Roles and Managerial Types
As well as offering ten roles, Mintzberg groups managerial jobs into eight basic
types:
- contact manager (figure-head and liaison)
- political manager (spokesman and negotiator)
- entrepreneur (initiator.changer and negotiator)
- insider (resource allocator)
- real-time manager (disturbance handler)
- expert manager (monitor and spokesman)
- new manager (liaison and monitor)
- team manager (leader role)
Contingent factors
He takes a neutral view of the managerial role (ignores matters of ownership and power) and suggests that contingency factors (the law of the situation) explain variations in the content/characteristics of managerial work. Contingent factors include:
- environmental matters (the location, community, industry, weather).
- job factors (hierarchical level, functions and degree of supervision)
- person variables (personality and style).
- situational variables (including technological and time-related factorss).
Mintzberg suggests that job level and functions that are supervised are the contibutors - more than anything else - to variation in the manager's work.
Turbulence (competition, rate of change, growth, pressure to produce) forces managers to spend more time in informal and verbal communication - varied, fragmented with action being an imperative.
Sectoral differences
He suggested differences between
- public and private sector top managers. The former spent more time in formal activity (eg scheduled meetings) and meeting stakeholders than managers of private firms.
- In service industries top managers spent more time in liaison roles than production managers.
- top managers of larger organisations spend more time in formal communication (memos, scheduled meetings). Correspondence is more developed. Brief, fragmented activities are fewer and external contacts and duties (ceremony, external board membership) increase.
With little operational involvement, opportunities walking the job and helping subordinates is lessened
- managers of small firms spend more
time on specialist roles and as substitute operators.
The higher the level, the more unstructured, unspecialised and long-range job issues are (complex, intertwined and extended in time). Lower job levels are
- more informal with less figurehead time.
- Junior managers can maintain steadier work
loads and give more time to 'doing' - disturbance handling and negotiating. They focus on current and specific issues.
Line managers specialise in the information they process and spend much contact time with a related 'clique'.
- production managers - more orientated towards operating problems and encounter more fragmentation (e.g. machine down-time, disturbance handling and negotiation).
- sales managers emphasise external relationships and staff development - spending time on interpersonal roles - figure-head, lead, liaison.
- Managers of staff specialists e.g. accountants - spend more time alone, are more involved with paperwork (their speciality functions), have less fragmentation and variety but spend time advising outsiders (peer and lateral relationships) . They are experts as well as managers hence the informational
roles; monitor, spokesman, disseminator.
Executive teams
In some organisations, 2- or 3- person executive teams share responsibility for the ten roles - to be successful, trust and efficient information sharing are vital. In a 'pair' executive team (joint managing directors). One MD may take external roles (figure-head, liaison, spokesman, negotiator) and the other internal roles (leader, disseminator, resource allocator, disturbance handler).
Task and change-stability cycles
In higher managerial job cycles involve annual and perhaps monthly time frames rather than weekly/daily regularities.
In terms of a change-stability cycle, change periods (initiator/changer and negotiator roles) are followed by consolidation (leader and disturbance-handler).
Intensive threat means disproportionate time spent in the disturbance-handler role after which contacts
and resources need topping up (liaison, spokesman, resource allocator).
Newly appointed managers
typically
- develop contacts and gather information (liaison and monitor roles)
- then enter a period of innovation (initiator/changer)
- then settle into regular patterns.
Participative organisation cultures
- require managers to attend to leader and external roles (figure-head, liaison, spokesman and negotiator).
SEMINAR QUESTIONS
- What are the current features of your job compared with these propositions?
- What changes should you make to your own job behaviour/variations arising
from these propositions?
- What are the training and development implications?
- How do such descriptions contribute to
- an ideology of management?
- manager training and development?
- management recruitment and selection?
- How robust is this type of theorising?
References
