Professor Henry Mintzberg Managerial Roles PDF

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Professor Henry Mintzberg Managerial Roles...

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Management expert Professor Henry Mintzberg has argued that a manager’s work can be boiled down to ten common roles. According to Mintzberg, these roles, or expectations for a manager’s behavior, fall into three categories: informational (managing by information), interpersonal (managing through people), and decisional (managing through action). This chart summarizes a manager’s ten roles:

Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles

Category

Role

Activity

Examples

Informational

Monitor

Seek and acquire

Scan/read trade press,

work-related information

periodicals, reports; attend seminars and training; maintain personal contacts

Communicate/

Send memos and reports;

disseminate

inform staffers and

information to others within the organization

subordinates of decisions

Spokesperso

Communicate/transmit

Pass on memos, reports

n

information to outsiders

and informational materials; participate in

Disseminator

conferences/meetings and report progress

Interpersonal

Figurehead

Leader

Perform social and

Greet visitors, sign legal

legal duties, act as

documents, attend ribbon

symbolic leader

cutting ceremonies, host receptions, etc.

Direct and motivate subordinates, select

Includes almost all interactions with

Liaison

and train employees

subordinates

Establish and maintain

Business correspondence,

contacts within and outside the

participation in meetings with representatives

organization

of other divisions or organizations.

Decisional

Identify new ideas and

Implement innovations;

initiate improvement projects

Plan for the future

Disturbance

Deals with disputes or

Handler

problems and takes corrective action

Settle conflicts between subordinates; Choose strategic alternatives;

Entrepreneur

Overcome crisis situations

Resource

Decide where to apply

Draft and approve of

Allocator

resources

plans, schedules, budgets; Set priorities

Defends business

Participates in and directs

interests

negotiations within team, department, and

Negotiator

organization

In the real world, these roles overlap and a manager must learn to balance them in order to manage effectively. While a manager’s work can be analyzed by these individual roles, in practice they are intermixed and interdependent. According to Mintzberg: “The manager who only communicates or only conceives never gets anything done, while the manager who only ‘does’ ends up doing it all alone.”...