Team Exercise 1          Team Exercise 2

 Team Exercise 1

Title:Is your college instructor a manager? Discuss in terms of Fayol’s management functions, Mintzberg’s managerial roles, Katz’s skills, the systems perspective, and the contingency perspective.

Teacher’s Analysis (From Stephen P.Robbins)                                           学生团队作品展示

A college instructor would generally not fall within the definition of a manager when utilizing Fayol’s managerial functions. This is because the relationship between instructors and students. Students are not employees but, more appropriately, clients. In fact, in some cases, an instructor may have little say about the course content or how it is to be taught. In these instances, the instructor clearly makes few decisions. Regardless, college instructors, in their position as teacher (in contrast to a position such as department head) are not managers.

In terms of Mintzberg’s managerial roles, college instructors are perhaps involved in some ways in the interpersonal, informational, and decisional roles. For example, a college instructor could be seen as a liaison (interpersonal role), a monitor and disseminator (both informational roles), and a disturbance handler and negotiator (both decisional roles).

Looking at Katz’s skills, college instructors obviously need a lot of technical skills—in this case, knowledge about the latest research and conceptual developments in a particular discipline. They also need significant human skills as they deal with their students. To a limited extent, the instructor might need to utilize conceptual skills as courses are planned or discussed.

From the systems perspective, the college instructor could be seen as responsible for coordinating the inputs (students, lecture material, classroom equipment, and so forth), processing them through some form of educational presentation (lecture, multimedia presentation, Internet-based instruction, and so forth), in order to produce outputs (student knowledge of a particular discipline, skills in a particular area, and so forth).

Using the contingency perspective, the college instructor would have to look at the various situational variables (who is in class on a particular day, the arrangement of the classroom, available material or equipment, and so forth) in order to most effectively and efficiently do his or her job.

Student’s Analysis

Management Issue: Is your course instructor a manager?

Robbins’ Viewpoint: The course instructor is not a manager. The teacher is a worker while the students is a kind of clients.

Our Viewpoint: The course instructor is a manager in China.

Our Statements:

At first we want to point out that Robbins and us analyze this problem in different background.Most of American schools are privately run and there has president, vice present, headmaster, teachers, students and so on. However, in China, almost all the schools are public owned. So we haven’t anybody who can make profit through the school. To the contrast, the main objective of Chinese schools is not to make profit but cultivate talents to serve our country.

Also, we don’t think the client presented in the standard answer is appropriately used here. Because in traditional business way, client is defined as the person who uses money to buy specific commodities or service, they don’t have the responsibility to cooperate with the teacher and finish the work or assignment they are told to. So, from this point we can see the distinct difference between the student and client. Anyway we admit that receiving knowledge in school is also a kind of enjoying service, but after the service, we are not the so-called clients any more but product, because we have received something different, and we are changed by it. So, the students are definitely not client.

Consequently, we will support our statements from the definition of management, managerial functions, managerial roles, skills, the system perspective, and the contingency perspective.

What is organization and what is manager? According to Robbins, organization is a deliberate arrangement of people to accomplish some specific purpose while manager is someone who works with and through other people by coordinating their work activities in order to accomplish organizational goals. As for our parts, the teacher should be the manager, and teachers and students compose an organization. This organization has a define purpose and it contains more than 2 persons, so management is needed here. The teachers take charge in this system, they plan, organize, lead and control, and they cooperate with the students to achieve the goal—to make the students assimilate the knowledge.

Firstly, we will discuss this problem in the terms of managerial functions with example of our Ms Yu. In the first chapter, Ms Yu wanted to give us an introduction of management, in order to achieve this goal; Ms Yu developed a series of plans and also made PowerPoint to help our understanding. The process of this preparation matches the definition of planning. And in the class and after class, Ms Yu would give us some problems to discuss and solve. We can regard these problems as teaching tasks. And she should decide that how the tasks are grouped, the final decision would be reported to whom, this work is a kind of organizing. Then as a teacher, one of the most important things is to motivate students’ spirit so that we can grasp the content in the class such as question—answer, doing presentation, etc. when Ms Yu did this, which means she is implementing leading function. Furthermore, after the work being done, Ms Yu would compare our answers with the standard answer, if we made some mistakes during the procession; she assumes the responsibility to correct us. This matches the features of controlling function.

Then we will discuss about the managerial roles. As a manager, the teacher should take the roles as interpersonal, informational and decisional. The most important role a teacher plays may be the informational ones. The reality of a teacher’s work is to transmit the knowledge to her students and make sure they can assimilate it. So the teacher’s job is much like the disseminator and the monitor in Mintzberg’s managerial roles. And the necessary roles a teacher should play are the interpersonal ones. Teaching is not equal to giving information, is should also include cooperating with them, taking care of their academy works as well as their mental health. Here a teacher may be the manager who plays the interpersonal roles. The teacher should also plays the decisional roles; she should decide which part of the course is more important and how to be taught in details.

