Introduction to Management
Chapter 3: values, attitudes, emotions, and culture
The manager as a person
Personality Trait: tendency to feel, think & act in a certain way
Big Five Personality Traits:
1. Extraversion: having positive feelings and feeling good
about oneself and the world. Individuals with high
extraversion are sociable, affectionate & outgoing.
Individuals with low extraversion are less sociable & less
positive
2. Negative affectivity (NA): experiencing negative feelings,
being distressed & critical of oneself & others. Individuals
with high NA are angry & complain about their work and
the work of others. Individuals with low NA are less
negative & less critical.
3. Agreeableness: getting along well with others. Individuals
with high agreeableness are likable, affectionate, & care
about others. Individuals with low agreeableness are
distrustful, unsympathetic, & can be antagonistic
(aggressive), and they are needed in some management
positions. low is coming as MCQ
4. Conscientiousness: tendency to be careful, organized, on
time & trustworthy. Individuals with high
Conscientiousness are organized & self-disciplined.
Individuals with low Conscientiousness are less organized &
have low self discipline.
5. Openness to experience: being original, having broad
interests, willing to take risks, and try new things .It’s the
personality trait that results in more innovation (important
for the exam). Individuals with high openness to experience
are willing to take risks in their planning & decision making,
and this results in higher innovation. Individuals who have
low openness to experience don’t take many risks & they
have conservative planning & decision making.
Locus (focus) of control:
Internal locus of control: the belief that you are responsible
for all outcomes, success and failure in your life
External locus of control: the belief that outside forces are
responsible for all success, outcomes & failure in your life
People with ILC are more successful
Attitude: feelings & beliefs
There are two attitudes:
1. Job satisfaction: collection of feelings & beliefs towards a job.
People who have JS have a positive view of their jobs
Factors of job satisfaction:
• are more likely to do volunteer to do extra work
• are less likely to quit their jobs.
Job satisfaction  doing extra work  saying positive things
about the organization in public  sharing knowledge and
training other/new employees  all these is organizational
citizenship behaviors (OCB)
organizational citizenship behavior: is behavior that aren’t
required by the organization, but employees do them to give their
organization a competitive advantage
2. Organizational commitment: collection of feelings & beliefs
towards the organization
• Believe in what the organization is doing
• Proud of what the company stands for
• Do extra work
• Less likely to quit
Emotional Intelligence: the ability to understand ones emotions
& feeling, and control them, and also understand the feelings &
emotions of others.
• Managers who have high emotional intelligence can
understand their feelings & control them so that their feelings
& emotions will not affect their decision making.
Questions that will come in the exam:
1. What is the main positive effect of high emotional
intelligence? effective decision making
Introduction to Management
Chapter 7: Decision Making, Learning, Creativity,
and Entrepreneurship
Decision making: the process of responding to opportunities 2. The administrative model: decision making is risky &
and threats by analyzing the options and making a choice that
uncertain and managers/people can never make decisions
results in achieving organizational goals
based on the classical model
Types of decisions:
• bounded rationality: there is a large number of
Programmed: repetitive routine decisions, rules or guidelines
alternative & too much info, so people can’t consider
for theses decisions, very little ambiguity and low risks
all of them when making decisions
• Example: choosing what to wear, choosing where to park
• Incomplete info: risk & uncertainty, ambiguity, time
your car, ordering office supplies, hiring new employees as
constraints, and info costs
the demand increases
Risk: when the possible outcomes are known & you can assign
Non programmed: non routine decisions made in response to probability for success and failure. E.g. 90% chance of success. If
new opportunities and threats.
the question has a percentage it’s always risk
• Example: opening a new branch in a new city. Developing a Uncertainty: can’t give probabilities because the outcome is
new products.
