The “Management by Objective” (MBO) approach, in the sense that it requires all managers to set specific objectives to be achieved in the future and encourages them to continually ask what more can be done, is offered as a partial answer to this question of organizational vitality and creativity.
Such temporary rules are important in order for the organization to take action from day to day, but they also must be seen as forever imperfect and in need of continual improvement. This behavior of managers is sometimes called “disagree and commit”—a necessary skill in the exercise of authority in organizations that value and preserve diversity.
Although they may be in favor of the change and willing to encourage those who perform in the desired manner, they will try to avoid taking action in connection with the nonperformers. If managers are allowed to ignore dysfunctional behavior, the organization again is sending out conflicting messages to its employees.
John Sample Organizations accomplish their goals and objectives through effective utilization of human, financial, informational, and material resources. Appraising performance is one of the most important functions of any developer of human resources.
MBO easily can be misused and often is. What is supposed to be a system that allows for dialogue and growth between boss and subordinate with a view to achieving results often degenerates into a system in which the boss puts constant pressure on the subordinate to produce results and forgets about using MBO for commitment, desire to contribute, and management development. Sometimes even well intentioned managers misuse MBO because they do not have the interpersonal skills or knowledge of human needs to keep their appraisal sessions from becoming critical, chewing-out periods. Finally, many managers have a tendency to see MBO as a total system that, once installed, can handle all management problems. This has led to forcing issues on the MBO system that it is not equipped to handle and that frustrate whatever good effects it might have on the issues with which it is designed to deal.
Having achieved an adequate level of intellectual development, most individuals in our society should be capable of Level-III interactions by early to mid-adolescence. However, in reality, as a study by Kohlberg (1968) shows, by age sixteen only about a third of the adolescents questioned gave Level-III responses on issues of moral judgment.
No matter what form the MBO approach takes in a given organization, it is essentially a process that helps to (a) direct managers’ attention toward results, (b) force members of the organization to commit themselves to specific achievement, and (c) facilitate their thinking in terms of their organization’s future needs and the setting of objectives to meet those needs. In addition, the MBO approach can supply the manager with greater measures of three of the tools he or she needs to make the best use of the organization’s greatest resource: people. The manager can: 1. Gain greater commitment and desire to contribute from subordinates by (a) allowing them to feel that the objectives they are working toward were not just handed to them but are really theirs because they played a part in formulating them, (b) giving subordinates a better sense of where they fit in the organization by making clear how the subordinates’ objectives fit into the overall picture, and (c) injecting a vitality into organizational life that comes with the energy produced as a worker strives to achieve a goal to which he or she has taken the psychological and (sometimes economic) risk to commit. 2. Gain better control and coordination toward goal accomplishment by (a) having a clearer picture of who is doing what and how the parts all fit together, (b) having subordinates who are more likely to control and coordinate their own activities because they know what will help and what will hinder their goal achievement, and (c) being able to see which subordinates consistently produce and which do not. 3. Gain an increased ability to help subordinates develop by (a) being better able to see their strengths and weakness in operation on a specific objective and (b) using a management approach that teaches the subordinates (and the manager, for that matter) to think in terms of results in the future—an approach that teaches them to try to anticipate change, to define clear and specific objectives, and to delineate concrete measurements that will tell them when they have achieved their goals.
As a management approach, it has been further developed by many management theoreticians, among them Douglas McGregor, George Odiorne, and John Humble. Essentially, MBO is a process or system designed for supervisory managers in which a manager and his or her subordinate sit down and
For example, a poor man might choose to steal medicine for his sick child because he values his child’s right to life. Another man may choose not to steal the medicine his child needs because he fears the personal consequences of being caught. In