Chapter 7 — Directing

Chapter 7 covers Directing — the managerial function of instructing, guiding, motivating, and leading people in an organisation to achieve its objectives. It discusses the four elements of directing: supervision, motivation, leadership, and communication, along with Maslow's Need Hierarchy Theory, financial and non-financial incentives, leadership styles, formal and informal communication, barriers to communication, and ways to overcome those barriers.

Directing refers to the process of instructing, guiding, counselling, motivating and leading people in the organisation to achieve its objectives. It is a managerial function that initiates action, takes place at every level of management, flows from top to bottom, and continues throughout the life of the organisation.

The four elements of directing are supervision, motivation, leadership, and communication. Together these encompass all activities through which managers guide and inspire subordinates to accomplish organisational goals.

Abraham Maslow, in a paper published in 1943, proposed that every human being has a hierarchy of five needs: basic physiological needs, safety/security needs, affiliation/belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualisation needs. A satisfied need can no longer motivate a person, and an individual moves to the next higher level only after the lower need is satisfied.

Financial incentives are those which are in direct monetary form or measurable in monetary terms and serve to motivate employees for better performance. Examples include pay and allowances, productivity linked wage incentives, bonus, profit sharing, co-partnership or stock options, retirement benefits such as provident fund, pension and gratuity, and perquisites like car allowance, housing, and medical aid.

Non-financial incentives focus on psychological, social, and emotional satisfaction rather than direct monetary payment. They include status, organisational climate, career advancement opportunity, job enrichment, employee recognition programmes, job security, employee participation in decision making, and employee empowerment.

The three leadership styles based on use of authority are: autocratic (leader gives orders and expects obedience; communication is one-way), democratic or participative (leader consults subordinates and encourages their participation in decision-making), and laissez-faire or free-rein (subordinates are given a high degree of independence to formulate their own objectives and methods, with the leader providing support and information).

Formal communication flows through official channels designed in the organisation chart and may be oral or written but is generally recorded; it can be vertical (upward or downward) or horizontal. Informal communication, also called the grapevine, takes place without following formal lines; it arises from employees' need to exchange views, spreads rapidly, is often distorted, and is very difficult to trace to its source.

Barriers to communication are grouped into four categories: semantic barriers (badly expressed messages, symbols with different meanings, faulty translations, unclarified assumptions, technical jargon, misread body language), psychological barriers (premature evaluation, lack of attention, loss by transmission, distrust), organisational barriers (restrictive policy, rigid rules, status differences, complexity of structure, lack of facilities), and personal barriers (fear of challenge to authority, lack of confidence in subordinates, unwillingness to communicate, lack of incentives).

The grapevine is the informal system of communication that spreads throughout the organisation in disregard of authority levels. It may follow four networks: single strand (each person communicates to the next in sequence), gossip (each person communicates with all on a non-selective basis), probability (individuals communicate randomly), and cluster (individuals communicate only with those they trust) — of which the cluster network is most common in organisations.

Motivation is the process of stimulating people to action to accomplish desired goals. Its key features are: it is an internal feeling arising from individual needs and urges; it produces goal-directed behaviour; it can be positive (rewards like pay increase, promotion) or negative (punishment, threats); and it is a complex process because individuals differ in their expectations and reactions.

Supervision is vital because the supervisor maintains direct day-to-day contact with workers and acts as the link between workers and management. A supervisor maintains group unity, ensures performance as per targets, provides on-the-job training, exercises leadership to build morale, and gives feedback to workers on how to improve their work skills.

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