Introduction
Management is one of the important aspects of organisations. It embraces all the steps and procedures taken to “bring people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using the available resources efficiently and effectively” (Deshpande & Farley 2004, p.5). This goal is often achieved through management functions, which include organising, staffing, planning, direction, leading, and controlling of an organisation in the effort to realise the organisation’s aims and objectives.
A manager is also involved in activities such as resourcing, which involves “the deployment and manipulation of human resources, financial, technological, and natural resources” (Gomez-Mejia, Balkin & Cardy 2008, p.35) in an organisation. Several management scholars also contend that an organisation can be viewed as being comprised of systems.
In this sense, the work of managers include facilitation of human actions such as design of systems that enable production process to run to yield useful outputs, which while sold bring value to organisations’ stakeholders. This argument implies that a manager has a central responsibility of enhancing empowerment of all the organisational stakeholders.
For instance, without empowerment of employees, it is difficult to keep them motivated so that they can have greater outputs, which result to the creation of more value to other stakeholders of an organisation including the owners (shareholders). It is also important to maintain cohesiveness of all the employees for the realisation of optimal outputs.
Hence, findings of the roles of managers in enhancing communication among employees of organisations are incredible. In this paper, research findings on the roles of management in communication in an organisation, the work of managers, and the role of management in the empowerment of the employees are the most important findings in the field of management.
Role of management in communication within an organisation
Communication is important in the effecting of management function of leading, planning, staffing, controlling, monitoring, and organising. Rashdidat et al. (2012) investigated how communication affected the performance of business organisations of by deploying “literature-based research instrument to measure the application of the investigated constructs” (p.16).
Survey method was used to establish a sample of 100 large and small service and manufacturing organisations. Using percentages, statistics, and t-test analysis, the researchers found out, “effective business communication is emphasised to a reasonable extent in the surveyed companies” (Rashdidat et al. 2012, p.16).
These results suggest that communication in an organisation is one of the facets that a manager deserves to pay imperative attention to in order to enhance achievement of the goals of an organisation.
Indeed, whether in the manufacturing or in the service industry, the main goal of any organisation is to increase productivity and quality of its objects of trade in the effort to hike its profits. In this endeavour, collective effort of all employees, customers, and suppliers is required. However, it is impossible to maintain all these components of an organisation without ardent communication between the organisation and each of them.
In a business context, communication is enabling every activity to be successfully completed. For instance, products and services of a company are promoted through communication with the chief aim of making a sale. Hence, a sales manager has the noble responsibility of enhancing good customer relations and provision of information about the organisation’s services coupled with the products on offer.
This goal is attained through internet-based communications, print, radio, and even television among other ways (Dick 2005, p.3). By noting this significance of communication, it is plausible to question whether communication is only important for managers whose organisation deals with direct services and products only.
In a research to determine how school management operates, Gronn (1983) maintains that school heads have to engage in a ‘constant talk’ with teachers (p.1). The author further argues, “To the extent that administrative control is accomplished by talks, schools’ personnel become enmeshed in language games” (Gronn 1983, p.1). This argument means that schools’ head exercise their managerial powers through words.
From the work of Gronn (1983), it is evident that school heads engage in talks with teachers to determine their work concerns. This way, it is arguable that school heads are able to execute their administrative work, which in the context of management literature entails commanding, planning, and directing among other things.
However, in school settings, Gronn (1983) argues that talk (communication) differs from other organisational settings since “as if administering is unilateral and unidimenstional actions directed at a set of employees, here is an administrator seemingly being controlled rather than being in control” (p.7). This argument means that effective communication requires up and down flow of information.
Hence, managers must take information of employees to help them arrive at a decision that would foster their wellbeing in the organisations. This research finding is important in the management studies since the roles of managers in an organisation are all organised around doing work in the right way with minimal resistance from employees.
Good communication is phenomenal in an organisation since organisations comprise people whose effectiveness in execution of the roles is dependent on the information flowing in the organisation. A growing body of literature for over a century articulates communications with the success of a manager in executing his or her responsibilities.
Blalock (2005) points out how “managers spend 75 to 80 percent of their time in some form of oral or written communication” (p.233). Consequently, it is important to consider communication as one of the important issues in the management studies since it accounts for the largest time of the manager in an organisation.
With regard to Blalock (2005), managers should engage in communication with employees and other organisational stakeholders for a number of reasons (233). One of the reasons is the expensiveness of ineffective communication in an organisation. Indeed, Blalock found out, “the ability to communicate was rated as the most important factors in making a manager promotable” (2005, p.240).
The role of communication in management is also an important finding since the organisational work environment continues to be sophisticated in the 21st century. It also involves a complex interaction process among all individual units that make the whole organisation. Consequently, “the collaboration that allows organisations to capitalise on creative potential of a diverse workforce depends on communication” (Rashdidat et al. 2012, p.18).
