2. DEFINITION OF MANAGER
An individual who is charge of a
certain group of task or a certain
subject of a company.
A manager often has a staff of people
who report to him or her.
3. How managers work?
In the article The manager's job: folklore and
fact, Mintzberg sets out the stark reality of what
managers do: 'If there is a single theme that runs
through this article, it is that the pressures of the
job drive the manager to take on too much work,
encourage interruption, respond quickly to every
stimulus, seek the tangible and avoid the abstract,
make decisions in small increments, and do
everything abruptly'.
Mintzberg uses the article to stress the importance
of the manager's role and the need to understand it
thoroughly before attempting to train and develop
those engaged in carrying it out.
4. How to managers work?
"No job is more vital to our society
than that of the manager. It is the
manager who determines whether our
social institutions serve us well or
whether they squander our talents and
resources. It is time to strip away the
folklore about managerial work, and
time to study it realistically so that we
can begin the difficult task of making
significant improvements in its
performance.“
5. NATURE OF MANAGERIAL
WORK
In The nature of managerial work, Mintzberg proposes six
characteristics of management work and ten basic
management roles. These characteristics and roles, he
suggests, apply to all management jobs, from supervisor to
chief executive.
The six characteristics are:
1. The manager's job is a mixture of regular programmed jobs
and un programmed tasks.
2. A manager is both a generalist and a specialist.
3. Managers rely on information from all sources but show a
preference for that which is orally transmitted.
4. Managerial work is made up of activities that are
characterised by brevity, variety and fragmentation.
5. Management work is more an art than a science and is
reliant on intuitive processes and a feel for what is right.
6. Management work is becoming more complex.
6. FOLKLORE AND FACTS ABOUT MANAGERIAL
WORK
FOLKLORE
The manager is a reflective, systematic planner.
The evidence on the issue is over whelming, but
not a shred of its supports this statement.
The effective managers has no regular duties to
perform
Managers are constantly being told to spend more
time planning and delegating and less time seeing
customers and engaging in negotiations.
7. To use popular analogue the good
manager like the good conductor, carefully
carried everything in advance, then sit
back, responding occasionally to an
unforeseeable exception.
The senior manager needs aggregated
information which a formal managerial
information system provides
Not too long ago the words total
information system were everywhere in the
management literature.
8. FACT
Managerial work involves performing a
number of regular duties including ritual
and ceremony , negotiations and
processing of soft information that links the
organisation with its environment,.
The managers’ programs—to schedule
time, process information, make decisions,
and so on—remain locked deep inside their
brains. Thus, to describe these programs,
we rely on words like judgment and
intuition, seldom stopping to realize that
they are merely labels for our ignorance
10. Because this model does not usefully reflect the
actual nature of a manager’s work as reflected by
numerous studies on the matter, Mintzberg has
created a new model based on three categories and
ten roles:
12. Interpersonal Roles
The Figurehead: performs ceremonial
duties. Examples: greeting visiting
dignitaries, attending an employee’s
wedding, taking an important customer
to lunch.
The Leader: responsibility for the work
of subordinates, motivating and
encouraging employees, exercising their
formal authority.
The Liaison: making contacts outside
the vertical chain of command including
peers in other companies or
departments, and government and trade
organization representatives.
13. Informational Roles
The Monitor: scans the environment
for new information to collect.
The Disseminator: Passing on
privileged information directly to
subordinates.
The Spokesperson: Sharing
information with people outside their
organization. Examples: a speech to a
lobby or suggesting product
modifications to suppliers.
14. Decisional Roles
The Entrepreneur: Seeks to improve the unit
by initiating projects.
The Disturbance Handler: Responds
involuntarily to pressures too severe to be
ignored. Examples: a looming strike, a major
customer gone bankrupt, or a supplier
reneging on a contract.
The Resource Allocator: Decides who gets
what.
The Negotiator: Committing organizational
resources in “real-time” with the broad
information available from their informational
roles.
15. CONCLUSION
Authors research indicates that
managers:
◦ work at an unrelenting pace on various
brief activities
◦ perform regular duties
◦ favor verbal communication
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