Contemporary Management Approaches

The various classical approaches laid the foundations or organisations that still exist today. The approaches sought to provide managers with skills and techniques to confront the important issues. The classical approach focused on the basic managerial functions, co-ordination of work and supervision. However it does fail to address the important issue of the role of external environment in determining success.

The next phase of this essay will describe the contemporary approaches to management.

After World War II, analytical methods developed by the military during the war effort began to be used in business decision making. The quantitative approach to management incorporates many analytical and numeric techniques into management methods.

Systems theories and perspectives can effectively contribute to management, marketing and service research due to their dual approach (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 2006)

Contingency Theory is the leader's ability to lead upon various situational factors, including the leader's preferred style, the capabilities and behaviours of followers and also various other situational factors. Contingency theories are a class of behavioural theory that contend that there is no one best way of leading and that a leadership style that is effective in some situations may not be successful in others. An effect of this is that leaders who are very effective at one place and time may become unsuccessful either when transplanted to another situation or when the factors around them change. This helps to explain how some leaders who seem for a while to have the 'Midas touch' suddenly appear to go off the boil and make very unsuccessful decisions. Midas is a Greek word to describe someone that is calm cool and collected, everything they touch seems to turn into a pot of gold. Contingency Theory is

His principle focus was on the quality at the end of the finished product. Total quality management (TQM) is defined as "managing the entire organization so that it excels in all dimensions of products and services that are important to the customer." As the definition states, this philosophy concentrates on quality as a primary component of the organization's drive for competitive advantage. TQM can be a very costly and time-consuming process. Speed and quality are essential to the concept of TQM as they are to product development and the efforts by firms. Organisations are discovering that the concept of TQM has some practical hazards that make complete implementation difficult. Specifically, Not all employees are capable of or desire to be empowered, it can be difficult to motivate