Managerial Behaviour Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Managerial Behaviour - Essay Example We were responsible for development, design and implementation of a website for a retail company which was aimed at enabling it to receive online orders directly from its customers. The project was planned to be completed in 6 months and was led by a manager, who was already working on two other projects. However, within a short period of 2 months, there arose drastic conflicts between team members and manager had to intervene to resolve them promptly so that the project would not suffer. 1. How does the manager undertake the activity being studied? When the matter reached the manager, he developed sound knowledge of background and circumstances of the situation before arriving at any conclusions or resolutions. Soon it was revealed that the bone of contention was partially the manager himself. The complexities of matrix structuring and ambiguous project requirements made it difficult for the team members to be clear about their team roles and duties and allocation of resources. This in turn was caused by the manager’s minimal input in the project and absence from most of the team briefings. His negligence towards this specific project had caused role conflicts and low morale amongst the members. The manager diagnosed the nature of conflict and identified that the team members were blaming each other for delay in designing a phase of the website. As a result a milestone, which was to be achieved 2 weeks back, was still in progress while 3 specialists responsible for it were finding a scapegoat for this setback. With no proper delegation and allocation of tasks, there were clashes as to who was responsible to complete which process. They claimed that the resources were not sufficient and time was wasted due to unavailability of website development tools simultaneously to each of them. Manager decided to focus his attention on this project to get it back on track according to initial project plan. He allotted each member equal tasks according to their skil ls and strengths and scheduled the processes to facilitate the sharing of resources. Project had limited funds and therefore it wasn’t possible for him to arrange for more and therefore it was necessary to ensure completion within the given manpower and equipment. He drafted formal role definitions for each of the members to avoid any ambiguities and confusion regarding what was expected to be contributed by each of them. His attention was substantially needed in areas of controlling and monitoring since the project was lagging behind schedule. He mobilized the resources and ensured effective and efficient utilization of each member’s core competences and resources available, diverting resources from stronger areas and focusing them on those more in need of them. He held team meetings and conducted one-on-one sessions to address concerns of each member, educate them with project requirements and deadlines, familiarize himself with the entire team and boost their morale through empathizing skills. He also encouraged members to feel free to contact him in person and whistleblow about other members if necessary. After taking updates on progress of each task, he compared them with the planned timetables and appraised performances accordingly. Since thereafter, he gave equal attention to this project and finally completed the project successfully,