Report on management functions

Essay by frank871University, Bachelor'sA, August 2005

download word file, 10 pages 4.6

Executive summary

The theory of Management has seen many different approaches to overcoming work place conflict and structural challenges through out history. There are four major functions of management: planning, organizing, leading and controlling. For thousands of years, managers have wrestled with the same issues and problems confronting. After industrial revolution, large corporations need formal management theory to guide their practise. Then in the early 1900s, the first step toward developing a theory was taken. Either in industrial age or in information age, those four functions are essential to management, and their relations even closer now. The four functions are used to apply on the resources of the organization. Compared with the industrial age, as the development of new technologies, management are facing new problems on an everyday basis now, four functions of management are inter-related in some manners.

Table of contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Assumptions 1

3. Situation analysis 2

3.1 Planning 2

3.2 Organising 3

3.3 Leading 5

3.4Controlling 6

4. Alternative options 7

5. Recommendation 8

Reference a

1. Introduction

"Management is creative problem solving. This creative problem solving is accomplished through four functions of management: planning, organizing, leading and controlling"(Robbins, Bergman, Stagg and Coulter 2003). The intended result is the use of an organization's resources in a way that accomplishes its mission and objectives. These resources include people, jobs or positions, technology and equipment, materials and suppliers, information and money. The nature of management involves effectively applying these four functions to achieve organizational success (Spulber 2001). In the industrial-age, organizational structures were derived from such institutions as the Roman Catholic Church and the 19th century Prussian general staff. This framework sees the manager as the boss and everyone else as the subordinate. But In the information-age, not only leaders and managers hold the department together;...