Leadership And Management In Today's Enterprises

RUNNING HEAD: INTRODUCTION TO MANAGEMENT
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Introduction to Management

Introduction to management 1
Introduction
The aim of the Ozzipalooza simulation is to seek the advice of management for organizing a
musical event. The event is managed by Swinburne graduate Alex. The aim of this reflection is
to summarize the event by linking it to the key functions of management studied in the course. I
will include my learning experience of the simulation and will include what challenges I faced at
the time of doing. Further, I will emphasize more on my performance in the simulation in the
context of class learning. At last, I will loom after the lesson that I learned from this
management exercise or simulation game followed by a conclusion.
Summary of the event
The simulation is based on organizing a music event and in the course; Alex had to make
decisions about event management. My overall simulation performance was resultant in a huge
loss to the company because of various factors such as venue decision and ticket price. But on
the other side, my performances across other parameters were marked good mainly in teamwork
and building a positive environment.
The management functions are organizing, planning, directing, and controlling. In the process of
decision-making planning play a vital role as for executing a plan decisions need to be taken
(Samson, and Daft,2015). In the context of the music event, all the decisions taken during the
execution were not programmed decisions. Bateman and Snell (2013) defined it as the unique or
creative decisions of a non-repetitive problem. In organizing music events, there were many
situations in which we were required to choose the most appropriate alternative with limited
information. In the simulation, one of the parts required to choose the decision-making approach
that I adopted for the participative decision-making approach or consultative decision-making
approach. I selected this approach because I have minimum managerial experience and my
subordinates have more knowledge and expertise in their relevant field that helped me out to
manage activities in a limited time frame. Robbins et.al,2015, define a participative decision-
making approach as the way of encouraging employees to share their views and ideas so that the
best alternative can be adopted. In the simulation, I had to choose a structure for the event team
and I opted for functional structure as this leads to fuller utilization of resources, efficiency, and
low overhead cost. Further, in each step of organizing an event decision that needs to be taken

Introduction to management 2
such as for band finalizing there were many options such as hiring local bands, contacting the
band of music festivals. There was a part which related to organizing through allocating different
task to members according to their expertise and job role (Heames et.al,2010). I allocated to each
member of my team on the basis of their excel areas included venue selection, marketing, and
band. Alex as a leader adopted for a democratic leadership style as leading a team includes the
adoption of a task-related, self-oriented and maintenance related approach. Most of the time
I stuck to a maintenance-related approach as my focus was on building strong relationships with
the team to ensure coordination and higher productivity. At last, the measures of performance
and control tools were inspection of budget and looking into the Gantt chart.
Evaluation
Personal reflection paper helps in to understand the aspects that are relevant for me in the future.
I have minimum managerial experience but with the help of Ozzipalooza simulation, I got the
opportunity to manage an event by putting into a management position (Hedberg, 2009). During
the simulation, I applied the management concepts I studied and saw the consequences of my
decision making. I organized the event very well as I got an appreciation for allocating tasks on
time and I monitored this using the Gantt chart and by inspecting budget on regular time
intervals. However, I was confused at the time deciding the ticket price and ended up deciding
lower prices than the average price in the view of attracting more customers. Due to that I failed
to add any financial value to the event and ended up at the huge financial losses. Hence, this
helped me out to understand that it is important to maintain a balance between a task-oriented
approach and a relationship-oriented approach as I was more focused on building a relationship
with team members and then accordingly increasing productivity (Bateman and Snell 2013).
According to Tichy, and Bennis, 2007, a manager requires different skills such as interpersonal
skills, technical skills, informational skills, and political skills. From self-assessment, earlier I
rated my information skills higher but after simulation, I get to know that I perform well in the
parts where interpersonal skills are needed.
With simulation, I identified that management functions are integrated and dependent on each
other. As all the four functions that are planning, organizing, directing and controlling all are
dependent and interrelated to each other (Yang, 2016). As I had to plan a music event in that I