Additionally, modern organisations immensely focus on strategic plans to be globalised. This argument implies increased number of customers to handle coupled with amplification of organisational diversity. Consequently, managers of a globalising organisation need to be ardent communicators to help the organisations to remain focused to their objectives, missions, and aims while operating in a globalised business environment.
The work of managers
For managers to have the capacity to execute their roles, they must understand their work in organisations. This argument makes scholarly studies, which provide evidence of the tasks that managers are well suited to accomplish important tasks. The degree to which specific task fits a given manager is dependent on the skills posed by a given person.
In the work The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Facts, Mintzberg (1990) suggests that managerial skills possessed by managers make them suited to tasks such as “developing relationships, carrying out negotiations, motivating subordinates, resolving conflicts, establishing information networks, and subsequently disseminating information, making decisions on conditions of extreme ambiguity, and allocating resources” (p.175).
Anybody entering the profession of management must know that the profession entails taking the overall charge of an organisation during times in which every person would fear making decisions due to the risk of perceptions of the probability of the decision made to resort to the failure of the organisation in question.
In this sense, a foundation for successful managers is developed in the sense that the findings in the field of management provide evidence that success is based on the capacity to turn around various obligations into organisational advantages.
The findings in the field of management lay fundamental theoretical framework through which managers may use to evaluate their performance in execution of their duties so that weaknesses can be identified in the due course. Identification of the weaknesses and the strengths of a manager is a function of cognition and understanding of what management work entails.
Luckily, intensive body of literature provides information of what managers in an organisation must focus on when placed in charge of any organisation (Hales 1986). These roles include leading, planning, directing, monitoring, controlling, organising, motivating, and staffing among others.
However, scholarly findings identify planning, controlling, organising, and directing as the primary functions of management. Henry Fayol, the father of the functional management, deploys this school of thought.
Planning entails the process of determination of various organisational objectives that are vital for achievement. Through planning, a course of action that is pivotal for the achievement of goals and objectives is also spelt out. Planning is a mental process that often entails the selection of facts coupled with making and “using assumptions regarding the future in the visualisation and formation of proposed activities that are believed to be necessary to achieve the desired results” (Wijesinghe 2008, p.313).
At the planning phase, managers must consider the 5W’s for a particular objective. Once a manager makes up a plan, he or she compiles the necessary labour coupled with material resources that form the prerequisites for achievement of the developed plan in the planning phase. In more interactive terms, organisation as a function of management is the “process of establishing relationships among members of the enterprise” (Wijesinghe 2008, p.315).
Research findings on the best practices for organisations evidences that the relationships determined through an organisation need to be based on responsibilities and authorities of various components that make an organisation. Essentially, organisation includes job specification and allocation of tasks based on skills and level of expertise of various work teams and individuals.
The third aspect that makes up the work of managers involves giving instruction once tasks have been distributed to the respective persons. Management scholars term this aspect as directing. The function enables managers “to control and supervise the actions of the staff” (Wijesinghe 2008, p.322). Directing is essential in that managers are able to aid the staff to achieve organisational goals coupled with the accomplishing of personal goals.
For this to happen, managers must have the capability to motivate, communicate and facilitate departmental leadership. In this end, empowerment becomes vital in an organisation. This argument implies that all the three findings of management studies discussed in this paper are intertwined. The claim further supports the reason why the three findings discussed in this paper are considered the most important finding in the management studies.
The relationship and interplay of the findings are critical by considering, “employees who are highly provoked generally surpass in their job performance by playing important roles in achieving the company’s goal” (Khandkar 2012, Para.5).
This effort underlines the reasons why managers consider motivating employees through empowerment as an incredible strategy for the success of the organisation they lead. This argument goes far in enabling managers to develop the capacity to maintain productive organisational relationships besides encouraging the flourishing of the culture of problems solving.
In the discussions of the important findings in the field of management, it is important that no systems run without checks. In this perspective, the findings of the roles of management function of controlling are significant. Henry Fayol (the father of functional management), argued, “Undertakings of control consist of verifying whether everything occurs in conformity with the plan adapted, the instructions issued, and principles issued” (Khandkar 2012, Para.8).
Hence, controlling can be interpreted to mean a corrective mechanism, which is deployed by managers to determine measures of performance in relation to the attainment of organisational plans and goals. The relevance of controlling is that planning is an essential tool for guiding goods and timely utilisation of resources in the effort to enhance efficient and effective planning.
The discussion of the findings of the most important aspects that constitute the work of management reinforces the argument that managers can only execute their duties well if they know what they are supposed to or not to do. Therefore, a clear “insight of the work of managers influences their effectiveness in the work” (Mintzberg, 1990, p.173).
