Business Studies · Ch 7 — Directing
Key Terms
Key Terms
- Directing – The managerial function of instructing, guiding, counselling, motivating, and leading people in an organisation so that its objectives are achieved.
- Supervision – Overseeing the work of subordinates at the operative level, guiding their efforts and ensuring optimum use of resources and achievement of work targets.
- Motives – Inner states that energise, activate, or direct a person's behaviour toward a goal, arising out of their needs (e.g. hunger, security, affiliation, recognition).
- Motivation – The process of stimulating people to action to accomplish desired goals; it depends on satisfying people's needs.
- Incentives – All measures used to motivate people to improve performance, classified as financial (pay, bonus, profit sharing) and non-financial (status, recognition, job enrichment).
- Self actualisation – The highest level in Maslow's Need Hierarchy: the drive to become what one is capable of becoming, through growth, self-fulfilment, and achievement of goals.
- Egoistic needs – Maslow's esteem needs: self-respect, autonomy, status, recognition, and attention.
- Leadership – The process of influencing the behaviour of people so that they strive willingly toward the achievement of group/organisational goals.
- Trait approach – The view that leadership effectiveness comes from a leader possessing certain personal qualities — such as courage, will power, judgement, knowledge, integrity, and decisiveness — though no single individual holds all of them.
- Communication – The process of exchanging ideas, views, facts, feelings, etc., between two or more people to create a common understanding.
- Encoding – Converting a message into communication symbols such as words, pictures, or gestures, so it can be transmitted to the receiver.
- Decoding – Converting the sender's encoded symbols back into a message the receiver can understand.
- Feedback – All those actions of the receiver that indicate they have received and understood the sender's message, completing the communication loop.
- Semanticism – Semantic barriers to communication: obstructions arising from badly expressed messages, words or symbols with different meanings, faulty translation, or technical jargon.
- Formal communication – Communication that flows through the official channels designed in the organisation structure — upward, downward, or horizontal.
- Informal communication – Communication that arises out of employees' needs to exchange views outside formal channels; also called the grapevine.
- Profit sharing – A financial incentive that gives employees a share in the profits of the organisation, motivating them to contribute to increased profitability. …