Characteristics of theory z management

Type A Short-term employment

(American) Individual decision making

Individual responsibility

R apid evaluation and promotion

Explicit, formalized control

Specialized career path

Segmented concern

Type Z Long-term employment

(Modified American) Consensual decision making

Individual responsibility

Slow evaluation and promotion

I mplicit, informal control with explicit, formalized measures

Moderately specialized career path

Holistic concern, including family

Lifetime employment

Type J Consensual decision making

(Japanese) Collective responsibility

Slow evaluation and promotion

Implicit, informal control

Non-specialized career path

Holistic concern

Each major view point has added important ideas to current knowledge about management and, in the process, has changed the way that managers think about and behave in organizations.

UNIT II administrative management

Part 1

Text A

What’s it all about

Management is a process used to achieve certain goals through the utilization of resources: people, money, energy, materials, space, and time.

Administrative management is an approach that focuses on principles that can be used by management to coordinate the internal activities of organizations.

For years, managers have considered decision making to be a pure art. It has been considered an art because a variety of individual styles can be used in approaching and successfully solving the same type of managerial problems in actual business practice. These styles are often based on creativity, judgement, intuition, and the experience rather than on the systematic analytical approach.

However, the environment in which management must operate is changing. A man has long since landed on the moon, and technological advancement dictates the pace of our life. Such advances in technology cannot possibly be made without concurrent advances in the systems of management.

Business and its environment are more complex today than ever before, and the trend toward increasing complexity is continuing. So making decisions today is much more complicated than in the past for three reasons. First, the number of alternatives is usually much larger. Second, the consequences of the decisions are more difficult to predict due to increased uncertainty. Finally, the cost of making errors has become larger and larger, mainly due to the size of operations, automation, and a resulting chain – reaction situation in which the impact of an error may be felt on many places due to complex interrelationships.

To illustrate how critical the impact of a single error can be, consider the following example.

In the early 80s, the management of Polaroid decided to invest millions of dollars in developing a new camera, SX-70. The justification for the huge investment was the anticipation of large profits from the sale of film for the camera. On July 2, 1985, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged almost 16 points and closed at a low for the year of 790. The major contributor to the fall was the drop in Polaroid, a once highly priced glamour issue that fell 11³/₈ points, a decline of 32 percent, in a single day! The drop was attributed to an announcement that the sales of SX-70 film were only one third of the company’s projections. The plunge reduced the value of Polaroid shares by more than 360 million USD overnight! The impact was so significant that even though Polaroid did not file for the bankruptcy, its earnings declined for several years.

Managers must become more sophisticated – they must learn to utilize new tools and techniques that are being developed in their field. No one can imagine a successful physician using the medicine and equipment of the turn of the century. Yet, in management, one can find executives using management tools of that time.