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Management Style and Productivity

This study examined the relative merits of a directive versus a participative management style with respect to the improvement of organizational productivity in the contemporary and future work place environments. At first blush, one might be tempted to question such an investigative focus within an economy that for decades has seen the participative management concept in all of its various forms extolled as the enlightened and most productive management style. The appointment by President Clinton in December 1993 of Retired Admiral Bobby Inman as Secretary of Defense, however, flies in the face of such accepted contemporary wisdom, as his reputation is that of a hardnosed, authoritarian leader. Inman certainly is not the only such manager around. A substantial proportion of the managers found in the American economy approach their tasks with a directive style, and many of the organizations thus managed are highly productive.

Productivity is a major concern in the 1990s of all profitoriented organizations, regardless of size (Rothschild, 1993, pp. 1718). Productivity levels within an organization are the product of a combination of physical, financial, and human resource inputs (Miles and McCloskey, 1993, pp. 4045).

A concern with organizational performance, thus, is one of the more significant of the problems that confront organizational managers in the last decade of the twentieth century (Hakim, 1993, pp. 4649). The costs to an organization of substandard

performance involve profit deterioration, the diversion of financial and human resources from production to diagnostic and corrective actions, and the introduction of discontinuity into organizational activities, just to enumerate a few (De Long and Summers, 1992, pp. 529).

Lagging productivity growth affects the ability of firms to compete effectively in both domestic and international markets. How best to attain productivity improvement, howev...

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Management Style and Productivity. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:11, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1684247.html