Managers always have been challenged to produce results, but the modern manager must produce them in a time of rapid technological and social change. Managers must be able to use this rapid change to produce their results; they must use the change and not be used or swallowed up by it. Both they and the organizations they manage need to anticipate change and set aggressive, forward-looking goals in order that they may ultimately begin to make change occur when and where they want it to and, in that way, gain greater control of their environments and their own destinies.
The most important tool the manager has in setting and achieving forward-looking goals is people, and to achieve results with this tool the manager must: first, be able to instill in the workers a sense of vital commitment and desire to contribute to organizational goals; second, control and coordinate the efforts of the workers toward goal accomplishment; and, last, help his or her subordinates to grow in ability so that they can make greater contributions.
In hopes of increasing individual production and contribution, managers have resorted to many different approaches: they have tried to get commitment and hard work through economic pressure and rewards; they have sought greater production by teaching the workers the best or most efficient ways to do a job; and they have tried to cajole their employees into a sense of well-being, hoping that their comfort would produce a desire to contribute. All these approaches had some success, but none succeeded totally in injecting enough of that element of vitality and adaptability into organizational life to allow it to thrive and remain viable in this age of change and sociotechnological turmoil.
DEFINITION
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. As a term, “Management by Objectives” was first used by Peter Drucker in 1954. 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