Strategic And Organizational Roles Of Managers, By Henry Mintzberg

To be efficient and effective in management, certain tasks must be performed by all managers. Managers must be able to plan, organize, lead, and control. Manager’s tasks are important no matter the level of the manager. Managers must be able to use and improve these skills depending on their position within the organization.

Managers need to ensure that targets are met and improvements if necessary are made. They need to plan ahead to ensure that their targets are achievable and control the workload to ensure all activities are carried out effectively.

Managers need to be able to plan ahead and to set objectives and co-ordinate the work force, delegate

Managers perform many functions and play many roles. They are responsible for handling many situations and these situations are usually different from one another.

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.

All of the managers we interviewed come from different companies, for example, Landon and John are both managers of bigger companies with many employees while Juan and Janet are managers of small stores. Since all managers come from such different industries, their work responsibilities and daily functions are all different. Landon provides integrated transportation, customs brokerage, and warehousing and distribution services on a global basis. He sells products, reaches out to organizations and individuals to expand their market. On the other side, John is responsible for bidding on contracts and managing works in the construction field. Juan and Janet, both managers of a small shop work in the store making sure items are in stock. Juan is

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.

There are many roles a manager has within an organization. Henry Mintzberg explains ten specific managerial roles most commonly seen within organizations. Performing this role is the basis of a manager's job. The best manager is the one who perform his roles in a professional way and face the complications and challenges in a huge market, where several competitors already exist, however Steve Jobs in Apple Inc. proved himself and set an example in the world. Six managerial roles performed by Steve Jobs while he was working for Apple Inc. includes figurehead ,negotiator, leadership ,monitor, spokesperson, entrepreneur.

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.

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.

An effective manager possesses good qualities such as sharing a vision, teamwork, communication, passion and compassion towards the business and to the workers. (Source 7)

All the managerial activities can be classified within a broad category. Managers, belonging from different hierarchy, are utilized in different managerial functions. However, managerial roles can be clustered into three main types: informational, interpersonal, and decisional.

Managers are expected to do a multitude of things. A manager has to be a visionary and adaptive to meet the current demands of what is required of them at all level

The last one role is decision-making roles. The manager has to make many important decisions for his organization for he knows more information about his organization than any of his subordinates. He must be responsible for his organization and he must do the important choices represent his organization. What he do will decide the development or failure of his organization, not just himself. Thus, in the manager is at the heart of the decision-making system.

Subsequently Mintzberg believing the reality of management to be vastly different from the true image went on to offer his own description of what ‘to manage’ entails. This comprised of 10 roles which can be split into 3 subsections. Mintzberg (1975) “Formal authority gives rise to the three interpersonal roles, which in turn give rise to the three informational roles; these two sets of roles enable the manager to play the four decisional roles”. Although Mintzberg’s attempt to reform the views on management was successful in stirring other theorists to conduct studies in the area, he can be criticised for the language he used not being explicit enough and although he has empirical evidence to support his discovery of how managers behave, it does not imply this is the way managers should behave as this view of management behaviour may not be that of an effective manager?