《穿普拉达的女王》中的管理学理论

An Analysis of Management Theories in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) 1. Introduction With the rapid development of global economy and enterprises in recent several decades, management science has been very popular. More and more enterprises focus on using effective and appropriate enterprise management to make optimal use of resources and realize profit maximization (Boddy, 2009). For new learners and practitioners, relevant cases such as movies can be referred and analyzed, so as to strengthen the understanding of key management concepts, theories and problems (Bumpus, 2005). The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is just an excellent case study. No matter how credible the organizational culture and team practices are, some plots really reflects some theories and research objects of management science. In this paper, the author aims at making a critical analysis of the utility and limitations of specific academic theories pertaining to teams and teamwork drawing on examples from the film The Devil Wears Prada, so as to get an in-depth understanding of relevant theory and practice of teams and teamwork in and organizational context. 2.Team role analysis The movie depicts the story that a new graduate Andrea Sachs accidentally went into a top fashion magazine office to work as the chief editor’s assistant. In this movie, the office of Runway magazine is just a typical business organization, and the editorial department is a fast-paced and efficient team. Main roles in this team include Miranda, the editor in chief, and A ndy, Miranda’s new assistant. According to Belbin’s theory of 9 team roles, there is no perfect individual but there are perfect teams. Efficient teamwork depends on tacit cooperation and coordination of team members (Belbin, 2010). Members within a team must know about their own and their partners’ roles, make up for each other’s weaknesses and perform strengths, and finally achieve organizational goals (Belbin, 2010). Successful teamwork can improve productivity, enhance morale and encourage innovation. Therefore, it is important for a leader to take advantage of members’ behavioral advantages to create a harmonious team, in order to largely improve group and individual performance (Boddy, 2009). It is obvious that Miranda is a mixed role of coordinator (CO) and Specialist (SP), a creative fashion editor and an effective leader. While her assistant Andy is an implementer (IM), an excellent executor. Their roles in team will be critically analyzed as below. 2.1 Miranda-CO+SP Based on Belbin’s team role th eory, a CO is usually very calm and confident, and has the ability to control the whole situation (Belbin, 2010). A CO can always be inclusive to all kinds of valuable ideas, and see problems objectively, but may be not very superior in intelligence and creativity. Within a team, a CO clarifies the organizational goals and direction, chooses problems which needs decision-making and ranked problems according to priority (Belbin, 2010). A CO also helps determine the labor division, responsibility, work boundary of team roles, summarize organizational feeling and achievements. Miranda is the leader of the editorial department. Her words and behaviors influence her subordinates much. According to Harold Koontz, leadership is a kind of influence, or an artistic process to impose influence to people, so as to let them be willing to make efforts for organizational goals (Tomei & Hilal, 2006). As a powerful coordinator and leader, Miranda can influence others and let them follow her. She also has the ability to let others participate and work together with her to edit the fashion magazine. She encourages her subordinates to assist her to realize her ideals, goals and achievements in fashion industry, she gives them the power of success. Influence of a coordinator or a leader is of great significance for the realization of organizational goals. From this sense, influence is a core competence of a coordinator or a leader. Her powerful personal influence not only largely increase teamwork efficiency, but also rapidly impr ove staff’s individual ability from an all-round way (Sacksteder, 2006). On the other hand, as the SP in editorial department, Miranda possesses acute judging ability to her occupation. No matter the entity or the details of the magazine, she can always be innovative and realize the perfect effect (Belbin, 2010). In order to focus on her editing work, Miranda asks Andy to do all her public or private affairs, including buying coffee and ordering flight. It is her highly effective personal style that makes her holds the mainstream power of speech in this ever-changing fashion world. When she communicates with her supervisor, she is full of wisdom, thus makes her reach her goals effectively. . 2.2 Andy-IM Andy Sachs is an employee with extremely strong power of execution. At the beginning, she was a bit disadvantaged as she had not adapt to the new working environment. However she never gave up, she actively learned new things, including her colleagues’ language, culture and dressing-up, and got involved into the team as fast as possible. She executed Miranda’s command with 100% effort and never said no. Even after she was criticized by her supervisor, she just made up for her mistakes and continued until reaching final success (Ramlall, 2004). Even when her father came to visit her from a distant place and when she was on a vacation, as long as Miranda’s calls, she would receive immediately and tried every effort to complete each tricky task, such as finding out manuscripts of Harry Potter and purchasing a steak within 15 minutes. In addition, Andy’s huge motivation is also related to Miranda’s leadership. Miranda is a result-oriented and strict boss, and always in pursuit of perfectionism (Tomei & Hilal, 2006). All employees know her personality and also make her as a role model. Such effective execution culture naturally motivate Andy to work hard. From Andy, the author has learned that in one’s career path, one should insist on the original goals and dreams, keep learning updated knowledge and skills, refuse to be haunted by temporary interest and reward, but to be diligent and surefooted. In the movie, Andy finally became outstandingly qualified for her job and got trust from Miranda. But she gave up the glamorous job in fashion industry and in turn pursued her original dream. This once again reflects her strong executive ability. 