dr hab. Jerzy Supernat Institute of Administrative Studies University of Wroclaw

dr hab. Jerzy SupernatInstitute of Administrative Studies

University of Wroclaw

Managerial Roles

Managerial Roles

dr hab. Jerzy Supernat

Henry Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work, Harper & Row 1973:„If you ask a manager what he does, he will most likely tell you that he plans, organizes, coordinates, and controls. Then watch what he does. Don’t be surprised if you can’t relate what you see to these four words. When he is rung up and told that one of his factories has just burned down, and he advises the caller to see whether tempo-rary arrangements can be made to supply customers through a foreign subsidiary, is he planning, organizing, coordinating, or controlling? What about when he presents a gold watch to a retiring employee? Or when he attends a conference to meet people in the trade? Or, on returning from that conference, when he tells one of his employees about an interesting prod-uct idea he picked up there? The fact is that…

Managerial Roles


these four words (planning, organizing, coordinating, and con-trolling – JS), which have dominated management vocabulary since the French industrialist Henri Fayol first introduced them in 1916, tell us little about what managers actually do. At best, they indicate some vague objectives managers have when they work.My intention (…) is simple: to break the reader away from Fayol’s words and to introduce him to a more supportable, and what I believe to be a more useful, description of managerial work. This description derives from my review and synthesis of the available research on how various managers have spent their time. (…) All kind of managers were studied – foreman, factory supervises, staff managers, field sales managers, hos-pital administrators, presidents of companies and nations, and even street gang leaders. These managers ‘worked’ in the United States, Canada, Sweden and Great Britain”.

Managerial Roles


Henry Mintzberg, born 1939

Managerial Roles


In Henry Mintzberg’s model managers play ten different roles („organized sets of behaviors identified with a position”) that fall into three basic categories: interpersonal roles informational roles decisional roles

Managerial Roles


Managerial Roles


Interpersonal roles: figurehead role leader role liaison roleFIGUREHEAD: carved decoration usually representing a head or figure placed under the bowsprit of a ship. The art is of extreme antiquity. Ancient galleys and triremes carried rostrums, or beaks, on the bow to ram enemy vessels. These beaks were often surmounted by figureheads representing national or religious emblems. Roman vessels were sometimes embellished with large heads of the gods in bronze. Viking ships had lofty and extended prows which were elaborately carved. Dragons and lions vied with the human form in the figureheads of the Renaissance. (…) With the disappearance of the sailing vessel figurehead art became practically extinct, The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, Columbia University Press 2004.

Managerial Roles


Figurehead role„By virtue of his position as head of an organizational unit, every manager must perform some duties of an ceremo-nial nature. The president greets the touring dignitaries (attends ribboncutting ceremonies – JS), the foreman at-tends the wedding of a lathe operator, and the sales manager takes an important customer to lunch. (…) Du-ties that involve interpersonal roles may sometimes be routine, involving little serious communication and no im-portant decision-making. Nevertheless, they are important to the smooth functioning of an organization and cannot be ignored by the manager”.

Managerial Roles


Laura Bush attends a ribbon cutting ceremony with football star Brett Favre and his wife, Deanna, left, Secretary Margaret Spelling, center, Dan Vogel, Associate Director, USA Freedom Corps, right, and students of Hancock North Central Elementary School at the Kaboom Playground, built at the Hancock North Central Elementary School in Kiln, Ms., Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2006, during a visit to the area ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. White House photo by Shealah Craighead.

Managerial Roles


Leader role„Because he is in charge of an organizational unit, the manager is responsible for the work of the people of that unit. His actions in this regard constitute the leader role. Some of these actions involve leadership directly – for example, in most organizations the manager is normally responsible for hiring and training his staff. In addition, there is the indirect exercise of the leader role. Every manager must motivate and encourage his employees, somehow reconciling their individual needs with the goals of the organization. (…) The influence of the manager is most clearly seen in the leader role. Formal authority vests him with great potential power; leadership deter-mines in large part how much of it he will realize”.

Managerial Roles


Liaison role„(…) in the liaison role the manager makes contacts out-side his vertical chain of command. (…) managers spend as much time with peers and other people outside their units as they do with their own subordinates, and sur-prisingly little time with their own superiors. (…) the ma-nager cultivates such contacts largely to find information. In effect, the liaison role is devoted to building up the manager’s own external information system – informal, private, verbal, but nevertheless effective”.

