Essay Example on There are numerous contemporary approaches to Management

There are numerous contemporary approaches to management practice that have advanced the understanding of managing and leading business organisations It is proposed in this essay to discuss and give examples of four contemporary approaches to management The contemporary approaches to management and leadership thinking and its practice in organisations have progressed enormously in the past 70 years Many of the approaches have taken their roots from the classical management theories and approaches that came before them in particular the Human Relations approach The four approaches that will be discussed are Motivation Leadership Theories Organisational Behaviour and Systems Theory Motivation and the idea of what motivates Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs was developed in 1954 and was the start of a debate on motivation In his model Maslow The definition of leadership could be described as the ability to persuade others willingly to behave differently and the process of getting people to do their best to achieve a desired result IPA 2017 Being able to influence others is a key role of leadership and management and one that is relevant to any organisation regardless of its area of business The main debate over the past 50 years has been as to whether the role of leadership is part of or separate to management As a result of this debate a range of leadership theories have emerged which can fundamentally be broken up into two sections trait theory and behaviours theory 

Trait theory focuses on the idea that certain individuals are born with a specific set of characteristics that will inevitably result in them having vast leadership abilities Behavioural leadership theory however argues that leadership qualities are skills that can be connected to behaviours that can be learned and acquired Emotional intelligence is fast becoming a key tool of any manager s arsenal if they hope to be successful in their role With its focus on managers examining and identifying how their own reactions and behaviours may or may not need to be addressed in order to relate effectively with their workforce this is a prime example of how behaviours can be learned in order to enhance leadership skills The origins of Organisational Behaviour theory stem from the recognition that the Human Relations approach was somewhat simplistic in its views Where the Human Relations approach believed that happy and content employees were more productive new research was not showing any conclusive relationship between job satisfaction and employee performance Therefore emphasis was put on individual group and organisational processes and how they could impact employee involvement and performance The aim of organisational behaviour is to rationalise envisage and influence behaviour by studying the actions and behaviours of people at work both as individuals and as part of a group These include stress job definition and satisfaction training needs group dynamics and organisational change 

Systems theory makes the case that organisations should be seen as methods that convert inputs factors of production from the external environment into outputs products services to the external environment Two types of system theory are closed systems and open systems An example of a closed system could be a factory that has production lines the employees working on the production lines are only responsible for completing their own part of the production process and have no need to concern themselves with any other aspect of the factory But the key feature of systems theory is to view the organisation as an open system which relies on external environment for inputs and production The departments or subsystems within the organisation each carry out their own functions but they depend on each other s input to ensure that the organisation has the information that it needs in order to understand the market it is catering for in order to gather the capital labour and resources needed to function effectively and efficiently Siobhan Tiernan Michael J Morley 2013