!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> Streamline Training & Documentation: Management Styles and Management Practices in Asia

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Management Styles and Management Practices in Asia

A useful study of the prevalence of various management styles in Vietnam (more tomorrow) builds on previous work by Asian researchers concerning management styles and management practices.1 This work is of interest because it reflects first-hand familiarity with the cultural characteristics of businesses located in Asian countries.

In a 1995 paper, Pradip Khandwalla, former director of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, defines these ten management styles (slightly edited):2

Conservative
  • Bias for preserving and extending whatever has worked.

  • Cautious in innovating and/or changing status quo.

  • Predisposes the organisation to related diversification and growth in familiar directions.

  • Uses traditions that preserve the strengths of the past.
Entrepreneurial
  • Indulges in calculated risk taking, pioneering, innovation, and rapid growth.

  • Necessary for a developing country to diversfy its industrial base and expand its output rapidly.
Professional
  • Adapts scientific optimisation-oriented approach to management.

  • Uses sophisticated management tools and techniques.

  • Undertakes long-range planning.

  • Useful for managing new and complicated technology-intensive industries in complex, globalisation environments.
Bureaucratic
  • Emphasises orderly management, accountability, and formalisation of rules, regulations, and procedures.

  • Used widely in large organisations and the public sector to ensure accountability, equity, orderliness and operating efficiency.
Organic
  • Deep commitment to flexibility, innovation, responsiveness to change, teamwork, and interactive feedback-based decision making.

  • Useful for operating in fast-changing environments.
Authoritarian
  • Emphasises discipline and obedience.

  • Perceived to be useful in situations of weak work ethic and a hostile task environment.
Participative
  • Committed to an ideology of collective, consensus-based decision-making.

  • Useful in ensuring that diverse perspectives are voiced and that information is shared by those affected by a decision before taking the decision.

  • Tends to foster motivation and cooperation.
Intuitive
  • Shows faith in experience, common sense, and intuitive judgment based on good rules of thumb or heuristics learned from experience.
Familial
  • Anchored in the notion that for cohesiveness and loyalty, the organisation must treat its employees like members of the family and look after their needs.
Altruistic
  • Believes in the philosophy that the organisation is an instrumentality of some larger social good, not just aiming for profit maximisation.

  • Of particular relevance in developing societies that have embarked on major nation-building and poverty alleviation goals.
Refik Culpan and Orsay Kucukemiroglu, management professors at Pennsylvania State University, define these six categories of management practices (slightly edited):3

Supervisory style — assessed in terms of:
  • Amount of discretion given to subordinates

  • Degree of delegation of authority to employees

  • Consistency in soliciting worker inputs

  • Freedom of employees to schedule their own work

  • Democratic supervision

  • Only supervisor handling work problems

  • Decisions and work problems delayed in supervisor’s absence

  • Supervisory back-up for his/her employees

  • Amount of direction given from top

  • Closeness of supervision
Decision making — assessed in terms of:
  • Consistency in soliciting worker inputs

  • Tackling unusual work problems

  • Trying innovative methods and products

  • Number of suggestions from employees

  • Wasting time and effort by incorrect estimates

  • Accepting unpopular projects

  • Initiating improvements

  • Decision delegation to the lowest level

  • Consensus decision making

  • Employee participation in decision making

  • Amount of supervisory direction

  • Individual decision making

  • Employee freedom to select their own course of action
Communication pattern — assessed in terms of:
  • Supervisory awareness of unit performance in meeting standards

  • Free flow of information

  • Supervisors’ awareness of things happening within unit

  • Complaints reaching top management

  • Employee unawareness of changes in policies and directives

  • Frequency of communications being blocked
Control mechanism — assessed in terms of:
  • Managers being on top of everything

  • Emphasising production as a goal

  • Freedom of workers to schedule their own work

  • Democratic supervision

  • Relying on the unit without checking

  • Follow-ups and checking on goal realisation

  • Closeness of supervision
Interdepartmental relations — assessed in terms of:
  • Providing assistance to other units for favours

  • Making trades and deals with other units

  • Bargaining with other units

  • Frictions with other units

  • Criticism by other units for being uncooperative

  • Getting into conflict with other units
Paternalistic orientation — assessed in terms of:
  • Involvment in family matters of employees

  • Helping employees with non-work-related matters
In reading through the above categorizations, one gets a good sense of what variables need to be considered in cross-cultural management research.

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1 Truong Quang and Nguyen Tai Vuong, "Management Styles and Organisational Effectiveness in Vietnam," Research and Practice in Human Resource Management, Vol. 10, pp. 36-55.

2 Pradip N. Khandwalla, "Effective Management Styles: An Indian Study,"Journal of Euro-Asian Management Vol 1 (1995), pp. 173-184. An abstract of the working paper version is here.

3 Refik Culpan and Orsay Kucukemiroglu, "A Comparison of US and Japanese Management Styles and Unit Effectiveness," Management International Review, Vol. 33 (1993), pp. 27-42.

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