in order to facilitate the organizational learning. It has a prudent role in communication development, implementation on participative leadership, improvement of dialogue, involving all organizational groups and individuals.
Whereas, Manager conceptual skill particularly the problem solving capability and predicting has an immense role in organizational learning.
In the case study it was found that there was a lack of cooperation among the employees. According to Paul Kelly from the Primary Section, “Within the section we used to support each other when applying for promotion or study leave much more. But now people are much less cooperative. People previously would acknowledge the contribution that others made when a joint project went well. Now it is every man for him, people just don’t look after each other any more.”
It is the manager’s responsibility to induce employees to help each other. Employees follow the culture provided by the manager and environment of the organization. Dialogue expresses a high level of communication and dialogue among employees. It is a vital instrument to create and coordinate learning and practice in organizational environment. Dialogue promotes thinking and collaborative interaction and enables organization to exploit social intelligence.
(Jandaghi, G, Matin, H, Khanifar, H & Kiaei, H, 2009)
Loon (2008) stresses on manager’s role to improve organizational learning and determine how organization focuses on various organizational activities. Managers also influence employee’s behavior. The signals sent by manager provide guidance to employee with the understanding of how to operate in the external and internal environment. It is argued that in order to expect employees to learn, leaders provide vision and take the future. A leader institutionalizes learning through the system. Training to manager is a new role but a new and effective sight to management (Jandaghi, G, Matin, H, Khanifar, H & Kiaei, H, 2009).
According to Luthan’s theory Managers perform following duties;
1. Communication: It involves observed behaviours that include answering procedural questions, receiving and disseminating requested information, conveying the results of meeting, giving or receiving information over the phone, processing mail, reading reports/letters/memos/financial reporting and record keeping.
2. Traditional Management: Planning/ Decision making and controlling matters. It involves setting goals and objectives , defining tasks to accomplish tasks, handling day to day operational crises , developing new systems, procedures, inspection, , monitoring.
3. Human Resource Management: To motivate, reinforce, manage employees their conflicts and development and training.
4. Networking: It involves interactions with outsiders, suppliers, customers, agents, attending social events informal chit-chat and discussions.
It is found that staff members of other sections were not satisfied with Bruce’s approach. They thought Bruce was taking their authorities from them. They were completely demotivated. Therefore it can be said that Bruce was lacking Human Resource Management skills because his employees were resistant to new system and changes he was bringing and he was failed to encourage them to accept the new system.
It is important to know accurate allocation of time to individual duties and tasks. Such as how much time need to be assigned for social networking and communications. It is also imperative to realize whether the assigned time would be effective to consume? A successful managers sometime use his intuition and some time experience to calculate the time allocation, however if the time allocation is appropriate, a manager can gather positive comments of proficiency from every department of organization, not from specific department that happened with Bruce in our case study.
In the case study it was found that Bruce was developing a software package that could assist in the measurement of academic performance of students within the school but, unfortunately the program was not appreciated by most teaching staff as it had a very difficult interface and was generally very slow. The teaching staff was complaining Bruce did not consider user’s perspective and most of the time he did not respond to even routine requests for support or information. There was a lack of managerial effectiveness. Bruce introduced a software but due to its difficult approach, he should have communicated with employees by coming down at their level, rather than kept busy in meetings with board.
The reason behind the staff resistance could be the difficulty level of the system. Although, Bruce conducted training sessions but still it was not accepted by the staff that can be reflected by the introduction of various incentives to encourage staff to use the system. It indicates that he was lacking technical skills. When he felt that after spending considerable time staff is still resisting it, he should have brought some modification in the system for easiness.
In this situation proper time allocation on individual duties such as training, communication, meetings could have benefited everyone.
Successful vs. Effective Allocation by Time
According to – Jack Welsh “The trick is to know when to go with your gut”. It is said that sometimes intuition results in inappropriate results, however in management it is common to take help of fads and fashions because it would be time consuming to study the tasks systematically.
It is emphasized that use evidence is highly important to inform intuition and experience. Organizational behaviour focuses on issues such as stress, decision making, and coping during difficult times, because it is believed that effective management becomes crucial during tough economic times. It is advised that managers should handle difficult activities such as firing employees, motivating employees to do more with less and make them understand about how to cope with stress when get worried about their future.
Managers play variety of roles particularly at higher levels in the organization (Mintzberg, 1973). Besides fulfilling specific responsibilities assigned to them such as those linked to functions like marketing, production, finance or personnel management, managers play strategic, leadership, operating, and other roles as well (Akhouri, 2002). It is defined as “A role is a set of expected behaviour patterns attributed to someone occupying a given position in a social unit”. (Robbins,1998). It is demonstrated that the performance of the manager can be reflected by how well his/her multiple roles are played and consequently, manager’s performance influences the performance of the organization (Khandwalla, P, 2004).