unknown
Those decisions are made through:
Ambiguity: info who’s meaning can be interpreted in different
1. Intuition: feelings, beliefs, gut feelings and hunches that and sometimes opposite ways
comes readily when presented with a new opportunities Time constraints & information costs: it takes time & money to
or threats. Decisions are fast, without gathering
collect info
information & “on the spot”
Cognitive bias:
• Example: manager making a decision on the spot 1. Prior hypothesis bias: prior strong belief about a
2. Reasoned judgement: takes time & effort to gather
relationship between two variables that affect decision
information, list alternative (option) &choose an
making. E.g. certain foods  illness
alternative
2. Representativeness (generalization): generalizing from a
There are three decision making models under RJ:
small sample or one single incident. E.g. all this nationality
1. The Classical Model of Decision Making: assumes
are smart, female dentists are not a good as male dentists
optimum (perfect) decisions. It requires:
3. Illusion of control: the tendency to overestimate one’s
• Listing all possible alternatives (options) & their
control over events, activities and time. E.g. a manager
consequences (results/outcomes). The problem
believed a project will take 2 weeks, and it didn’t finish
with this is that it assumes that people can have all
before 2 months
the information about options and outcomes
4. Escalating commitment: committing considerable resources
• Rank the alternatives based on personal
when all evidence show that a project is failing. E.g. any
preferences. The problem with this is that it
managers that will not give up on a failing project, and is
assumes that people always have the mental
continuing to try and make it work
capacity to assess options
• Select the alternative or option that has the best
future outcomes. The problem with this is that it
assumes that people/managers can’t predict the
future outcomes of alternatives.
Six steps in decision making:
1. Recognize the need to make a decision (most important
step)
2. Generate alternatives (list as many options as possible)
3. Evaluate alternatives (evaluate all options & rank them
from best to worst)
Evaluating criteria/system (assessed in sequence):
• Legality: is this legal? Managers should follow rules
and laws
• Ethicalness: is the option ethical? E.g. environmental
implications, animal/human testing, working
conditions
• Economic feasibility: is it affordable? Possible?
• Practicality: is this option doable?
4. Choose among alternatives: choose the best option
5. Implement the chosen alternative (most difficult step)
6. Learn from feedback: consider what went right and what
went wrong in the decision making. Compare what actually
happened after you made your decision to your
expectation
Introduction to Management
Chapter 9: Value Chain Management: Functional Strategies for Competitive Advantage
Product development function: creating a new product idea or
developing a current product (ideas on paper, on a computer, or
creating prototypes)
Marketing function: customers are informed of the new product &
that they need it and need to buy it
Materials management: controls the movement & storage of raw
materials & products until they are distributed to customers
Production: making the finished goods (products or services)
Sales: locating customers, informing them about the new products
and services and convince them to buy
Customer service: after sale support and services
How to improve the four building blocks of competitive advantage:
1. Improving responsiveness to customers: focusing on customer
needs and feedback
• Lower prices, high quality products
• Good customer service
• Offer products with more features
• Offer products with unique design to satisfy special
customer needs
2. Improving quality:
• Total quality management (TQM) which refers to the
improvement of all six activities in the value chain
• Find ways to measure quality
• Get input about quality from customers & employees
• Identify defects and trace them to fix them
3. Improving efficiency
• Just in time (JIT): inventory storing system at which
companies get raw materials when the material is needed
for production to minimize storing time, cut costs, and
increase efficiency
• Facility layout:
 1. product layout: machines and work stations are
organized in sequence
 2. process layout: the workstations are fully equipped and
have no sequence (works for trying to make new product)
 3. fixed position layout: product stays in a fixed spot and
all components/parts are brought to it
Value chain: a series of functional activities necessary to
transform input into output (finished goods/services) that
have value to customers, & customers want to buy it
Inputs: raw materials & component parts, creative ideas of
products and services, market research
Change by: people, machines, computers, skills
Change to outputs: products or services

The two types of innovation are quantum (results in the
development of an entirely new product/service. This is
associated with a shift in tech e.g. inventing TV) and
incremental ( involves gradual improvement to existing
products/services e.g. plasma TV / electric cars)
4. Improving innovation (happens in stage one of the value
chain ‘product development function):
• Involving customers and suppliers & getting their
feedback
• Establish cross-functional teams: involve
employees from different functional activities such
as marketing, production & sales to work together
in developing new products and services
• Stage-gate development funnel which is a
technique that forces managers to choose among
competing new ideas so that resources are used to
develop only one or two new products or services
that are likely to be profitable