Managerial Roles


Informational roles:

monitor role disseminator role spokesman role

Managerial Roles


Monitor role„As monitor, the manager perpetually scans his environ-ment for information, interrogates his liaison contacts and his subordinates, and receives unsolicited information, much of it as a result of the network of personal contacts he has developed. (…) a good part of the information the manager collects in his monitor role arrives in verbal form, often as gossip, hearsay, and speculation. By virtue of his contacts, the manager has a natural advantage in col-lecting this soft information for his organization”.

Etymology: 16c: from Latin monere to warn or advise.

Managerial Roles


Monitoring is like watching where you are going while riding a bicycle; you can adjust as you go along and ensure that you are on the right track.

Monitoring is an intermittent (regular or irregular) series of observations in time, carried out to show the extent of com-pliance with a formulated standard or degree of deviation from an expected norm.

Managerial Roles


Disseminator role„He (the manager – JS) must share and distribute much of (…) information. Information he gleans from outside personal contacts may be needed within his organization. In his disseminator role, the manager passes some of his privileged information directly to his subordinates, who would otherwise have no access to it. When his subor-dinates lack easy contact with one another, the manager will sometimes pass information from one to another”.

Managerial Roles


Spokesman role„In his spokesman role, the manager sends some of his information to people outside his unit (…). In addition, as part of his spokesman role, every manager must inform and satisfy the influential people who control his organiza-tional unit. (…) The president of a large corporation (…) may spend a great deal of his time dealing with a host of influences. Directors and shareholders must be advised about financial performance; consumer groups must be assured that the organization is fulfilling its social respon-sibility; and government officials must be satisfied that the organization is abiding by the law”.

Managerial Roles


Decisional roles:

entrepreneurial role disturbance handler role resource allocator role negotiator role

Managerial Roles


Entrepreneurial role„As entrepreneur, the manager seeks to improve his unit and to adopt it to changing conditions in the environment. In his monitor role, the president is constantly on the lookout for new ideas. When a good one appears, he initi-ates a development project (…) The chief executive ap-pears to maintain a kind of inventory of the development projects that he himself supervises – projects that are at various stages of development, some active and some in limbo. Like a juggler, he keeps a number of projects in the air: periodically one comes down, is given a new burst of energy, and is sent back into orbit. At various intervals, he puts new projects on-stream and discards old ones”.

Managerial Roles


Disturbance handler role„While the entrepreneurial role describes the manager as the voluntary initiator of change, the disturbance handler role depicts the manager involuntarily responding to pres-sures. Here change is beyond the manager’s control. He must act because the pressures of the situation are too severe to be ignored: a strike looms, a major customer has gone bankrupt, or a supplier reneges on his contract. (…) every manager must spend a good part of his time responding to high-pressure disturbances. (…) Disturban-ces arise not only because poor managers ignore situa-tions until they reach crisis proportions, but also because good managers cannot possibly anticipate all the conse-quences of the actions they take”.

Managerial Roles


The things we fear most in organizations – fluctu-ations, disturbances, imbalances – are the prima-ry sources of creativity.

Margaret J. Wheatley

Managerial Roles


When you are up to your backside in alligators, it's hard to remember the object of the exercise was to drain the swamp.

Managerial Roles


Resource allocator role„To the manager falls the responsibility of deciding who will receive what in his organizational unit. Perhaps the most important resource the manager allocates is his own time. Access to the manager constitutes exposure to the unit’s nerve center and decision-center. The manager is also charged with designing his unit’s structure, that pat-tern of formal relationships that determines how work is to be divided and coordinated. Also in his role as resource allocator the manager authorizes the important decisions before they are implemented. By retaining this power, the manager can ensure that decisions are inter-related; all must pass through a single brain”.

Managerial Roles


Negotiator role„Studies of managerial work at all levels indicate that ma-nagers spend considerable time in negotiations (…) nego-tiations are duties of the manager’s job; perhaps routine, they are not to be shirked. They are an integral part of his job, for only he has the authority to commit organizational resources in ‘real time’, and only he has the nerve-centre information that important negotiations require”.