Consequently, Hales (1986) points out how the output levels of managers is a function of the degree to which a manager resolves dilemmas surrounding his or her mandates in an organisation coupled with the extent of his or her understanding of the management job. Consequently, findings on the functions of manager in an organisation constitute some of the most important findings in the discipline of management studies.
Role of management in employees’ empowerment
Managers ensure that work is done through other people. They must adopt appropriate approaches that would make it possible for the work teams they are in charge of leading and directing to be motivated and committed to the activities of the organisation. For this reason, empowerment is noble in the realm of management.
Colin and Klidas (1998) note the significance of empowerment when they reckon, “it seeks to address one of the most enduring intractable problems in the management of human resources – the need to secure both compliance and co-operation among employees” (p.88). Indeed, it is through such cooperation that organisations operate as single entities even if they are composed of people with differing cultures.
Literature on the roles of empowerment in an organisation contends that most people prefer working in empowering organisations (Colin & Klidas 1998, p.88). This finding is crucial since, for an organisation to reduce incidences of labour turn over, it must look for mechanism of ensuring that people prefer what they do at their respective workstations.
Managers are interested in not only how empowerment can assist in this extent but also “the way in which it does so –advocating that employees should be ceded a degree of discretion over work performance and/or involvement in organisational decisions“ (Colin & Klidas 1998, p.88). Involving employees in decisions making is a subtle tool for their empowerment.
This tool makes the implementation of organisational decisions easier since they feel as part of the decisions made. In this regard, empowerment as a managerial function in an organisation implies the “greater employee responsibility for decisions, which influence the immediate circumstances of their job rather than greater involvement in wider workplace decision-making” (Colin & Klidas 1998, p.93). The implication of this argument is that not at all instances exist where employees are involved in decision making as a way of empowering them.
Through a study on the empowerment of employees in five star hotels located at Amsterdam, Colin and Klidas confirmed this assertion by stating, “The scope of empowerment in practice may be limited even under relatively favourable circumstances” (1998, p.93p.88). Consequently, managers have to evaluate the conditions under which strategies for empowerment of the employees would yield the desired goals.
Different organisations adopt different organisational cultures to unite all their employees to common goals, objectives, and missions. With the empirical evidence linking empowerment with increased productivity of employees, the main question that awaits managers is how they can deploy their managerial skills to facilitate empowerment of people within their organisations.
According to Willmott (1987), one of the milestones of doing this job is to differentiate between empowerment and engagement of employees. Afterwards, managers should then consider looking for factors that may enhance effective empowerment of the employees. One of such factors is the creation of an organisational culture that facilitates empowerment (Colin & Klidas 1998, p.93). In this perspective, Willmott (1987) asserts that empowerment does not work well in case “managers feel threatened by a loss of authority” (p.258).
This argument is significant perhaps by considering that the current employees do not take up jobs in which they perceive will not give them a chance to make decisions. This case is particularly phenomenal in an organisation that is driven by creativity and innovation. For these two aspects of organisational success to help an organisation to deal proactively with competitors, management has to accept that ideas and decisions can originate from down the hierarchical order of flow of organisational voice of command. However, when should this happen?
Willmott (1987) explores circumstances under which a manager needs to adopt an organisational culture that fosters empowerment. The author claims that, even though it is important that managers retain a state of their authority of command in the effort to push for implementation of certain strategic plans, it is crucial that they empower people by permitting them to contribute in decision-making processes (Willmott 1987).
Empowerment is particularly important when employees are the persons who are close to the organisational customers such as in the case of direct sales agents, when customer relationships have to be made during the time of technological sophistication when innovation and creativity are required or during times of rapid change in organisational processes and uncertainties.
Arguably, these aspects define the business environment of the modern world, which is characterised by excesses of supplies in products and services. This argument makes the finding of the roles of empowerment in managerial studies important in the sense that, to survive in an environment that is defined by these traits, an organisation has to source for various alternatives that will lead to its success.
Hence, the findings of the impacts of empowerment on employees provide a manager with a quick basis for justification of empowerment as a strategy of getting business into the right track when he or she encounters situations in which supervision is almost impossible and or when employees are lowly motivated.
Conclusion
Management constitutes an area of focus in organisations, which have drawn immense interest from a large number of scholars. Several studies have been completed seeking to provide information on how management practices can be made more effective.
While the findings in all the studies are crucial in the shaping of the management profession, the paper holds that roles of management in effective communication, description of the work of managers, and empowerment are some of the most crucial findings in the discipline of management.
The rationale for this position was based on empirical evidence that managers spend more than 75 percent of their time communicating with different stakeholders.
To have work done in the right way, managers must know their duties. Managers control an organisation through people. Consequently, the roles of managers in facilitation of employees’ empowerment were considered as other important findings in the studies on management.
References
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