Henry Mintzberg - Management theories PDF

Preview

Summary

Management theories...

Description

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317615592

Mintzberg Management Folklore Conference Paper · November 2014

CITATIONS

READS

0

3,336

2 authors, including: Wael Sleiman Zaraket American University of Science and Technology 22 PUBLICATIONS12 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Leadership View project

Organizational Commitment View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Wael Sleiman Zaraket on 16 June 2017. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Mintzberg Management Folklore

Wael S. Zaraket [email protected]

Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University College of Business Administration P.O. Box 1664 Al Khobar 31952 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Tel: +9665 53525942

ABSTRACT Mintzberg’s managerial roles have been dominating the business behavior for the past decades, even though an incessant criticism by scholars and management experts who belong to the “Fayolan” functional school of management. This study delineates the concept and Mintzberg’s managerial roles, comparing Mintzberg’s observation and studies with other prominent classical managerial theories. The aim of this paper is to distinguish between distinctive management studies and reflecting that on business behavior.

Keywords: Mintzberg’s managerial roles, Lebanon, Henry Fayol, Hofstede Cultural Dimensions.

1

INTRODUCTION During the last decade, many management theories have been formulated in an aim to accurately define managerial work that would lead to enhancing the manager’s skills and eventually towards achieving the most efficient and effective performance at work. Most of these theories discussed management in a traditional context, such as Henry Fayol who states that the manager’s job can be only described through a predefined number of managerial functions that include planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. However, the management professor and expert, Henry Mintzberg has challenged the traditional ideas of management and described the functional school of management more like a “folklore”. In order to understand the nature of managerial work, Mintzberg has done observational studies of five executives at work. At the end of these observations, he argued that the functional school of management does not accurately describe the manager’s job but rather it can be better explained through three sets of roles or activities as follows: 1- Interpersonal - the roles in this set deal with providing information and ideas, 2- Informational - the roles included in this set deal with processing information, and 3Decisional - the roles in this set deal with using information. He further divided these three sets into ten primary roles or behaviors that are ought to be used in classifying the different functions of a manager as listed next.

MINTZBERG’S MANAGERIAL ROLES

I.

Interpersonal: 1. Figurehead: considered to be the symbolic head of the organization. Thus, the manager is expected to hold social, legal and ceremonial responsibilities, in addition to performing symbolic duties and being seen as a source of inspiration, where employees look to the manager as a person with authority. 2. Leader: it is where the manager provides leadership for his staff, subordinate teams, the department, or even the entire organization. As a leader, the manager is ought to motivate and direct subordinates, as well as train, influence, and advice them. Also, part of being a leader is to manage the responsibilities and performance of all members in the group. 3. Liaison: managers should communicate with contacts inside and outside the organization. Hence, managers need to develop and maintain a network of internal and external contacts in order to effectively communicate and sustain the information links within and beyond the organization.

II.

Informational: 4. Monitor: in this role, the manager is responsible for gathering useful and relevant information for the organization, as well as looking for relevant changes in the environment. The manager personally studies all gathered information, examines papers and reports, monitors the productivity and well-being of teams, and maintains interpersonal contacts in order to be able to understand the organization. 2

5. Disseminator: this is the role where the manager transmits and communicates any useful data and information gathered/received from outsiders to the colleagues and teams working inside the organization. Also, the manager transfer data through memos and phone calls. 6. Spokesperson: managers are considered to be representatives of their organizations and hence they are expected to represent and speak for their organizations in speeches and reports. Unlike the previous role, the manager in this role is responsible for transmitting and communicating the organization’s plans, goals, policies, and actions to the people outside it.

III.

Decisional: 7. Entrepreneur: managers always look for opportunities, basically in creating, exploiting, and controlling change inside the organization. They initiate new projects, generate new ideas, solve problems, identify opportunities, and determine areas of business development. 8. Disturbance handler: the manager is the one responsible for dealing with unexpected disturbances that faces the organization. He is the one in charge for taking corrective actions throughout crisis, resolving any conflicts among staff, and adapting to external transformations. 9. Resource allocator: in this role the manager makes decisions related to the allocation of available resources and where best applied within the organization. This involves deciding who gets resources, allocating funding, assigning staff, setting schedule, defining budget, and setting budgets. 10. Negotiator: the manager may take part in representing the organization in important negotiations. This includes negotiations within his team, department or organization as well as dealing with negotiations with unions, suppliers, and other organizations.

