The management of people Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

The management of people - Essay Example Management is a serious task (Aguilar, 2002). Low team morale is a hindrance to success in any project and it is the Manager's responsibility not only to make sure that the project is successful, but also see that the team is satisfied. People work in projects to make something for people. The problems in projects are human problems. For every technical, financial or schedule problem there is a human problem behind it. The most significant resource any business has is its people. A significant element in managing a complicated project knows how to manage the most precious asset the human resources. Perhaps the greatest challenge that is presented by a global project is the management of the human resource pools. This is true at a macro or overall staffing levels and micro or delegation of work to labour pools level. Management is now assuming a greater role to strategic business partners (Holsapple and Joshi. 2000). Successful businesses realize that true competitive advantage lies in the people. Businesses have been forced to redefine the responsibilities and develop a compelling response for critics who dispute human resource's value to the bottom-line. Management has been around since the dawn of civilization (Terry, 1960). In primitive societies almost everybody had to do physical labour. To break away from this burden, about the only choices were going into politics (kings) or religion (priests). Complications arise in tracing the history of management. Others see it by definition as a late modern in the sense of late modernity conceptualization (Ahmed, Lim, and Zairi. 1999). On those terms it cannot have a pre-modern history, only harbingers. Others, on the other hand, detect management-like activities in the pre-modern past. Civilized urban societies led to more specialization, produced new vocational alternatives to manual labour, and saw a tendency of those who did not work with the hands to look down on those who did. Others argue modern management as a discipline started as an off-shoot of economics in the 19th century (Drucker. 1988). Economists provided a theoretical background to resource allocation, production, and pri cing issues (Conceicao, Gibson, Heitor, and Shariq. 1997). About the same time, innovators produced elements of technical production such as standardization, quality-control procedures, cost-accounting, interchange ability of parts, and work-planning. Many of these aspects of management existed in the ante-bellum (pre-1861) US slave-based economy. There, 4 million people were, as the contemporary usages had it, managed in profitable quasi-mass production. By the late 19th century, a new layer of complexity is introduced to the theoretical underpinnings of management (Bennis, 1989). The first tertiary-level course in management in 1881 is offered. Management of People provides managers and human resource professionals with skills and knowledge for managing the people aspects of strategic implementation (McWilliams, Abagail, and Siegel 1999). In the early 21st century, it was easy to see the development of a "third wave" in these well-established concepts (Stacey, 1992). Just as the 21st century has seen new types of organizations and new ways of doing business arise, so, too, will there