Mgt 521 - the Role of Management

The Role of Management

Noemi Silva

MGT/521

February 5, 2014

Carlos Campos

The Role of Management

A functional area, as defined by BusinessDictionary.com, is a grouping of activities or processes on the basis of their need in accomplishing one or more tasks. There are several functional areas of business. Having a thorough understanding of each of these areas is vital to the successful management of a business. Managers must have a plan that allows these different functional areas of business to operate effectively both individually and as a whole. Although all functional areas of business are important this paper focuses on five in which management plays the most important role. These five areas are: human resources, accounting, operations management, strategic planning, and leadership. The role a manager must play within each area differs from area to area.

Human resources department handles the hiring, orientation, training, and evaluation of employees. It establishes pay scales and provides information about employee benefits. The human resources department also handles allocation of resources. These are its main responsibilities but not the only ones. “The purpose of this department is not only to achieve by harnessing the potential of human resources, material, and financial results at large, but to create an environment for their fulfillment.” (Anca-Ioana, 2013). Here in lies the role of management in the human resource functional area. It is key that managers provide the right environment for the human resources department to function.

The accounting department works behind the scenes to ensure a business’s finances stay on track. They identify and record cash collections, cash payments, procurement and inventory, and property accounting. Managements role in the accounting business function is to support competitive decision making by collecting, processing, and communicating information that helps upper management plan, control, and evaluate business processes and company strategy. This is a key function because a business needs to know where its money is coming from and where it is going in order to be successful.

Management’s role in the operations management area of functional business is pretty obvious. As the name implies a manager in operations management must manage operations. Defining operations is not that simple though. So what a operations manager does differs from company to company. Typically it is the operations manager’s responsibility to ensure that the various moving parts of the business that contributes to the production of the business’s good or service run smoothly. This means that the