Question

Discussion #8

Define management. Compared and contrast management roles, skills and competencies.

Answer 1

1 According to John Mee F "Management maybe defined as the art of securing maximum results within a minimum of effort so as to secure maximum prosperity and happiness for both employer and employee and give the public the best possible service".

2 Management is in many ways merely an extension of certain rather routine components of human life,setting objectives is a natural human endeavour-to set them in a rational way and to set them for other people requires management skill .The provision of high quality health services is the basic objective of health professionals.There are three types of skills .

Technical skill is the ability to use the methods ,processes and techniques of a particular field .it is easy to visualise the technical skills of a surgeon or a physiotherapist ,but in a similar way counselling a subordinate or making out a departmental budget also requires a considerable amount of skill.

Human skill-is the abity to get along with other people to understand them,and to motivate and lead them in a work place

Conceptional skills-is the mental ability to visualise all complex interrelationships that exist in a work place -interrelationship among people,among departments or units of an organisation and even a single organisation and the environment in which it exists.Conceptional skills permit the manager to understand how the various facts in a particular situation fit together and impact on each other.

Just as an actor plays a role ,the management must have a manager who can adopt certain patterns of behaviour when he assumes a managerial position.All managers have a common bond of formal authority over organisational units they manage and that this authority leads them into interpersonal relationships where they must play interpersonal roles as figure head,liason ,leader with other units of organisation.These roles help the manager with the opportunity to gather information .This fact along with what the manager does with the information permits a second set set of roles.These informational roles include monitor,disseminator,and spokesman roles.Finally authority granted to managers,,supported by their interpersonal and information roles requires that they play decisional role .These include disturbance hanlder,resource allocator andnegotiator roles.In addition ,a key decisional role for every manager is that of entrepreneur in which the manager functions as an initiator and designer of changes intended to improve the unit over which he or she has the authority.

The key copetencies are the ability to take a number of actions which include planning,organising,directing,co-ordinating and controlling ,simultaneously and as a part of a continuum.