Read the following text.

3. Say why control is an important management function. How does it relate to the other management functions of planning, organising, and leading?

Control is an issue facing every manager in every organisation today. Control concerns are very extensive. Office productivity, the time needed to resupply merchandise in stores, the length of time that customers must wait in check-out lines, quality and suchlike are all about control.

The systematic process through which managers regulate organisational activities to make them consistent with expectations established in plans, targets, and standards of performance is called organisational control.

A well-designed control system consists of four key steps: a) establishing standards of performance, b) measuring actual performance, c) comparing performance to standards, and d) taking corrective action.

Control should be linked to strategic planning. Changes in the environment require that internal control systems adapt to strategic changes; control systems must not continue measuring what was important in the past.

The organisation exists around a production process, and control can focus on events before, during, or after this process. These three forms of control are called, respectively, feedforward, concurrent, and feedback.

Feedforward control focuses on human, material, and financial resources that flow into the organisation. Its purpose is to ensure that input quality is sufficiently high to prevent problems when the organisation performs its tasks.

Concurrent control monitors ongoing employee activities to ensure that they are consistent with quality standards. It relies on performance standards. Concurrent control is designed to ensure that employee work activities produce the correct results.

Feedback control focuses on the quality of the end product or service after the organisation’s task is completed.

Most organisations use all three types simultaneously but emphasize the form that most closely corresponds to their strategic objectives.

Finally, effective organisational control consists of several characteristics, including a link to strategy, use of all four control steps, acceptance by members, a balanced use of objective and subjective data, and the qualities of accuracy, flexibility, and timeliness.

A new approach to control being widely adopted in Canada and the United States is total quality management. It involves everyone in the organisation who is committed to the control function.

There are two main control approaches to quality. They are modern clan control and traditional bureaucratic control. Bureaucratic control is the use of rules, policies, hierarchy of authority, written documentation, reward systems, and other formal mechanisms to influence employee behaviour and assess performance. Clan control relies on social values, traditions, common beliefs, and trust to generate compliance with organisational goals.

The implementation of total quality management involves the use of many techniques. Four major techniques of total quality management are benchmarking, reduced cycle time, outsourcing, and continuous improvement.

Quality circles, which are teams of 6 to 12 employees who identify quality problems and discuss solutions, are one means of implementing a quality control philosophy in an organisation.

Дата добавления: 2015-08-27