The formal lines of management authority give a misleading picture of how good management works. There must be an organization structure, but the formally defined relationships of which it is composed are no more the reality of management than the rules of football are the game itself. Organization charts are necessarily based on the definition of responsibilities, and taken by themselves give the impression that management consists of instructions handed down by superiors to subordinates. In practice good management does not work like this, it works through co-operation among members of teams. The manager is not so much an order giver as a co-coordinator of the skills of the members of his team.
He has the formal authority to overrule members of the team because in the last resort he is responsible for what is done, but if his normal approach is authoritarian he cannot be using his subordinates abilities to full advantage. There is a distinction between employee-centered and job-centered supervision. Job-centered supervision proceeds by breaking the total operation into simple components, selecting people to do them, training these people, supervising them to see that they do the work properly, and wherever possible providing a monetary incentive scheme to get the required motivation. In this system the initiative and decisions rest with management and operatives are merely required to carry out instructions. leia todo o artigo