Thirdly, in the terms of managerial skills: any instructor should have basically knowledge and proficiency in certain specialized in order to be a qualified teacher, such as math, English sociology and so on. That is technical skills. As for human skills, during the teaching process, a instructor, no doubt that a instructor may involve to deal with the students and other level mangers or operatives directly or indirectly, so that a instructor can communicate, motivate, lead, and inspire enthusiasm and trust. That is the human skills. In order to make his students to adapt to the society, to meet the society requirements, to be more competitive, any responsible instructor should see, the class that is an organization as a whole, understand the relationships among various different organizations, and visualize the class fits into its broader environment and the development of the society. That is the conceptual skills. .

Fourthly, In the terms of systems perspective: we can consider the class as a system .The students who just step into the campus, the teaching equipments, teaching faculty, the money put into the teaching process, the collected information related to a certain major are, to some extent, inputs. While after the hard working of instructors’ management measures and non-managerial activities, the cooperation between the students and instructors, etc, the inputs are transformed into the outputs. Also during this course, students become professionals and can devote his knowledge, skills, and ideology to serving the society. The instructors can boost his teaching level and some other staffs in this organization become more and more mature and experienced. Even to the universities especially the private universities, they can gain fruitful financial revenue. There are kinds of outputs. During the dynamic course, in order to make the students adapt to the society more flexibly, to ensure all the staffs to coordinate to the reform and changes of the environments and teaching, to make all the members in the systems to be more qualified, some feedbacks are essential and some modulations are necessary and vital to the systems. Consequently, the whole teaching process become interactive, dynamic, circulated, which certainly is an open system.

In addition, from Contingency Perspective; we hold that teacher is a manager from the following five aspects.

1- organizations are different (the size of class; the tape of class is different)

2- facing different circumstances or contingencies (social-need is changing; education system is reforming; equipment is improving and the character, philosophy and interest of students are various)

3- requiring different ways of managing (debate, argument, discussion, other method)

(Different languages, various communicated ways)

4- contingency variable (in different time to take different measures)

(in different place to take different measures)

5- the primary value -stresses (there are no simplistic or universal rules, every class has different rules and the rules is changing as the changing of the environment)

Due to the evidences above, we can get enough reasons to evident our opinion. Different ways of managing are required in different organizations and different circumstances and the teacher use this perspective so skillfully and correctly, so we get the result.There is no doubt that our course instructor is a manager.
                                                            
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Exercise 2

Title:If an organizational chart (a visual drawing of an organization’s structure) isn’t available, an organization’s choice of structural design often can be determined by reading descriptions of what it does. Find one company on the Web. Describe in a short paragraph what organizational structural design each is using and how you came to that conclusion.

 Student’s Analysis 1

 Take Google Inc.for example

Company Overview

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

As a first step to fulfilling that mission, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a StanfordUniversity dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world's largest search engine -- an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.

Google Management

Co-founders Larry Page, president of Products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. Since then, the company has expanded to more than 4,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced technology professionals in the industry.

Management Team

• Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer 董事长兼首席执行官
• Larry Page, Co-Founder & President, Products 创始人兼产品总裁
• Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology 创始人兼技术总裁
• George Reyes, Chief Financial Officer 首席财务官
• Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development 全球销售及业务拓展部高级副总裁
• Alan Eustace, Vice President, Engineering 工程部副总裁
• Jeff Huber, Vice President, Engineering 工程部副总裁
• W. M. Coughran, Jr., Vice President, Engineering 工程部副总裁
• Jonathan Rosenberg, Vice President, Product Management 产品管理部副总裁
• Salar Kamangar, Vice President, Product Management 产品管理部副总裁
• David C. Drummond, Vice President, Corporate Development 公司发展部副总裁
• Shona Brown, Vice President, Business Operations 业务运营部副总裁
• Tim Armstrong, Vice President, Advertising Sales 广告销售部副总裁
• Sheryl Sandberg, Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations 全球在线销售和运营副总裁
• Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Vice President, Asia-Pacific and Latin America Operations 亚太和拉丁美洲地区运营副总裁
• Nikesh Arora, Vice President, European Operations 欧洲运营副总裁
• Norio Murakami, Vice President and General Manager, Google JapanGoogle 日本副总裁兼总经理
• Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist 副总裁兼首席互联网顾问

 Analyzing Organizational Structure

The common sense for organizations to design an organizational structure is to allow employees to efficiently and effectively do their work. Google, obviously, is such an instance. Established in 1998, Google is a new small organization with a total number of 4,000 employees worldwide compared to titanic corporations like GE, GC and so on. However, its organizational structure design is no less fashionable than such large companies. To reach the mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, Google has its own style of organizing.

Exhibit above shows evidently two of the five common forms of departmentalization that Google has used,functional departmentalization and geographical departmentalization.

