What Titles Do Managers Have?

Photo of Aditi Banga. — Aditi Banga is an associate product manager at Pocket Gems, a firm in San Francisco that makes and publishes mobile games such as Pet Tap Hotel and Paradise Cove. Collaborating with multiple teams of engineers and designers, she manages games from initial concept through development to product launch.

Stephen Lam/Reuters

Although they can have a variety of titles, identifying exactly who the managers are in an organization shouldn’t be difficult. In a broad sense, managers can be classified as top, middle, first-line, or team leaders. (See Exhibit 1–2.) Top managers are those at or near the top of an organization. They’re usually responsible for making decisions about the direction of the organization and defining policies and values that affect all organizational members. Top managers typically have titles such as vice president, president, chancellor, managing director, chief operating officer (COO), chief executive officer (CEO), or chairperson of the board. Middle managers are those managers found between the lowest and top levels of the organization. These individuals often manage other managers and maybe some nonmanagerial employees and are typically responsible for translating the goals set by top managers into specific details that lower-level managers will see get done. Middle managers may have such titles as department or agency head, project leader, unit chief, district manager, division manager, or store manager. First-line managers are those individuals responsible for directing the day-to-day activities of nonmanagerial employees and/or team leaders. First-line managers are often called supervisors, shift managers, office managers, department managers, or unit coordinators. We want to point out a special type of manager that has become more common as organizations use employee work teams. Team leaders are individuals who are responsible for leading and facilitating the activities of a work team.

A triangular figure presents the hierarchy of management levels. From the top downward they are: Top Managers, Middle Managers, First-line Managers, and Team Leaders at the bottom.

Classic Concepts in Today’s Workplace

The terms management and manager are actually centuries old.2 One source says that the word manager originated in 1588 to describe one who manages. The specific use of the word as a person who oversees a business or public organization is believed to have originated in the early part of the 18th century. However, used in the way we’re defining it in terms of overseeing and directing organizational members, management and manager are more appropriate to the early-twentieth-century time period. The word management was first popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor is a “biggie” in management history, so let’s look at his contributions to how management is practiced today.

In 1911, Taylor’s book, Principles of Scientific Management, took the business world by storm—his ideas spread in the United States and to other countries and inspired others.
Why? His theory of scientific management: the use of scientific methods to define the “one best way” for a job to be done.
Taylor, a mechanical engineer in Pennsylvania steel companies, observed workers and was continually shocked by how inefficient they were:
- — Employees used vastly different techniques to do the same job and often “took it easy” on the job.
- — Few, if any, work standards existed.
- — Workers were placed in jobs with little or no concern for matching their abilities and aptitudes with the tasks they were required to do.
The result was worker output only about one-third of what was possible.
Taylor’s remedy? Apply scientific management to these manual shop-floor jobs.
The result was phenomenal increases in worker output and efficiency—in the range of 200 percent or more!
Because of his work, Taylor is known as the “father” of scientific management.

Want to try your hand at using scientific management principles to be more efficient? Choose a task you do regularly such as laundry, grocery shopping, studying for exams, cooking dinner, etc. Analyze that task by writing down the steps involved in completing it. What activities could be combined or eliminated? Find the “one best way” to do this task. See if you can become more efficient—keeping in mind that changing habits isn’t easy to do.

Management: Finding one best way to do a job?

Discussion Questions

Are Taylor’s views still relevant to how management is practiced today? Why or why not?
You lead a team of shelf stockers at a local health foods store. You’ve been asked by your store manager to find a way to make your work team more efficient. Using Taylor’s scientific management principles, write a list of possible ideas to share with your manager.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.

Table of Contents for What Titles Do Managers Have?

Create new playlist

Sign In

Sign Up

Table of Contents for
What Titles Do Managers Have?