top management

(noun)

company employees responsible for controlling and overseeing the entire organization

Related Terms

Examples of top management in the following topics:

  • Top-Level Management

    • Top-level managers work at the top of organizations and guide strategy and planning.
    • Top-level managers include boards of directors, presidents, vice-presidents, CEOs, general managers, and senior managers, etc.
    • Top-level managers are responsible for controlling and overseeing the entire organization.
    • This organizational chart shows the top-level manager for a company.
    • Identify the critical functions of top-level managers and the general role played by senior management teams

  • Middle-Level Management

    • Middle management is the intermediate management level accountable to top management and responsible for leading lower level managers.
    • Most organizations have three management levels: first-level, middle-level, and top-level managers.
    • Executing organizational plans in conformance with the company's policies and the objectives of the top management;
    • Defining and discussing information and policies from top management to lower management;
    • Middle managers may also communicate upward by offering suggestions and feedback to top managers.

  • Management Levels: A Hierarchical View

    • The board of directors, president, vice-president, and CEO are all examples of top-level managers.
    • In addition, top-level managers play a significant role in the mobilization of outside resources.
    • They are accountable to the top management for their department's function.
    • Middle-level managers devote more time to organizational and directional functions than top-level managers.
    • Defining and discussing information and policies from top management to lower management; and most importantly

  • The Role of Management in an Organization

    • Different levels of management will participate in different components of this design process, with upper management creating the initial organizational architecture and structure.
    • All levels of management perform these functions.
    • However, the amount of time a manager spends on each function depends on the level of management and the needs of the organization—factors which play a role in organizational design.
    • Top-level managers include the board of directors, president, vice-president, CEO, and other similar positions.
    • Middle-level managers include general managers, branch managers, and department managers, all of whom are accountable to the top-level management for the functions of their departments.

  • Functional vs. General Management

    • General managers focus on the entire business, while functional managers specialize in a particular unit or department.
    • Functional management and general management represent two differing responsibility sets with an organization.
    • Besides the heads of a firm's product and/or geographic units, the company's top management team typically consists of several functional heads (such as the chief financial officer, the chief operating officer, and the chief strategy officer).
    • Each functional manager is in control of a particular area of expertise—e.g., operations or policy and planning—and the general manager supervises all the functional managers.
    • Differentiate between functional management and general management from a business perspective

  • Frontline Management

    • Most organizations have three management levels: first-level, middle-level, and top-level managers.
    • Frontline managers belong to the first level of management.
    • Frontline managers are managers who are responsible for a work group to a higher level of management.
    • Frontline management is the level of management that oversees a company's primary production activities.
    • Another example of a frontline manager might be a grocery store manager.

  • Decentralization

    • A decentralized organization typically has fewer tiers in its organizational structure, wider span of control, and a bottom-to-top flow of ideas an information.
    • In a more decentralized organization, the top executives delegate much of their decision-making authority to lower tiers of the organizational structure.
    • One of the major advantages of this type of management structure, assuming the correct controls are in place, is the bottom-to-top flow of information, allowing the decisions made by the senior management to be better informed about what is happening in the lower tier operations.
    • For example, if an experienced technician at the bottom of an organization discovers how to potentially increase the efficiency of production, the bottom-to-top flow of information can allow this knowledge to more easily be passed back up to senior management.
    • To ensure that decentralized organizations stay on task, upper management needs to maintain open lines of communication and increase the frequency with which they communicate with local management.

  • Administrative Management: Fayol's Principles

    • Fayol was a classical management theorist, widely regarded as the father of modern operational-management theory.
    • In contrast, Fayol emphasized a more top-down perspective that was focused on educating management on improving processes first and then moving to workers.
    • Fayol developed 14 principles of management in order to help managers conduct their affairs more effectively.
    • Fayol is also famous for his five elements of management, which outline the key responsibilities of good managers:
    • Outline Fayol's effect on administrative management through the recognition of his 14 management principles

  • Managing Organizational Diversity

    • Managing diversity and inclusion in organizations is a critical management responsibility in the modern, global workplace.
    • Management may encounter significant challenges in incorporating diverse perspectives in group settings, but managing this diversity in the workplace is essential to success.
    • First and foremost, diversity must be defined organizationally from the top down and confirmed from the bottom up.
    • When failures in diversity management occur, managers must be accountable in taking corrective action.
    • Upper management and departmental managers are not the only individuals involved in diversity management, however.

  • Introduction to Share Management Tasks as Well as Technical Tasks

    • Share the management burden as well as the technical burden of running the project.
    • There is no reason not to share that burden, and sharing it does not necessarily require a top-down hierarchy either—what happens in practice tends to be more of a peer-to-peer network topology than a military-style command structure.
    • Sometimes management roles are formalized, and sometimes they happen spontaneously.
    • In the Subversion project, we have a patch manager, a translation manager, documentation managers, issue managers (albeit unofficial), and a release manager.
    • The issue manager does not prevent other people from making changes in the tickets database, the FAQ manager does not insist on being the only person to edit the FAQ, and so on.