As for functional departmentalization, Google divides its jobs into products, technology, finance, global sales and business development, engineering, product management, corporate development, business operations, advertising sales, global online sales and operations. And for geographical departmentalization, it groups jobs on the basis of geography as Asia-Pacific and Latin America, European and Japan.

This may seem to be a simple organizational structure, but something, in fact, does not reflect from the exhibit directly yet is special in Google, strategy. Being the world's leading search technology company, Google regards innovation as the most important dimension of its strategy. An organization’s structure is influenced by the organization’s strategies. Structure should follow strategy. As a result, Google's simple organizational structure does provide innovators with the flexibilities and free-flowing information of the organic structure, for Google’s goal is to provide a much higher level of service to all those who seek information, whether they're at a desk in Boston, driving through Bonn, or strolling in Bangkok.

Moreover, Google’s organization is, to some extent, a team-based structure. Because in Google, the entire organization is made up of work teams that perform the organization’s work. Every president or vice president is a team leader of his or her team. In the team, employee empowerment is crucial because there is no line of managerial authority from top to bottom. Rather, employee teams are free to design work in the way they think is the best and also hold responsible for all work activity and performance in their respective areas.

We can conclude that Google’s organization combines most of the five forms of departmentalization and forms a special structure that has characteristics both of functional structure and team-based structure.

Suggestion

Facing the increasing dynamic and complex environments, Google should find creative ways to organize work to make its organization more responsive to the needs of customers, employees, and other organizational constituents. Through the analysis, we want to suggest that Google adopt the learning organization for the reasons as follows.

Firstly, in a learning organization, employees are practicing knowledge management by continually acquiring and sharing new knowledge, and willing to apply that knowledge in making decisions or performing their work. For this, Google has naturally advantage in that it has the most expert specialists who are world famous in their respective areas.

Secondly, in a learning organization, members can share information and collaborate on work activities through the entire organization---across different functional specialties and even at environment, employees are free to work together and collaborate in doing their work or resolving issues. "The perfect search engine", as Google co-founder Larry Page put, Google can never fail to do so.

Thirdly, a learning organization’s culture is one in which everyone agrees on a shared vision and everyone recognizes the inherent interrelationships among the organization’s processes, activities, functions, and external environment. There is a strong sense of community, caring for each other, and trust. In a learning organization, employees feel free to openly communicate, share, experiment, and learn without fear of criticism or punishment. Actually, such a culture is what Google’s top managers are engaging in creating. For instance, at the Googleplex headquarters almost everyone eats in the Google café (known as "Charlie's Place"), sitting at whatever table has an opening and enjoying conversations with Googlers from all different departments. Topics range from the trivial to the technical, and whether the discussion is about computer games, encryption or ad serving software, it's not surprising to hear someone say, "That's a product I helped develop before I came to Google."

Hopefully, Google will soon become a learning organization.

08104318 许寰 08104320 余晓溪 08104322 张文明

Student’s Analysis 2

 Our team takesGree Electric Appliance, Inc. for example.

 Introduction to Gree

Gree Electric Appliance, Inc, Of Zhuhai, founded in 1991, is the corporation with the biggest manufacture scope and the most powerful technique strength among the big size specialized air conditioner Corporations in China.

 Top Management

Its management team is efficiency and effectiveness; all decisions made by directorate are advisable and can be carried out without delay. The most of specification of air conditioner and the complete of series is the No.1 among the industry in China. It’s mostly due to its well-designed organizational structure.

From the day listed in Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 1996, Gree has always behaving outstanding achievement, and constantly adjusts its structure to the development of company.

Organizational structure chart

Organizational Structure Analyzing

As to structure, The Gree mainly uses the form of Functional Departmentalization. Engineering Manager, Manufacturing Manager,Human Resources Manager, Purchasing Manager are under the leadership of the president.

Generally, large organizations combine most or all forms of departmentalization, which are crossed. Gree isn’t an exception. Other forms of departmentalization such asProduct Departmentalization, Geographical Departmentalization and Customer Departmentalizationare used more or less.

In production, it is divided into several parts, such as compressor, pattern, pipeline and so on. Five workshopsassort with each other and form pipelining.

And it invests huge capital in other parts of the country to build factories, even expand abroad to increase its sale.

Gree’s span of control is large, wide spans of control are consistent with managers’ efforts to reduce costs, speed up decision making, increase flexibility, get closed to customers and empower employees.

 Suggestions

As competition becoming drastic, Gree should improve its organizational structure in order to let the company operate efficiency.

First, it has to deal with the relationship between centralization and decentralization, mechanistic and organic. Second, it has better got close to boundaryless organization and learning organization. Meanwhile, Gree is becoming an international company, so we think it should develop diversity. Because there is no transnational company that does not develop diversity for adapting the drastic competitive environment.

 08104302 蔡雪君 08104309 李志华 08104313 孙晓青
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