Management and Supervision:Management, Leadership, and Theories
Management is the process of using organizational resources effectively and efficiently to achieve organizational goals through planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Successful managers are able to maximize the utilization of human resources. They are leaders who understand the benefits of teamwork and agree on building inside and outside an organization's operations. They recognize the importance of technology, information management in the decision making process, and the social responsibility in building business relationships. Successful managers know that the ability to determine and respond quickly to changing economic conditions and new business opportunities is crucial to remaining practical in the workplace.
An organization has the greatest chance of being successful when all of the employees work toward achieving its goals. Since leadership involves the exercise of influence by one person over others, the quality of leadership displayed by supervisors is a critical factor of organizational success. Therefore, supervisors study leadership in order to influence the actions of employees toward the achievement of the goals of the organization.
Supervisors can learn about leadership through research. Leadership studies can be classified as trait, behavioral, contingency, and transformational. Earliest theories assumed that the primary source of leadership effectiveness lay in the personal traits of the leaders themselves. Although, traits alone cannot explain leadership effectiveness. Later research focused on what the leader actually did when dealing with employees. These behavioral theories of leadership sought to explain the relationship between what the leader did and how the employees reacted, both emotionally and behaviorally. Yet, behavior cannot always account for leadership in different situations. As a result, contingency theories of