What is management by objectives? What are its advantages and disadvantages?

Objective management is a modern management method that is goal-oriented, people-centered, and results-oriented, which enables organizations and individuals to achieve optimal performance.

Objective management is also known as "results-based management". It refers to the active participation of individual workers in the enterprise, from top to bottom to determine the work objectives, and in the work of the implementation of "self-control", bottom-up to ensure the realization of the objectives of a management approach.

Advantages

①Objective management will bring good performance to the objectives that are easy to measure and decompose in the organization. For those who are technically divisible work, due to the responsibility, task clear goal management often play an immediate effect, while for the technical inseparable team work is difficult to implement goal management.

②Objective management helps to improve the organizational structure of the division of responsibilities. As the results of the organizational goals and responsibilities are trying to be assigned to a position or department, it is easy to find insufficient authorization and unclear responsibilities and other defects.

③Target management inspires self-consciousness and mobilizes the initiative, enthusiasm and creativity of workers. It improves morale because it emphasizes self-control, self-regulation, and the close linkage of individual and organizational interests.　

④Goal management promotes the exchange of ideas and mutual understanding and improves interpersonal relationships.

Disadvantages:

① Objectives are difficult to set. Many goals in the organization are difficult to quantify and specify; many team work is technically unsolvable; there are more and more variables in the organizational environment, which are changing more and more rapidly, and the internal activities of the organization are becoming more and more complex, which makes the uncertainty of the organizational activities more and more. These make it difficult to set quantitative goals for many of the organization's activities.

②The philosophical assumptions of management by objectives do not always exist. Theory Y makes overly optimistic assumptions about human motivation, and in reality, people have an "opportunistic nature", especially in the case of poor supervision. Therefore, in many cases, it is difficult to create the atmosphere of commitment, self-awareness and autonomy required by management by objectives.

3 target agreement may increase management costs. Targets agreed to communicate up and down, unified thinking is very time-consuming; each unit, individuals are concerned about the completion of their own goals, it is likely to ignore the mutual cooperation and the realization of organizational goals, and promote localism, temporary views and quick success tendency.

4 Sometimes rewards and penalties may not always be able to match the results of the objectives, and it is difficult to ensure fairness, thus weakening the effect of goal management.

Expanded:

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The guiding principle of goal management is based on the "Y theory" of management psychology, which holds that people can be held accountable for their own actions when their goals are clearly defined. Its theoretical basis is the psychology and organizational behavior in the goal theory. That is, any organizational system that sets goals and emphasizes the evaluation of the results of the goals can improve the efficiency of the organization and the satisfaction of the employees.

The purpose of management by objectives is to motivate employees through the incentive of objectives, thus ensuring the achievement of the overall goal. Its core is to clarify and pay attention to the evaluation of results, and advocate the self-improvement of individual ability, which is characterized by the objectives as a guide to the management activities, and to achieve the results of the objectives to assess the size of their contribution.

The central idea of goal management is to specify the development of the organization's goals to become each member of the organization, each level, department, etc., the direction of behavior and incentives, and at the same time to make it become the evaluation of each member of the organization, each level, department, etc., the standard of performance, in order to make the organization can be effectively run.

The basic content of goal management is to mobilize all employees to participate in the development of goals and objectives to ensure the achievement of goals, that is, by the organization's superiors and subordinates together to agree on the organization's *** with the goal, and its specificity to the organization's various departments, each level, each member. With each unit, department, level and members of the organization's responsibility and results are closely linked to each other, in the implementation of the objectives of the process should be based on the objectives to determine the scope of responsibility of the upper and lower levels, the upper authority to decentralize the lower level to achieve self-management.

In the process of assessing the results, these objectives are strictly used as the evaluation and reward criteria, the implementation of self-assessment and the combination of superior assessment. In this way, the final organization to form an all-round, all-process, multi-level goal management system, improve the leadership ability of superiors, stimulate the enthusiasm of subordinates, to ensure that the goal is achieved.

Target management within the organization to establish a system of interrelated goals, and this system of organic organization of employees, so that the collective strength can be played, while the implementation of target management means that the organization's management of the democratization of the staff management of self-control, the results of the management of the target. So target management is in fact a kind of overall, democratic, conscious and results-based management. This is the charm of goal management.

The goal system is the whole organization's overall view to examine the organizational goals, the goal network is to work from a specific goal of the overall coordination of the implementation of planning. If the various goals are not interrelated, not coordinated or mutually unsupportive, then members of the organization will be self-interested and take the path that is beneficial to the department and detrimental to the company as a whole. The connotation of a network of goals is reflected in the following parties.

(1) goals and plans are not linear, that is, not the realization of one goal and then go to another goal, goals and planning to form an interconnected network.

(2) Managers in an organization must ensure that each component of the goal network is coordinated.

(3) Departments in an organization must coordinate with other departments in setting their own departmental goals.

(4) Organizations must coordinate with many constraints when setting their own goals.

According to the expectancy theory of the American managerial psychologist Victor Frum, the degree of motivation or effort (motivating force) that people put into their work tun is the product of potency and expectancy. Among them, the valence refers to a person's evaluation of a certain work and its results (achievable goals) can bring their own degree of satisfaction, that is, the evaluation of the usefulness of the goal of the work (value); the expected value refers to the possibility of people on their own to be able to successfully complete the work of the possibility of the probability of the work of the probability of the goal of the work can be achieved.

Thus, a goal must be acceptable and accomplishable if it is to be motivating to its recipient. A goal is not motivating to a goal achiever if it is more than he or she is capable of achieving.

Divided by the main content of the goal

From the content of organizational goals, an organization usually has many goals, but no matter what the organization, for-profit or non-profit organizations whose goals include four main aspects, namely, financial goals, environmental goals, participant goals and survival goals.

(1) Financial goals. Involves the organization's capital costs and other financial aspects of the goals.

For the enterprise, economic efficiency is the first task, and the objectives in this regard include the level of profit, the rate of return on investment, the level of productivity and sales revenue.

(2) environmental objectives. The main description of the relationship between the organization and the external environment, including the adaptability to environmental changes, growth, social responsibility and market share and other objectives.

(3) Participant goals. Involve people in the organization. Objective variables include employee turnover, absenteeism, and some non-quantifiable factors such as employee satisfaction, training and development of personnel, and quality of work life.

(4) Survival objectives. Survival is the basic objective of all organizations. Any organization must revitalize organizational vitality and prevent decline and corruption in order to survive and thrive.

References:

Baidu Encyclopedia - Management by Objectives