Often it is needed by managers to bring changes and improvements in procedure and operative ways. To successfully bring innovation, managers should possess multiple competencies that include careful planning of the change required, advocacy competency, an understanding of the funds and resources available and support and team development. For instance, AD, a middle level manager in an American company wanted to develop a new measuring instrument for improving the quality of the company’s product (Kanter, 1982). But, there was no support from his colleagues. So AD spent significant time to convince the colleagues about the worth and usefulness of the new system. He tried to convince his bosses to put up money for the development of the instrument. Due to the opposition from a high level manager, AD gave prior training to two participants in the coming high-level meeting for supporting the proposal in front of high level managers. Once he had the committee’s support, he developed a task force. The responsibility of the task force was to advise the development team about the development procedure and the correctness of the end result for the company’s operations (Khandwalla, P, 2004).
Bruce should have developed a particular team of employees that understand the system better, who could train the other staff members in a more effective way. Then, it would have become easier for Bruce to allocate his time to other tasks and roles without making the staff members annoyed for not responding, if they need support (Khandwalla, P, 2004).
Core Competencies required for All Sets of Roles
- Reliability in getting jobs done
- Intellectual mapping of solution
- Personal responsibility for job completion
- Capability mobilize scarce resources
- Ability to build effective team to take care important new projects
- Choosing appropriate timing for introducing innovation
(Khandwalla, P, 2004)
Likert (1961) had suggested that a manager should be adaptive and motivated to a specific situation and needs of his/her followers resulting in high degree of effectiveness in meeting the personal and organizational goals. According to Reddin (1970), managerial efficacy is nothing more than the output, and it is based upon the output related to one’s position in the company. In the complex and tough situation, an effective manager acts as an optimizer of resources for better operations of organization (Campbell et al., 1970).Whereas Drucker (1977), did not emphasize on indicator of managerial effectiveness. According to him, what considerable is the nature of a manager in managing the problem in a particular way. Once this strategy or practice (which develops through experience) develops then it does not matter what the situation is, he becomes habitual to perform well (Srivastava , S, 2009).
According to Langford (1979), managerial effectiveness is dependent upon the situation that could be the manager himself, his position, tasks assigned to him, the organization and the socio-economic factors. It was studied and one idea was developed by Mott (1971) and described that there are three directions of effectiveness, which are productivity, flexibility and adaptability. Whereas, Jain (1999) has also demonstrated three factors namely functional effectiveness, interpersonal effectiveness and personal effectiveness that count towards managerial effectiveness. In order to be effective as managers, it is considerably important that managers should try to minimize the stress faced due to organizational variables.
(Srivastava , S, 2009)
When there is continuous failure or employee dissatisfaction, it reflects that it requires the improvement of the sustainable performance that can be expressed as environmental friendliness of an organization that means that the organization needs to innovate. A manager who wants to guide and steer the sustainable innovation processes ought to be an innovation manager with all required leadership competencies such as flexibility, adaptability and confidence (Bossink, B, 2007).
It has been studied that a charismatic leadership style expresses an innovative vision, motivates others to innovate and induce innovation procedures. Barczak and Wilemon (1989), and Nadler and Tushman (1990) wrote that charismatic leadership produces energy, that gives birth to commitment and leads the individuals towards new objectives, values or hopes. This is also suggested by Eisenbach et al. (1999). They described that a charismatic leader gives a vision that becomes attractive to other individuals, that take account of the underlying needs and values of the key stakeholders, and is intellectually instigating. Norrgren and Schaller (1999) elucidated that a strategic innovative leadership vision helps the development of the innovative characteristics of employees. Managers of innovative companies score comparatively high. They consider innovation strategically, make bold decisions no matter often the circumstances become uncertain (Saleh and Wang 1993). A communicative innovation leadership style emphasizes on focused consideration on individuals when providing training.(Bossink, B, 2007)
Therefore according to Katz’s and Luthan’s theory Bruce was lacking some administrative and managerial skills that caused his failure however, he was trying to introduce potent and effective software for the betterment of overall operations. He was dedicated, confident and supportive but his influence was not equal for all the sections. He was gathering more resources for his section rather than every section therefore not all the employees were happy with him nor all were annoyed. There was mixture of bad and good comments from the staff. Therefore, I do not completely agree with the statement that Bruce was totally ineffective manager however I do agree partially.
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