Hence, according to Henry Mintzberg, a manager is daily exposed to do different tasks that falls under one or more of the abovementioned roles. In fact, a manager who is leading a team inside his department or within the organization may find himself representing his department in a board meeting, negotiating new contracts, resolving a conflict amongst team members, or approving requests for installation of new software. Thus, Mintzberg believes that managers constantly switch roles in accordance with the change in situations, tasks, and expectations. Moreover, in addition to Mintzberg’s ten roles, the manager’s activities more often involve reflection and action. Mintzberg described reflection as thoughtful thinking since managers “think, ponder, and contemplate about their decisions”, whereas the action included in their activities referred to practical doing, i.e. the execution of their decisions every time they act to do something. Consequently, we find that Mintzberg in his model of management - which is based on actual and real observations of managers at work - emphasizes on the fact that managers spend less time planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. Thus, he totally rejects the traditional image of the manager and indicates that managing should be associated with what managers do. For the past 40 years, Mintzberg has attempted to this everlasting question: What do managers really do? During these years, he has always concentrated on the role of manager as mentioned in his books: “The Nature of managerial work” published in 1973 and “Managing” published in 2009. In addition to the ten roles mentioned earlier, in his first book, The nature of managerial work, Mintzberg suggests six 3

characteristics of management work that apply to all management jobs from a chief executive officer to a supervisor. The six characteristics are: 1. The manager's job is a combination of regular, programmed jobs and non-programmed tasks. 2. A manager is both a generalist and a specialist. 3. Managers depend on information from all sources but usually they prefer those transmitted orally. 4. Managerial work involves activities that are described by variety and fragmentation. 5. Management work is considered to be more of an art rather than a science, which depends on a feeling of what is righteous. 6. Management work is getting much more complex. Furthermore, in his latest book titled “Management? It's not what you think!” which was published in 2010, Mintzberg attempts to respond back to all of those who have criticized and doubted the accuracy of his model of management which has resulted in list of 10 roles that describe what really managers do. In his study this time, he has thoughtfully observed 29 managers from different institutions with distinct responsibilities - from a CEO from a major bank to a refugee camp manager - and how would each one of them spend a day. Again, the observations have ascertained the same results he got back in 1973, yet his study and research reveals that managers face a high degree of interruptions especially with the introduction of technology. Mintzberg states that “management is largely about interruption”; however, emails and BlackBerries in hand makes it much worse.

Criticism of Mintzberg’s Management Theory The new findings of Mintzberg on management were opposed and rejected by scholars and management experts who belong to the “Fayolan” functional school of management. Henri Fayol was the first to identify the functions of management that attempt to accurately describe the job of managers. Fayol defined the five functions of management as planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. According to Fayol, these functions were universal to all managers despite the nature of their work, whether they operated in business organization, military, government or other institutions. According to Fayol, planning deals with setting objectives, developing ways to achieve these objectives, and forecasting future conditions. He defines organizing as making provisions for recruiting, training of personnel, and evaluation. As for commanding, Fayol considers it as a managerial function that deals with the supervision of subordinates and motivates them towards attaining the planned objectives. Fayol stresses on the importance that managers ought to understand their work colleagues and treat subordinates in a manner consistent with the firm’s policy. Fayol regarded the coordination function of great importance that it harmonizes all of the distinctive activities of the firm. As for the control function, Fayol described it in terms of assuring that all activities occur within the predefined parameters of the plan and thus identify any possible deviations from objectives and take corrective actions accordingly. Consequently, supporters of the functional management theory greatly disagree with Mintzberg and reject his model of management that describes the role of managers in terms of a list of ten predefined roles. They argue that Mintzberg’s model which is based on observation does not accurately address the activities of managers because his observational approach does not analyze the functions of management. They state that management serves the purpose of attaining the firm’s objectives in a way that achieves the most effective utilization of resources and efficient use of time. Hence, unlike what Mintzberg claims, managing is not anything that occurs haphazard, accidently, or wasteful. Functional management theorists

4

criticize Mintzberg’s belief of role of managers as an abstract, chaotic, and random process distantly removed from daily work, but rather they argue that it is an organized and purposeful way of working. Furthermore, one more critique on Mintzberg’s model is that his focus on the role of the manager creates a kind of confusion between the terms managing and doing. For instance, the function of selling can be viewed in two different perspectives, where Mintzberg considers selling as done when being made by a sales agent while it is considered managing when it requires the manager’s authority to be done. Thus, from a functional viewpoint, Mintzberg provides no argument for the identification of managing with everything managers do, where functional theorists argue that not everything a manager can just be part of his role as a manager. They disagree with Mintzberg and state that managers can both do and manage, which is evident enough that management is a function that managers get engaged in occasionally.

