Summary of Learning Outcomes

1. What do managers do to help organizations achieve top performance?

In order to help their organizations to achieve top performance, managers must adapt their roles and actions to unique and changing circumstances. Their most common activities involve spending time with others in brief, unplanned, verbal conversations. As a result, managers must have strong listening and speaking skills, and must be able to record and act on fragmented information.

2. What are the roles that managers play in organizations?

Managers perform a variety of roles in organizations, but amongst one of the most important functions they perform is communicating with direct reports to help their organizations achieve and exceed goals. Managers perform three major types of roles within organizations, interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles. the extent of each of these roles depends on the manager’s position within the organizational hierarchy.

3. What are the characteristics that effective managers display?

Management is the process of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling the activities of employees in combination with other resources to accomplish organizational goals. Managerial responsibilities include long-range planning, controlling, environmental scanning, supervision, coordination, customer relations, community relations, internal consulting, and monitoring of products and services. These responsibilities differ by level in the organizational hierarchy and by department or function. The twenty-first-century manager will differ from most current managers in four ways. In essence, he will be a global strategist, a master of technology, a good politician, and a premier leader-motivator.