CASE STUDY 1

The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact

By Henry Mintzberg

WHO ARE THE MANAGERS?

 Foremen
 Factory supervisors
 Staff managers
 Field sales managers
 Hospital Administrators
 Presidents of companies and nations
 Street gang leaders

Definition of a manager: The person in charge of an organization or one of its subunits.

FOLKLORE AND FACTS

 Folklore: The manager is reflective, systematic planner.

 Fact: Managers work at an unrelenting pace, their activities are characterized by brevity,
variety, discontinuity. They are strongly oriented to action and dislike reflective activities.

Example as per the case study:

 Studies on 5 chief executives proved: 1/2 of the activities < 9 minute 10% activities > 1 hour
 Studies on 56 U.S. foremen proved: 583 activities per 8-hour shift 1 activity every 48
seconds + Mails, callers, coffee breaks and lunches work related.

 Folklore: The effective manager has no regular duties to perform. Need only to plan more,
delegate more and spend less time with customers and on negotiations.
 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.
 Folklore: The senior manager needs aggregated information, which a formal management
information system best provides. Means that manager is to receive all his important
information from a MIS.
 Fact: Managers favour verbal media, telephone calls, and meetings over documents.

Example as per the case study: Statistics show:

 66% to 80% time in verbal communications. Responses to only 2 of the 40 routine reports.
 Removing the most of periodicals in first seconds. Strongly cherishing “soft” information
gossip, hearsay, speculations.
 Folklore: Management is becoming a science and a profession
 Facts: The managers’ programs – to schedule time, process info, make decisions – remain
locked inside their brains. No computer so helpful as stored information, judgment.
 Management doesn’t involve systematic, analytically determined procedures or programs to
call it scientific.

INTERPERSONAL ROLES

1. The Figurehead Role

 Duties of a ceremonial nature.
 Involving little serious communications.
 No important decision making.
 However, they are important to the smooth functioning of an organization and cannot be
neglected by the manager.

2. The Leader Role

 Manager is responsible for the work of its people.
 Leadership decides in large part how much of it the manager will realize.

3. The Liaison (channel of communication) Role

 The manager makes contacts outside his chain of command.
 The liaison role is devoted to building up the manager’s own external information system:
informal, private, verbal and effective

INFORMATIONAL ROLES

1. The Monitor Role

 The manager continuously scans his environment for information, interrogating his
liaison contacts and his subordinates and receives unsolicited information.
2. Disseminator
 The manager passes some of his privileged information directly to his subordinates,
who would otherwise have no access to it.
3. The Spokesman Role
 The manager sends information to people outside of his unit. Also inform and satisfy
the influential people who control the organizational unit.

DECISIONAL ROLES

1. Entrepreneur
 Voluntary initiator of change
 Improving the unit, to adapt it to changing conditions in the environment.
2. Disturbance handler
 Describes the manager involuntarily responding to pressures.
 Change is beyond the manager’s control.
 Every manager must spend a good part of his time responding to high-pressure
disturbances.
3. Resource Allocator
 Responsible of deciding who will get what in his organizational unit.
 The manager designs his unit’s structure and authorizes the important decisions of
his unit before they are implemented.
CONCLUSIONS

 The 4 myths about the managers’ job are no longer in use. Facts show that brevity,
fragmentation and verbal communication characterize managers’ job.
 I have illustrated all the different managerial behaviours. They obviously differ from
company to company.
 However different types of managers seem to act differently they always keep up with the
same guide line.
 Managers’ education remains an ABSTRACT area.
 Manager’s job can only be balanced properly if the individual act as a good manager as well
as leader to achieve his/her organisational goal.