Challenges Faced by Managers in Practicing Organisational Behaviour

When related to Mintzberg, there are many similarities between his and Fayol’s views. Planning, one of Fayol’s functions can be related to Mintzberg’s manager roles leader, liaison, entrepreneur and so on (Lamond, 2004, pg.351) and this occurs throughout all five of his roles. The consistent similarities between both the functions and roles of management allow us to recognise that both perspectives must be related in some way.

According to our text, Henry Mintzberg created three managerial roles. These roles include interpersonal, information, and decisions roles. The interpersonal role requires a figurehead, leader, and a liaison. Informational roles require monitor, disseminator, and a spokesperson. Or in other words, informational roles involve "collecting, receiving, and disseminating information" (Pg 11). Decision roles need an entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiators. According to Mintzberg, decisional roles should involve thinking and doing.

This paper will start off by comparing, and contrasting the role of the manager and a

The world of business has undergone radical and dramatic changes in the last decade changes that present extraordinary challenges for the contemporary manager. A manager is an organizational member who is responsible for planning, organizing, leading, and controlling the activities of the organization so that the goals can be achieved. According to a widely referenced study by Henry Mintzberg, managers serve three primary roles: interpersonal, informational, and decision-making. Management is process of administrating and coordinating resources effectively and efficiently in an effort to achieve the goals of the organization.

A professional workplace is an environment that produces numerous challenging situations and if not handled correctly, could create a very unproductive organization. A well-qualified employee is selected to be responsible for controlling all or part of a company, including difficult situations that arise between co-workers. The term given to this worker is a manager; their main task in the organization is to get things done through the efforts of other people. This may sound like a rather simple task, but it is very deep and layered with different difficulties. Henry Mintzberg, an internationally renowned author on business and management, broke down the tasks a manager faces into ten different interrelated roles. According to Mintzberg’s managerial roles, there are three categories that break up the ten roles a manager performs: Interpersonal, Informational, and Decisional. Interpersonal encompasses figurehead, leader, and liaison. Informational includes monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson. Finally, Decisional covers entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator. It is clear that being a manager is a demanding job and it is not for the easily overwhelmed individual.

“The study of the structure, functioning and performance of organisations, and the behaviour of groups and individuals within them” Derek Pugh’s (1971)

A professional workplace is an environment that produces numerous challenging situations and if not handled correctly, could create a very unproductive organization. A well-qualified employee is selected to be responsible for overseeing many aspects of a company, including difficult situations that arise between co-workers. The term given to this worker is a manager; their main task in the organization is to help other employees work more effectively towards their goals. This may sound like a rather simple task, but it is very deep and layered with different difficulties. Henry Mintzberg, an internationally renowned author on business and management, broke down the tasks a manager faces into ten different roles. According to Mintzberg’s managerial roles, there are three categories that break up the ten roles a manager performs: Interpersonal, Informational, and Decisional. Interpersonal encompasses figurehead, leader, and liaison. Informational includes monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson. Finally, Decisional covers entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator. It is clear that being a manager is a demanding job and that it requires a high level of organizational and interpersonal skills.

Henri Fayol’s theory was almost a century old and was originally written in French. Further review on several journal articles has led to an overview background of Fayol’s working life which provided the foundation that conceptualized his theory. According to Wren (2001), Fayol was appointed as the Director in a mining company, Decazeville, where he succeeded to turnaround the company to become profitable. Fayol was the first person to classify the functions of a manager’s job. Fayol (1949; as cited in Wren, 2001) identified five key functions in managerial works.as planning, organising, command, coordination and control. Planning consists of any managerial work that involves setting goals and coordinating actions to

Exams 1, 2, and 3 will cover the material presented before that respective exam. Exam 4 will be a cumulative and optionalfinal exam. If you take all exams, your lowest exam score will be dropped, so that your course grade is based on your three highest exam scores. If you are satisfied with your first 3 exams you DO NOT have to take the final exam. Make-up exams will ONLY be given for university required activities. No make-up exams will be given for any other reason. If you are unable to take an exam during its scheduled time, then that exam will count as the one that you drop and you must take the final exam to replace it. Each exam is the property of the professor and should not be removed from my office.

The effective management of an organization can only occur once a manager fulfils his/her roles and responsibilities to the organization. Henry Mintzberg (1973), stated there are three categories to the roles of management namely, interpersonal, informational and decisional. The interpersonal category of Mintzberg’s theory contains the element of leader, as the leader, subordinates look to management for instructions, guidance, motivation and support for the completion of tasks. "Motivation may be defined as the degree to which individuals commit effort to achieve goals that they perceive as being meaningful and worthwhile" Johnson, & Johnson (2003). Nevertheless, management as a leader must understand his/her roles and how these role are to be performed effectively while considering his/her working environment.

Henry Fayol was working in France at a mining company as an engineer who later became the director of the company when it employed more than 1,000 people. He came up with the theory of management functions from his observations and experience while working in the company. He also established and published 14 important principles of management. However, Henry Mintzberg dismissed Fayol’s management functions claiming that managers nowadays apply little planning or not at all, hence, their work is unpredictable (Bateman, 2012). Mintzberg came up with three broad categories of managerial roles. These two theories are seen as competing views where one seems to be the base of the other.

Sociology, psychology, communication, management, economics and human resource studies are fields that comprise of organizational behavior. Within each of the theorists preferred model of theory, their basis for conducting research is to examine how individuals and their behaviors influence the environment. As evident by the available literature, each theorist uses modern organizational studies in order to understand, control, predict, and explain some phenomenon based on a particular need. In the 1900s, theories were formulated around production and economic goals. In the 1960 and 70s, theories were heavily influenced by social psychology and quantitative research and in the 1980s, literature then expanded to providing cultural explanations of organizations with influences from psychology, sociology and anthropology, shifting from quantitative to qualitative research as an acceptable method for conducting research.

The four functions of a manager are planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. These are key elements that managers must understand to run a successful organization. I will view each concept as well as their roles to acknowledge how these functions have been related to my personal experience in the work environment. Behind the scenes of a manager, they spend an equal amount of time planning so that he or she can successfully achieve the leading and controlling functions. These functions are standard for any industry that is striving to maintain a strong organization. While reviewing this paper, try to think of the four functions as a method that is established to build on each other. The four functions must be performed efficiently, and when done correctly, an organization will reap the accomplishments from a well-defined plan. My own experiences of how the four functions operate illustrates that each role requires a manager to devote time and patience in order to ensure that the main principles are achieved.

The paper will explore different theories of Management, include Henri Fayol and Henry Mintzberg. This section of this paper provides an overview of functions, roles and skills required of a manager. What is Management? Management can define as the process of reaching organisational goals by working with and through people and other organisational resources. (Management Innovation, 2008).

Managerial roles, introduced by Mintzberg, are also another useful aspect to categorize managerial behavior. They include ten different, but, highly interrelated roles that managers must be prepared to enact. These ten managerial roles consist of three interpersonal roles, three information and four decisional roles. Interpersonal roles are “roles that involve people and other duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature” (Robbins, Bergman, Stagg and Coulter 2003 pg.11). It