Managerial Roles


Chester L. Karrass, In Business As In Life – You Don’t Get What You Deserve, You Get What You Negotiate, Stanford St. Press, Beverly Hills, CA 1996 – The Bible of negotia-tions.

The less the other person knows about you, the better off you are. The more you know about them, the stronger your bargaining power. Of course, some information must be exchanged in the give and take of bargaining. [...] My advice to those who negotiate: “Don’t talk too much. Everything you say may be held against you”. You may end up like the missionary in Mark Twain’s story who wanted to convert the cannibals. “They listened with great interest to everything he had to say”, Twain said. “Then they ate him”.

P r i n c i p l e s of n e g o t i a t i o n s

Managerial Roles


Leave time for things to go wrong. Murphy’s Law applies to nego-tiation as well as life – things will go wrong if they can. Have a con-tingency plan when talks are delayed or things bog down. Start down on the assumptions that your time will be wasted in unforeseen ways. [...] The time to worry about “buying time” is long before you need it.

If you want the other party to look favorably at your position, find a good rule or a regulation to support it. When Moses came down the mountain with the Ten Commandments, they weren’t just ideas in his head. They were engraved in stone. Who was going to negotiate a change when every word was chiseled in granite and blessed at the highest level of authority? [...] Legitimacy, precedents and habit add strength to a negotiator’s position. They allow arguments to take the high ground. Legitimacy, precedents and habit imply that the weight of organization and history is behind the negotiator. Like Moses with the Ten Commandments, a negotiator backed by precedent or habit becomes a more persuasive bargainer.

Managerial Roles


To be successful, learn to dress two or three levels higher than you are. On the other hand, if you want to show that you don’t have much money for negotiating purposes, then dress that way. You can always dress like a country gentleman on the weekend.

Take notes about what is said and agreed to. Your notes have the power of legitimacy if the other side wants to renegotiate a prior con-cession. It’s amazing how often people forget what was said yester-day.

We are inundated by what appear to be firm prices. [...] From now on, whenever you encounter a firm price, say to yourself, “That’s the most the seller or merchant wants. I wonder what the least they will take is?”. Test the process – there is usually some flexibility in the seller’s offering or terms. [...] Fight your fear of trying. If you are too timid to try, you will never find out if the price was really firm or not.

Managerial Roles


Be ready to walk away from a negotiation and walk back again as many times as it takes. Negotiators who are prepared and willing to do this have the best chance of discovering what the other party’s bottom line really is.

Set the stage for a “yes” answer. Bring good things to eat and drink. Find personal areas of mutual interest to talk about like sports, films or family affairs. Make things comfortable. Break bread togeth-er.

Managerial Roles


Chester L. KarrassThe Seven Amendments

1. You Have a Right Not to Understand.2. You Have a Right to Be Wrong.3. You Have a Right to Be Indecisive.4. You Have a Right to Be a Broken Record. 5. You Have a Right Not to Answer Questions and You Have a Right Not to Know the Answer.6. You Have a Right to See Things Through Your Own Eyes and to Be Somewhat Illogical or Emotional.7. You Have a Right Not to Be Liked.

Joseph W. Grubbs, The Changing Roles of the Public Manager, Lecture at the University of Wrocław in 1998Roles unique to the public manager (public service roles):• consensus builder – a community leader, responsible for listening to the diverse interests within the external environment and making sure that those interests are reflected in the decision-making process• educator on community issues – a public service leader, responsible for communicating to the local community important aspects of the network and providing access to the decision-making process for interested parties • interpreter of community values – a normative leader, responsible for identifying the values underlying community action and translating those values to other stakeholder groups as a way of ensuring understanding and appreciation; also responsible for providing that the values reflect the needs of the entire community, not the limited interests of specific groups • bearer of ethical standards – a moral leader, responsible for serving as an example of excellence in public service and ethical behavior• sharer of community power – an unselfish leader, responsible for distri-buting power throughout the network and the community and recognizing that only through a strong network / community can public organizations achieve the public’s well being

Managerial Roles


Concluding Remark


The one word that makes a good manager – decisiveness.

Lee Iacocca

Lee Iacocca, born 1924

Documents

dr hab. Jerzy Supernat Institute of Administrative Studies University of Wroclaw