Free Management Dissertations - Contemporary Management Is Not So Much About Control It Is Much More About
Contemporary Management is not so much about control it is much more about gaining the commitment of the workforce. Is this true?
The larger shape of institutional change is always difficult to recognize when one stands right in the middle of it. Today, throughout U.S. industry a significant change is under way in long-established approaches to the organization and management of work. Although this shift in attitude and practice takes a wide variety of company-specific forms, its larger shape, its overall pattern, is already visible if one knows where and how to look. (Walter, 1985) Considering the example given by Walter, involving the marked differences between two plants in the chemical products division of a major U.S. corporation, it is clear to see what many consider to by the crux of the differences between contemporary and classical management. Both the divisions make similar products and employ similar technologies, but that is virtually all they have in common. The first, organised by businesses with an identifiable product or product line, divides its employees into self-supervising ten to fifteen person work teams that are collectively responsible for a set of related tasks. Each team member has the training to perform many or all of the tasks for which the team is accountable, and pay reflects the level of mastery of required skills. These teams have received assurances that management will go to extra lengths to provide continued employment in any economic downturn and have also been thoroughly briefed on such issues as market share, product costs, and their implications for the business.
Hyman and Mason (1995) state that the first, contemporary, form of management is due to a company policy of ‘employee involvement’, which refers to practices and policies which emanate from management and which purport to provide employees with the opportunity to influence decision-making on matters which affect them. This approach is described as ‘unitarist’, and is common in the UK and US, where employers, with the support of their governments, have been shown to be strong proponents of this policy. Employee participation, on the other hand, refers to state initiatives which promote the collective rights of employees to be represented in organisational decision-making, including collective bargaining, and the other countries in the EU, with their legally based industrial relations, are shown to exhibit this ‘pluralistic’ approach, with works councils, employee representation on boards and financial participation. Management Decision (1994) actually proposes the integration and coordination of employee involvement and total quality management, and thus the elimination of the differences between total quality and employee involvement, in terms of organisational practices.
Dissertations - Free Management Dissertations
