Introduction to Management

INTRODUCTION TO MANAGEMENT

REFLECTIVE JOURNAL 1

On the 4th of September, I begin my studies for the subject ‘Introduction to Management’ and attended my first ever lecture for this subject. In this lecture, we are introduced to our lecturer, Ms. Natasya and she kicked start the subject with the topic ‘Management and Organization’. This topic firstly covers why managers are important, who managers are and the place in which they work in. We then go deeper onto the roles, functions and skills of managers. Later on, we are thought on how manager’s job changes as time passes and lastly the reasons why we studied management.

On the second week, I had my first tutorial class, which covers questions and reviews about the first topic. Our lecture goes on as usual and this time we learnt about Management History Module. This includes some historical background of management and the theories in various approaches towards management like classical, quantitative, behavioral and contemporary approach.

Moving on to week 3, ‘Business Environment’ is the title of the topic that is being thought to us. In here, I’ve learnt that there is two ways in which the roles of managers are viewed which is ‘omnipotent’ and ‘symbolic’. We also examined about how external environment affects an organization and its managers. The most interesting part that I find in this topic however, would be the study of organizational culture and the cultural issues in which an organization face. And of course, we had our tutorial which covers our previous topic from week 2.

In the following week, our fourth topic of the subject is being introduced to us in the lecture entitled ‘Basic Organizational Design’. What we learnt from here is the six important elements of organizational design, understand and compare mechanistic and organic structures, the contingency factors for an appropriate organizational structure and lastly the traditional organizational designs. In the tutorial class on the other hand, we had a recap and answer questions on what we had learned in ‘Business Environment’.

On week 5, we had a very interesting tutorial class conducted by our tutor, Ms. Chang whereby we were asked to worked in groups to discuss about basic organizational structure and from here I have learnt a lot on this topic. Our lecture continues and this time it covers topic 5 in which we talked about motivating employees. Firstly, we are thought on how to define ‘motivation’ and then discuss about the early and contemporary theories of motivation. The current issues of motivation are also being covered.

Times flies and we are in week 6 of the semester, and this time we discuss about leadership. This covers the definition of leaders and leadership. We then learnt about the early and contingency theories of leadership, the contemporary views on leadership and leadership issues. This week’s tutorial class, we further examine on the topic of ‘motivation’.

Week 7 arrives and we are introduced to the topic ‘Foundations of Planning’. We review on the nature and purposes of planning, the types of goals and plans, approaching the setting of goals and developing plans and lastly, the contemporary issues in planning. In this week, we are also asked to submit our first individual assignment of the subject.

REFLECTIVE JOURNAL 2

Practicing goals are vital as it provides us a direction in living our life to the fullest. There are two kinds of goals, which is short-term and long-term. Being a student, I had set myself short-term goals in academic wise and this includes achieving a good academic result with a CGPA of 3.8. Besides, I had a notebook which states “What I had learnt today” and my aim is to filled it in every single day throughout the whole semester. In the long-term, my goal is to be graduated with a ‘high distinction’ at the end of my degree program and precede my studies by taking up Masters in Finance. In career preparation, in the short-term, my aim is to apply as many theories that I had learnt and often relate it with real-world situations. At the same time, socializing with peoples around to build public relation skills. In the long-term, my goal is to be a financial analyst so it is important that I constantly keep tracks with the world economy. Also, my target is to work hard and eventually work for a big corporation, which could guarantee me a good future. As for family, in the short-term, my goal is to study hard so that I do not disappoint my family members and also constantly giving morale support for them to overcome difficulties. In the long-term, I aim to give them a good life and at the same time, maintaining close relationship by spending more time with them. For hobbies, I love playing badminton and as for now my goal is to improve on my singles’ match up and collect money to get a new racket. As for long-term, my goal is to eventually master in both singles’ and double match play and to coach students from my previous school.

Applying the concept of controlling is essential in our personal objectives as it helps to monitor, compare and correct work performances. For instance, when we conduct the group assignment for this module, whereby a research is made about the management style of a company. The feedforward control is used when we interview the company’s manager before we do the report as it gives us true information and prevent problem from occurring during the process of the report. Concurrent control happens during the course of doing the report and it is used to prevent mistakes and errors while doing the report such as checking grammar and using the right information. Feedback control is then used when we obtained our results by evaluating them to see whether our controls used are effective. Besides academic, controlling is also applied in our daily life. Take a conflict with a friend for instance; feedforward control comes in the form of patience to prevent having an argument while if a conflict does occur concurrent control is to try and solve the problem and feedback control is when we think back of how the conflict could had been minimized and tries not to repeat the same mistake again.