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Hello, and welcome to this tutorial on management styles. Now, as always with these tutorials, please feel free to fast forward, pause, or rewind as many times as you need in order to get the most out of the time you're going to spend here.
So let me ask you a question. What tools exist for managers to get their jobs done? And is it preferable, or is it even wanted for managers to have different style sets in order to get that job done that you've assigned to them? Well, during this lesson today, we're going to be looking at style and motivation. We're also going to be looking at different management styles that are out there.
Well, first we're going to look at style and motivation. Now, part of being a manager, part of management is motivation. It's motivating your employees to do the best that they can. Motivation, to put it quite simply, is providing a reason to work and for the employees to work in the organization's best interest.
There are lots of different management styles on the part of the managers that they can choose from at any given time. And it's important to understand, especially if you're a manager, that people have different motivators. And managers have different styles to encourage and manage those employees and trigger those motivators within the employee himself.
Now, the management styles we're going to talk about, individuals have a different styles that they go to, and so do organizations. Individual and organizational factors are going to help determine what style an individual manager may or may not use. Now, independent management styles depend on the personality of that particular manager, the intelligence and the self-confidence. In addition, that corporate culture, the organizational factors we're talking about, could influence an individual management style and how they choose to approach an employee or manage a particular portion of the business. Now, both of these styles are going to get together and they're going to help determine what given style a manager is going to use at any given time.
Let's take a look at some of these individual management styles. So the first one is autocratic, or the autocratic management style. Now, UPS is an example of a company who uses this. And it's simply my way or the highway. You will do it the way we tell you to do it, or, well, you can just leave. Now, the pros to this style is decision making is very, very clear. My way or the highway-- there is only one option. The cons, however, is it could be antagonizing to some people who really don't like that straightforward, autocratic style of management.
Now, the second one we're going to look at is the democratic management style. Saturn Auto is an auto company that recently went bankrupt back in the early 2000s. What Saturn Auto used was this democratic management style. And basically it comes down to, hey, let's take a vote on it. So everybody gets a say on the decisions that are made on a daily basis.
Now, the pros are everybody feels included, and you get this sense of empowerment throughout the company. The cons are, well, it slows down decisions, because you have to wait for everybody to put their $0.2 in order to get anything done.
The next one is free-rein, or free-rein management style. And this is something that Apple Computer uses. And basically, this is every man for himself. Now, the pros to this particular management style is it empowers employees to make ideas, to make creative ideas, things that are good for the company and good for the organization. And if you think about Apple's run, those decisions and those good creative ideas that they've made along the way, have helped catapult it to a very, very prominent spot in the world of business today.
Now, the cons of this, well, you're going to have inconsistent results as you work through this process. Every man for himself can simply mean sometimes that every man gets to take a break, or do something else that's more interesting to them. And in this case, deadlines that you really, really, really need to meet can be missed along the way.
The next one we're going to talk about is the contingency style. Now, this is a style where you adapt the style to a given situation at the moment. The pros for this is it can be very flexible, because you're using a different style of management depending on the given situation that you're faced with. So it can be pretty effective that way.
The con, on the other hand, is that employees can sometimes be confused. They're not sure if you're going to use one or the other, or what their part in it is, or maybe how much say they have in the decisions that are being made. Now, understand that most companies are going to use a contingency approach, and especially they're going to change as deadlines start coming due quicker or they start getting shorter. You may start off with something like free rein and move to a democratic approach. But as time gets really tight, you're going to see the move to a more autocratic style in order to make those deadlines and do the things they need to do in a timely manner.
So what did we talk about today? Well, first of all, we looked at style and motivation, how those different styles of leadership might affect the motivation of your employees. And we also looked at those different management styles that organizations and individuals alike rely on in order to get their jobs done as managers-- autocratic, democratic, free rein, and the contingency approach all have a place in modern day management.
As always, I want to thank you for spending some time with me, and I hope you have a great day.