Administration is the key ingredient in one of man’s most impressive social inventions, the work organization. Over the ages, many of our most ambitious undertakings, from pyramids to space exploration, have been achieved only through the combined output of complex assemblages of human, physical, and financial resources. The process of accumulating, organizing, applying, and maintaining these resources for current and emergent organizational goals are, in a word, administration. And, just as organizations are among man’s most notable inventions, administration is one of man’s most challenging tasks.

The challenge of administration is not simply the complexity of the process but rather the fact that the administrative “problem” is never completely solved. The variables involved-both external and internal to the organization-are frequently changing, and each change places new or different demands on the administrative process. Moreover, as we will discuss in more detail below, the effectiveness of the administrative process must be judged not only in terms of current performance but also in terms of the extent to which today’s administrative actions facilitate future organizational performance. That is, an administrative action which may be effective in meeting current organizational needs but which restricts the adaptive of organizational resources to upcoming needs may be judged, on balance, ineffective.

It must already be apparent that defining administration broadly. The term administration is frequently used in conjunction with, and sometimes as a substitute for, a number of other terms, most prominently “leadership” and management.

In both theory and research, leadership is most often concerned with face to – face interaction among individuals of differing status (although leadership acts among peers are gaining increased attention). The key characteristic of leadership is personal action aimed at influencing the behavior of some particular individual or group. Management, on the other hand, entails the direction and coordination not only of people but also of physical and financial resources toward a given set of organizational goals. These goals, in turn, have been defined by top management as part of an ongoing process of relating the organization to its environment. Involving more than face-to-face interactions, management includes searching the environment for change and opportunity, reducing uncertainty for the rest of the organization by defining tasks and goals, and creating a structure of roles and work processes to ensure the efficient utilization of resources. Thus, unlike leadership, management is also concerned with relationships between and among organizations and with the larger environment.

Although the term management tends to be used more in the private sector while the term administration tends to be associated with the public sector, we see no theoretical or practical benefits to be gained from distinguishing between the two terms. Therefore, management and administration are used interchangeably to refer to the set of decisions, actions, and mechanisms required defining, developing, and maintaining the alignment of the total organization with its environment.

Concern with administration is, of course, nothing new. Almost from the beginning of recorded history, heads of organizations have proclaimed the problems of administration and presented their own solutions. In earlier periods, these problems were primarily limited to public organizations: the state, the military, and the church. The emergence of large-scale commercial enterprises over the past several hundred years has now brought the private sectors management problems into full view. In both arenas, however, parallel searches for administrative effectiveness have been numerous and prolonged. The first target of the search for administrative effectiveness was personal characteristics. Early Chinese philosophers bemoaned the scarcity of honest and diligent young administrators; Plato sought to overcome scarcity by breeding and training a special caste of philosopher-kings; and Machiavelli claimed that insight, guile, and single-mindedness were the key characteristics of the successful administrator. Adopting this same approach, behavioral scientists throughout the present century have pursued an elusive set of characteristics which might identify the ideal administrator. Despite these sustained efforts, however, neither physical nor personality attributes have proved to be predictive of administrative excellence.

Over a similarly lengthy time period, another investigation has been underway to find the ideal administrative structure and process. Jethro advised Moses to delegate judgment (administration) over the tens and hundreds and thousands lest the Israelites wander forever in the wilderness; and a thousand or so years later, the Roman legions marched across the Mediterranean world and into Europe with an army structured on similar lines. Over the past hundred years, scholars have studied these two hallmarks of organization design, along with the governance of the Catholic Church, the evolution of the military general staff, the development of the modern governmental bureau and countless other organizations in search of a reliable set of administrative laws or principles. However, ideal principles, structures, and processes, like ideal personal characteristics, have also proved vulnerable to the vagaries of time and circumstance-administrative structures and policies which appeared highly effective in one organization and period have frequently failed in other organizations and under other conditions.

Viewed historically, the search for the ideal personal and structural characteristics of effective administration has failed to provide many lasting answers but has succeeded in clarifying the proper questions to be asked. Today, most scholars no longer seek the one best solution to all administrative problems. Instead, the bywords of modern theorists are systems and contingency. Systems analysts portray the organization as a total system, composed of many interrelated parts, that must respond to a wide range of external (markets, suppliers, etc.- and internal – technologies, personalities, etc.- demands.

Contingency theorists, in turn, seek to discover the conditions under which various organizational systems are most effective-that is, when the organization is most fully meeting both the demands of the environment and the needs of its members. It is not clear at this point whether modern theorists, guided by the systems and contingency concepts, have brought us significantly closer to the truth about administration than their predecessors. What is clear, in retrospect, is that few of today’s answers will be perfectly suitable for tomorrow’s administrative questions.

Author Bio: http://sites.google.com/site/cliptheschoolbeginning/ http://sites.google.com/site/arturvictoriasite/

Category: Business Management
Keywords: Business,investing,company,organizing,organization,administrator,manager,leader,Motivation,Attitudes