chapter - Pearson

Chapter 1
Organizational Behavior and Management
13
with employees once a year to perform basic organizational tasks like passenger
check-in and baggage handling to demonstrate Southwest’s team approach to leading
employees.
Controlling
Monitoring and evaluating individual,
group, and organizational performance
to see whether organizational
goals are being achieved.
Controlling. In controlling, managers monitor and evaluate individual, group, and
organizational performance to see whether organizational goals are being achieved.
If goals are being met, managers can take action to maintain and improve performance;
if goals are not being met, managers must take corrective action. The controlling
function also allows managers to evaluate how well they are performing their
planning, organizing, and leading functions.
Once again, the theories and concepts of organizational behavior allow managers
to understand and accurately diagnose work situations in order to pinpoint
where corrective action may be needed. Suppose the members of a group are not
working effectively together. The problem might be due to personality conflicts
between individual members of the group, to the faulty leadership approach of a
supervisor, or to poor job design. Organizational behavior provides tools managers
can use to diagnose which of these possible explanations is the source of the problem,
and it enables managers to make an informed decision about how to correct the
problem. Control at all levels of the organization is impossible if managers do not
possess the necessary organizational behavior tools.
The way in which Marjorie Scardino transformed her company after several
years of declining performance vividly demonstrates not only the importance of the
management control function but also the way successful planning, organizing, and
leading depend on a manager’s ability to take quick corrective action. (See Insight 1.2.)
INSIGHT M A N A G E M E N T 1.2
BIG CHANGES AT PEARSON
In 1995, Britain’s Pearson PLC owned companies as different
as the London-based Financial Times and The Economist magazine,
Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, Royal Doulton
China, Lazard Freres investment bank, and U.S. textbook
publisher Addison-Wesley. Perhaps not surprisingly, Pearson’s managers were having
a difficult time planning and controlling the activities of these diverse businesses,
and the company’s performance was declining as a result. Searching for a way to turn
the company around, Pearson’s chairman decided to appoint Marjorie Scardino, the
chief executive of Pearson’s Economist Group, as the CEO of the whole Pearson
company.
Scardino, a native Texan, who includes among her earlier activities operating a
Gulf Coast shrimp boat and managing a Savannah law firm, took a radical new
approach to managing Pearson. She began with a whole new approach to planning
Pearson’s operations. She decided that henceforth Pearson would solely be a media
and publishing group with cutting-edge Internet-based applications in all its businesses.
9 She moved quickly to sell Pearson’s nonmedia assets such as Madame
Tussaud’s (which was sold to Walt Disney) and Royal Doulton (which was sold to the
Wedgwood-Waterford Group). She then used the proceeds of these sales to make
over $5 billion in media and publishing acquisitions including Putnam books and
Prentice Hall (the publisher of this book). Then, she combined these new businesses