The Truth About Managing People...and Nothing but the Truth - Softcover

Robbins, Stephen P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0131838474 ISBN 13: 9780131838475

Publisher: Ft Pr, 2003

Synopsis

This isn't just "someone's opinion"...It's the first, definitive, evidence-based guide to effective management. In The Truth About Managing People...and Nothing but the Truth, Robbins delivers principles you can rely on throughout your entire management career--regardless of your organization, role or title. This is a management book that cuts through the soft opinion and conjecture books that have dominated the business shelves in recent years and shows what management researchers know actually works, or doesn't work, when it comes to managing people.

Drawing on the author's 30+ years of research and textbook writing experience, Robbins has distilled the results of thousands of research studies on human behavior into over 60 proven "truths" that can transform how you manage people--and the results that are achieved. The author provides guidance to you organized around key, human-behavior-related problem areas that managers face (hiring, motivation, leadership, communication, team building, conflict management, job design, evaluating performance and coping with change), along with guidance to help you apply the information and improve your managerial effectiveness.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen P. Robbins, the world's bestselling management and organizational behavior textbook author, has sold more than 2 million books used at more than 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities. Robbins' Organizational Behavior, Ninth Edition (Prentice Hall) is a market leader throughout North America, Central America, South America, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, India, China and Scandinavia. Author of Managing Today and co-author of Management, Fifth Edition and Fundamentals of Management, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and has served in management roles for Shell and Reynolds Metals. He currently is a member of the San Diego State University faculty.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Managers are bombarded with advice from consultants, professors, business journalists, and assorted management "gurus" on how to manage their employees. A lot of this advice is well thought out and valuable. Much of it, however, is a gross generalization, ambiguous, inconsistent, or superficial. Some of it is even just downright wrong. Regardless of the quality, there doesn't seem to be any slowdown in the outpouring of this advice. Quite to the contrary. Books on business and management have replaced sex, self-help, and weight loss as topics on many nonfiction best-sellers lists.

I've been teaching and writing about managing people at work for 30 years. As part of my writing efforts, I have read upwards of 25,000 research studies on human behavior. While my practitioner friends are often quick to criticize research and theory-testing, this research has provided us with innumerable insights into human behavior. Unfortunately, to date there has been no short, concise summary of behavioral research that cuts through the jargon to give managers the truth about what works and doesn't work when it comes to managing people at work. Well, this is no longer true. This book has been written to fill that void.

I've organized this book around key, human-behavior-related problem areas that managers face: hiring, motivation, leadership, communication, team building, conflict management, job design, evaluating performance, and coping with change. Within each problem area, I've identified a select set of topics that are relevant to managers and where there is substantial research evidence to draw upon. In addition, I've included suggestions to help readers apply this information to improve their managerial effectiveness. And at the back of the book, I've listed references upon which the chapters are based.

Who was this book written for? Practicing managers and those aspiring to a management position—from CEOs to supervisor wannabes. I wrote it because I believe you shouldn't have to read through detailed textbooks in human resources or organizational behavior to learn the truth about managing people at work. Nor should you have to attend an executive development course at a prestigious university to get the straight facts. What you get from this book, of course, will depend on your current knowledge about organizational behavior. Recent MBAs, for instance, will find this book to be a concise summary of the evidence they spent many months studying. For individuals who haven't kept current with research in organizational behavior or for those with little formal academic training, this book should provide a wealth of new insights into managing people at work.

You'll find each of the 63 topics in this book is given its own short chapter. And each chapter is essentially independent from the others. You can read them in any order you desire. Best of all, you needn't tackle this book in one sitting. It's been designed for multiple "quick reads." Read a few chapters, put it down, then pick it up again at a later date. There's no continuous story line that has to be maintained.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ft Pr
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0131838474
• ISBN 13: 9780131838475
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 211