Contextual Management : A Global Perspective

Contextual Management will help you and/or your organization make effective managerial placements that are meaningful for individuals and productive for organizations. It does so by providing a framework that identifies managerial positions in terms of three administrative levels—executive, managerial, and supervisory—and three organizational cultures—paternalistic, bureaucratic, and synergistic. This allows the student and the professional manager to identify the requisites of a particular position and its context. Then one can decide whether or not there is a fit between the position and the individual''s personal needs and preferences. Each chapter is followed by assessment questions and suggestions for further readings to help the individual seek positions wherein he/she can be at his/her productive best and most effective.

Senior executives, middle managers, supervisors, administrators, and other students of administrative behavior need to know why harnessing human energies demands a full understanding of organizational and cultural contexts combined with a knowledge of personality characteristics--of self and others. In response to this need, Contextual Management: A Global Perspective addresses the art of getting things done in today''s organizational world. It offers managers guidelines for working under a varied set of circumstances and explores ways to increase administrative effectiveness in organizations worldwide.

Contextual Management integrates different administrative levels and various organizational cultures with appropriate management styles and personal attributes to help you recognize the position context where you can be most effective. Using its self-assessment questions, you can gauge your strengths, weaknesses, and requisites for particular administrative position roles and contexts. You can also use tools from the book''s appendix to help you assess personality attributes as well as the characteristics of a particular position context. You will put your individual experiences into perspective and enhance your understanding of organizational realities as you read about:

• individual managerial behavioral relationships
  
• organizational designs, job configurations, and CEO orientations
  
• recruiting, placing, motivating, and supporting your staff
  
• identifying a particular unit''s work culture and recognizing its characteristics
  
• why a supervisor must be personable to be able to carry out instructions from superiors while gaining allegiance from subordinates
  
• assuring ''good fits’of administrative personnel in various organizational systems
  
• goals--the logical stepping stones for initiating the process of implementation
  
• the constraints particular work systems place on the relationships between managers and others within an organization

Appropriate styles of performance, as Contextual Management illustrates, are contextual, not universal. The fact that you are effective in one environment doesn''t mean you will be effective in another. With this book, though, you can change your thinking about functions of leadership, decision making, communication, planning, and implementation and realize congruence in whichever environmental niche your organization moves into next!