Written by The traditional understanding of a manager’s job is always being defined in terms of management functions, which was introduced by French industrialist Henri Fayol in 1916.
Fayol identified five functions that a manager must perform, namely planning, commanding, coordinating, controlling, and organizing.
However, this description of a manager’s job was based on his observations and experiences in the French mining industry and was not derived from any thorough survey of managers.
In the late 1960s, Dr Henry Mintzberg conducted an empirical study to determine if Fayol’s description of a manager’s job was still valid in the 1960s.
Mintzberg studied five executives and discovered that the best way to define managers’ jobs is through their roles in the organization.
He introduced the term “managerial roles” to describe the specific categories of managerial actions or behaviours expected of a manager.
Through his research, Mintzberg concluded that managers perform ten distinct but interrelated roles. These roles are figurehead, liaison, leader, monitor, disseminator, spokesperson, resource allocator, disturbance handler, and negotiator.
However, He grouped these ten roles under three categories: interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles.
Interpersonal Roles
Interpersonal roles are mostly social in nature, in that they require managers to interact with people for the purpose of achieving organizational goals.
These roles involve using social skills to interact with others in a way that helps to achieve the organization’s goals.
According to Mintzberg, there are three types of interpersonal roles: figurehead, leader, and liaison.
Figurehead
The figurehead role of a manager involves performing ceremonial duties on behalf of the organization.
It includes those social, ceremonial and legal responsibilities that are expected of a manager.
Examples of figurehead roles include attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony on behalf of the organization, attending an employee’s wedding, and interacting with foreign officials.
Leader
The leader role is perhaps the most common role of managers. As the leader, managers are accountable for the work and performance of their subordinates.
As such, managers typically provide training and incentives to their employees too to maximize productivity.
In short, a manager’s role as a leader is to hire, train, motivate, direct and manage the performance of his subordinates.
Liaison
In addition to being the leader and figurehead, managers also act as liaisons.
The liaison role of managers involves acting as a link between the organization and its external stakeholders.
As a liaison, the managers must communicate with suppliers, customers, or other stakeholders to ensure that their needs are being met and that the organization is achieving its goals.
In essence, the liaison role means that managers contact external sources that are necessary for achieving organizational objectives.
Informational Roles
Informational roles are concerned with the management of information, both from within and outside the organization, and its distribution to other members of the organization who need it to perform their jobs.
In other words, informational roles are roles that require the collecting, receiving, and dissemination of information.
Managers play three informational roles: monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson.
Monitor
The monitor role involves examining the surroundings for information.
Information, whether solicited or unsolicited, can come from the vast network chains of a manager.
Therefore, a manager must play the important role of monitoring and scanning his environment for information.
He must be conscious of what is happening within and outside the organization so as to gain important information that would assist him in accomplishing the organizational goals
Disseminator
After the information has been gathered, it will be of little or no use if it is not disseminated.
Hence, there is a need for managers to play the important role of disseminator’s role.
This involves disseminating information to subordinates and other stakeholders within the organization.
Managers usually disseminate information such as new policies, procedures, new initiatives, etc. through memos, reports, meetings, and other forms of communication.
Spokesperson
In addition to disseminating information to people inside the information, Managers send information to people outside the organization. This is the spokesperson’s role.
The spokesperson’s role involves a manager acting as the public face of the organization by communicating information to external stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and investors.
A manager also plays the role of a spokesperson when he represents and speaks for the organization to outsiders.
Decisional Roles
It will be surprising if managers do not make decisions given the level of information they have access to.
The decisional roles of managers are basically about making decisions that are required for the smooth operation of the organization.
In decisional roles, the manager makes decisions, solves problems, allocates resources, and implements solutions within their organizations.
There are four main decisional roles that managers play, namely entrepreneur, disturbance handler, negotiator and resource allocator.
Entrepreneur
This role involves a manager taking risks and investing time and resources into developing new opportunities for the Organization.
As an entrepreneur, a manager plan, directs, and implements changes that are necessary to improve the company or a sub-unit of it.
Managers create strategies and innovations that are necessary for the improvement of the organization.
Disturbance Handler
The disturbance handler role involves managers responding to unexpected events or problems within the organization.
In any organization, managers are often in charge of dealing with challenging situations that are beyond their control.
Situations like deteriorating economic conditions, strikes, and competitor activity, are far too important for the manager to overlook.
The managers, as disturbance handlers, take some type of action to resolve these circumstances.
For example, when there is a strike, the manager may mediate between the organization and the strikers to negotiate an arrangement that benefits both the organization and the strikers.
Resource allocator
In every organization, resources are in short supply.
Therefore, resources must be allocated efficiently among the various organizational units.
So, managers play the resource allocator role, which involves managers deciding how best to allocate resources to achieve organizational goals.
As the resource allocator, Managers decide how much of the organization’s resources each subunit receives.
They allocate resources such as time, money, and machines to the various parts of the business.
In a nutshell, the resource allocator role involves distributing the organization’s physical, financial, intellectual, and human resources across the various components of the organization.
Negotiator
Because of their role as resource allocators and spokespersons, Managers are in a unique position to negotiate on behalf of their organization.
The negotiator role involves managers negotiating with key external stakeholders such as suppliers, customers, and competitors.
As a negotiator, a manager spends a lot of their time negotiating supplier contracts, employee labour contracts, government contracts, customer contracts, and other stakeholder contracts.
Together, each of these ten roles, according to Mintzberg, provides a better reflection of a manager’s job.
Final words
In conclusion, Henry Mintzberg’s seminal work on managerial roles has greatly influenced the study of management.
Mintzberg’s work highlighted that managers play ten distinct roles, which can be broadly classified into three main categories: interpersonal, informational, and decisional roles.
Interpersonal roles are focused on interactions with people within and outside the organization.
These roles include the figurehead role, which involves representing the organization, the leader role, which involves managing subordinates, and the liaison role, which involves building and maintaining relationships with external stakeholders.
Informational roles, on the other hand, are concerned with the gathering, processing, and sharing of information.
These roles include the monitor role, which involves collecting information from both internal and external sources, the disseminator role, which involves distributing information to those who need it, and the spokesperson role, which involves speaking to external stakeholders on behalf of the organization.
Finally, decisional roles involve making decisions and taking action to achieve the organization’s goals.
These roles include the entrepreneur role, which involves identifying and pursuing new opportunities, the disturbance handler role, which involves managing crises and conflicts, the resource allocator role, which involves managing and allocating resources, and the negotiator role, which involves negotiating with external stakeholders.