IMPACT OF MINZBERG’S MANAGERIAL ROLE IN LEBANON Lebanon, known as country of the cedar, is a small country in the Middle East, which immediately draws one’s attention by the extreme diversity of the communities that compose it. “Crossroads of civilizations”, “bridge between the East and the West” (Salibi, 1977), and “Ground of Islamic-Christian dialogue” are some of the many expressions that signify the multicultural variety of Lebanese society. An Arab country located in the Middle East, Lebanon has cultural features that make it different from all the other Arab countries. It is the only non-Muslim country of the 22 Arab countries, and can be described as a “bireligious” reality (Harris, 2012). Geert Hofstede (1980) disseminated that culture can the best be defined as a “collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another”. Continually, Hofstede through his work with IBM conducted a massive survey for the 117,000 employees of IBM in 66 conutries. Hofstede categorized culture can be devided into four dimesnions: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity-Feminity, and Individualism-Collectivism. Uncertainty Avoidance The Lebanese social identity been always affiliated with innovation and entrepreneurship. The Lebanese working force reflects low uncertainty avoidance where they look forward to initiate innovative and collaborative performance. The conceptualization of Mintzberg’s management roles play a vital role in the kindling such a business behavior where the manager can reflect his decisional – entrepreneurial managerial roles and transmit such savvy to his subordinates and colleagues. Individualism – Collectivism The Lebanese social and business culture reflects individualistic behavior. Through history the Lebanese compatriots have been always into emigration and business trading abroad. This can be observed in today’s organizational operation in Lebanon where the emphasis is the same like the international pattern focusing on team building and group synergy, but still the management behavior in Lebanon is into investing in indoctrination of the Lebanese human asset. The aforementioned management style reflects Mintzberg’s management roles where every employees and cadres has to pass through specific commensurate with his/her job description.

5

Power Distance The Lebanese culture shows high scores in power distance, where it is believed that the manager or authority power is a fact of life that employees are not equal and every one carry his/her rightful place. Lebanon depicts high power distance based on long turbulent feudalism history, impact of religious tutelage, and the current political system the Lebanese abide with. Mintzberg’s managerial roles is indispensable in the Lebanese scenario due to the fact what it reflects from authority status such as figurehead, leadership, and monitor.

CONCLUSION It is clear that Mintzberg's contribution to management thinking is based on a broad approach that involves the study of all activities that managers do and how they do them. Through his books and writings, it can be noticed that he strongly believes that management is about applying human skills to systems and not the other way around. Mintzberg argued that the functional or process school of management was "folklore" and that functions of management such as planning, organizing, leading, and controlling did not accurately depict the chaotic nature of managerial work. He felt that the functional approach to the managerial job falsely conveyed a sense that managers carefully and deliberately evaluated information before making management decisions. Mintzberg rejects the classical view of managerial work in terms of a set of functions revolving around planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. He described the functional or process school of management as “folklore”, which did not accurately illustrate the chaotic and random nature of managerial work. Nevertheless, he has introduced a new model of management that is based on observation of the activities that managers do at work. This model identified 10 roles that describe the different tasks and activities that a manager really does, where the role of the manager constantly varies depending on the change in situations, demands, tasks, and expectations. Consequently, the ten roles can be applied to any managerial situation and it is up to the manager to act accordingly by switching roles as necessary to achieve the organizational goals.

6

REFERENCES Encyclopedia of Management. 2006. Management Functions. http://www.enotes.com/management-functions-reference/management-functions. Accessed August 5, 2014. Harris, W., 2012, Lebanon: A History, 600-2011, Oxford University Press Inc., New York. Hofstede, G. 1980, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA. Hofstede, G. (1991), Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, McGraw-Hill, London. Kenney M., 2009. Ten Management Roles by Henry Mintzberg. http://www.sayeconomy.com/ten-management-roles-by-henry-mintzberg. Accessed September 5, 2014. Lutans F., 2001. Succesful vs. Effective Real Managers. http://carmine.se.edu/cvonbergen/Successful%20vs%20Effective%20Real%20Managers. pdf. Accessed August 3, 2014. Management Roles, 2011. http://vampiregrave.hubpages.com/hub/ManagementRoles Accessed September 15, 2014. McCrimmon M., 2011. Mintzberg on Management. http://www.lead2xl.com/mintzberg-onmanagement.html. Accessed September 12, 2014. Mind Tools, 2011. Mintzberg's Management Roles - Identifying the Roles Managers Play. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/management-roles.htm . Accessed October 2, 2014. Salibi, K., 1977, The Modern History of Lebanon, Caravan Books, Delmar, NY The British Library Board, n.d. Henry Mintzberg. http://www.mbsportal.bl.uk/taster/subjareas/busmanhist/mgmtthinkers/mintzberg.aspx Accessed October 12, 2014. Wall Street Journal, 2009. What Managers Really Do. http://www.mintzberg.org/sites/default/files/mgrsreallydo.pdf. Accessed November 3, 2011.

7...