ORGANIZATIONAL PLANNING

Organizational Planning

Organizational Planning

Introduction

In the today business environment, organizations are changing and the role of managers within the organizations is going to be different than what it was a couple of decades ago. One cannot help but wonder whether the elements and principles of management identified by the father of management theory, Henri Fayol is still applicable after all this while.

Fayol regarded the elements of management as functions planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling. However, these functions have been condensed down to only four basic but very important ones: planning, organizing, leading and controlling (Robbins et al, 2003, p9).

Fayol placed considerable emphasis on the importance of planning (prevoyance in French). He held that management must be able to “assess the future and make provision for it” and he views the “action plan” as the most useful output of the planning process (Koontz and O'Donnell, 1955, p26). In the past, it was believed that planning varied by organizational level. That is, top management planned in the longest time horizon and engaged in more strategic planning with middle managers spending less time in planning and are more engaged in operational planning rather than strategic ones. Today, managers at all levels are being asked to participate in strategic planning and all of them are responsible for taking a long term view of the organization as a whole (Buhler, 1998, p17).

Under the organizing function, the task of management is to build up an organization that will allow the basic activities to be carried out efficiently and effectively. There must be unity of command and direction, with clear definition of responsibilities and a precise decision making system. Hence, organizational structures in the past tend to be very mechanistic (Pugh and Hickson, 1997, p88). Since then, there has been a trend towards flatter organizations with fewer levels of management and more emphasis on teamwork so as to give credence to human values so as to ensure that the organization can stay competitive in modern day business environment (Wren, 1994, pp430 - 431).

The leading function may be perceived as an all-encompassing function of guiding the human resource towards organizational objectives. It is also commonly referred to as directing, commanding and so forth. In early organizations, leadership was often viewed as a function of custom or as a function of the personal traits of the leader. The command philosophy of leadership is based on the notion that centralized control is needed to keep individuals in their place and it's the worker responsibility to perform the job in a certain manner as directed by the manager (Wren, 1994, pp431 - 432). The trends in today's workplace are very much different as employees and self-managed teams are empowered to make decisions with the managers more engaged in coaching and mentoring activities rather than traditional leading (Buhler, 1998, pp17 - 18).

The controlling function that is being identified by Fayol consists of ongoing, routine verification of plan implementation and principles. Controlling applies to all processes and its purpose is to identify problems so ...