3.Leadership style A big selling point of the film is Meryl Streep’s wonderful performance playing the role of the “devil”. As the editor in chief of a well-known fashion magazine, Miranda shows very unique leadership style and management method to her employees (Dunphy, 2009). For example, all tasks assigned by Miranda properly present the huge workload and pressure in fashion industry. Assistants must correctly record numerous tasks and complete them on time without a break. When he assigned work, she never explained any details and told her subordinates they should figure out by themselves. She never made any comments on her subordinates’ work, and firmly criticized those unsatisfactory work. All these highlight a cold, arrogant, strong, bossy and impersonal Iron Lady image (Srivastava et al, 2006). Miranda’s leadership performance conform to the style with lowest care for people and highest care for production in the theory of management style. Such a style just corresponds with the leadership style of task management, which means making the team to realize highly efficient operation and reducing interference of human factors to the lowest degree (Holcomb, 2005). In fact, Miranda’s leadership style and her talent on fashion help her to establish the authentic position in fashion industry and make Runway magazine become a representative of American fashion (Smith, 2009). Of course, in real society with intense competition, especially the fashion world with extremely fast capital and talent flow, such leadership style may not attract most excellent designers and assistants. If Miranda is regarded as a charismatic banner with strong gathering force of industry resources, her arrogance and peremptoriness will hinder her to make the best decision. 4. Organizational culture Organizational culture refers to the entity of all group consciousness accepted by all team members, including values, behavioral principles, group awareness, thinking mode, working style, psychological expectations, sense of belonging etc. (Boddy, 2009). In order to get involved into an organization, a person should think and behave according to the organization’s consistent ways and principles, let himself or hersel f integrated into the organizational culture, so as to smoothly conduct work and gain expected performance. All of these are the influence of organizational culture to its members (Dunphy, 2009). In addition to this, current condition of a certain organizational culture also links closely to its origin. For example, organizational culture of Runway magazine in the movie inevitably has a very close correlation with various values of the fashion industry (Abrahamson, 1996). In the movie, Andy meant to seek f or an editor’s position in NYC after graduation from university with a degree of Journalism. She believed that it was the inner mind that matters, dressing up was of no importance. Therefore, during the first a few days in the fashion magazine office, she paid little attention to the study of fashion culture. When she met difficulties in work and was very frustrated, with the help of other, she soon realized that her working attitude to the fashion field was too random. She always did things in accordance with her consistent style, but failed to try her best in workplace. Since then, she changed her modeling and clothing, and gradually learned to choose fashion products with acute senses. As a result, she got involved in the organization and better completed her work. As a matter of fact, the in-depth connotation of her change is that she changed her mind and actively got involved into the organizational culture. She no longer resisted fashion culture and even practiced it in daily life and work. She also accepted some specific organizational behaviors formed by her boss’s unique leadership style. She actively overcame the influence of human factors and followed the organizational expectations to work, thus she obtained the positive effect (Griffin & Moorhead, 2011). It can be seen that organizational culture does has huge influence to employees. 5. Human resource management When human resource department fulfills its functions, a very important work is to make HR plan (Armstrong, 2003). From the perspectives of recruitment and training, the fundamental point of recruiting new employees is releasing detailed job descriptions, including basic requirements for qualification and competency model; during the interview, interviewers should effectively adopt all kinds of methods to examine applicants (Boddy, 2009). Maybe due to the plot setting, these stages are neglected in the movie. Miranda’s interview on Andy is very simple and random. The reason why Miranda hired her is because she wanted to use someone different. In the reality, it is almost impossible. Of course, Andy later proved herself as an outstanding employee, which shows that people need time and opportunities to perform their potential. Another necessary stage in modern workplace is new staff training. It makes new employees to be familiar with the organizational culture and relevant technical learning before conducting work formally, which can help new staff rapidly adapted to the organization and improve their work efficiency (Champoux, 1999). It seems that Runway magazine failed to hold good staff trainings, especially the trainings on the boss’s assistant, because this position requires very strong working ability and comprehensive quality. Even as excellent as Andy, she still suffered a lot from the high-speed, difficult and pressed work at the beginning. Andy’s “training” was held in an extremely unadapt environment, which also resulted in the decline of organizational performance. In a word, Runway’s HR was very incompetent. 6. Conclusion All in all, the movie The Devil Wears Prada contains a lot of valuable management knowledge in modern workplace, including team roles and team management, leadership style, organizational culture and human resource management. It is not hard to find these concepts and theories, but the extensive thinking and analysis is where the real value lies. Therefore, another realistic and serious problem appears, what kind of life do you want, what is your career goal. Many films including this one naturally adopted all kinds of methods to differentiate an original moderate answer into the two extremes, just like Andy chose to resign the job but Miranda still worked as an iron lady. It is difficult to make a balance in life, maybe the key is never regret after selection. References: Abrahamson, E. (1996). 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