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What Is Management

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Submitted By lucidhours
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As the concept of the modern enterprise has evolved, likewise there are many different definitions of ‘management' as a function within the business organisation.

McFarland (1971) describes management as a systemic process of purposive organisational activity over a varying span of time; Donnelly (et al., 1999) as a high- level coordination of individual and group effort to achieve goals; whilst others view the act of management as an operational, function-based activity, comprised of a set of key duties, responsibilities and relationships towards achieving desired goals of the organisation (Robins et al., 2013).

Even without definitive agreement to a single definition, there are commonalities in all that identify management as a social and dynamic process, by which an individual (or group of individuals) is responsible for the economical and effective planning and regulation of the enterprise and its employees (Boddy 2008). This essay will identify several functions of managerial activity and examine how they contribute to the wider operation of utilising human resources to deliver organisational objectives.

In essence, the manager’s role is effectively that of a human conduit; their acquired acumen and expertise applied to identify and extract value from otherwise isolated events and information. It is the process by which the key functions of planning, organising, leading and controlling (Robins et al., 2013) work to direct the organisation’s human resources towards achieving said goals. Managers at all levels of every organisation perform these same functions to varying degrees – the time spent on each function dependent on both level of management and the organisation’s structure and activities. Thus, the act of ‘management’ is an effort of coordination, control and planning to direct both individual and group activity towards desired goals of the

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