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What Do Managers Do?

9 九月, 2015 - 11:17

Imagine that you are successful in a job application for the post of manager in our small travel organization – now grown to 15 employees. What sorts of responsibilities and activities would be expected of you? How do you expect you would spend your average day at work?

Now repeat the exercise; but this time assume you are to take up the post of manager in a large chain of travel companies, with about 50 shops. Each shop employs 10 staff, both full-time and part-time. You work in the Head Office which employs 80 administrators and support staff. The company is itself part of a larger group with shops and offices in many different countries.

What aspects are common to the two situations? What aspects are different? Try to note down some ideas before reading the next section.

The classical view of management is derived from the work of early theorists such as Henri Fayol (1841-1925). Fayol defined the five functions of management as:

  • planning
  • organizing
  • co-ordinating
  • deciding
  • controlling

Fayol’s experience as head of a coal mine in France led him to identify these functions or activities, and they are related to the ideas discussed earlier particularly those concerned with the two forms of the division of labour.

Using the list you prepared earlier, can you match your ideas against the five functions given by Fayol? It may not always be easy to select just one function. Did you find that some of the tasks you specified do not fit with any of Fayol’s five functions?

It is important to understand that although Fayol’s ideas might seem fairly obvious and conventional now, they were not really taken up until late in the 20th century. The concept of management as something distinctive did not really become widespread and important until after World War II. Peter Drucker, generally regarded as the most influential management guru of the last 35 years, argues that it was really only after World War II that what we now consider to be the essential aspects of management came into being. After World War II, management became a key focus for ‘big business’ and the private sector. In particular the practice of management was encouraged in a systematic manner by the head of General Motors, Alfred P Sloan Jr. (1875-1966). Sloan developed a systematic approach to management of large corporations. Many common ideas such as developing business objectives, formulating business strategies and strategic planning were started by Sloan. At this time the first multi-national organizations appeared, including the Unilever Companies that merged Dutch and English organizations. So it can be argued that the core concepts underlying modern management were first formulated in the late 1940s; but it should also be noted that some key features such as leadership, influence and power are far older, dating back at least to the 16th century and the publication of Niccolo Machiavelli’s book The Prince.

Drucker extends Fayol’s ideas by proposing three ‘dimensions of management’, each of which requires a particular task; each is ‘equally important but essentially different’:

  1. ‘to think through and define the specific purpose and mission of the institution, whether business enterprise, hospital or university’;
  2. ‘to make work productive and the worker achieving’;
  3. ‘to manage social impacts and social responsibilities’ (p36).

Many might question whether modern management actually encourages the third set of tasks. Some would argue that it certainly does not; some that it should not; and others that it should, but does not.

A more important point is that models such as those put forward by Fayol, Drucker and many other theorists often rely on highly idealized views of the daily routines of organizational reality. This was noted in particular by Henry Mintzberg who demonstrated the discrepancy between what many managers said they did, and what they actually do. He argued that the view of managers as rational decision-makers and planners was at best only partially true. More importantly he identified a series of roles that managers undertake in the course of their activities. These were grouped under the headings – interpersonal, informational, decisional. Each one subdivided as follows:-

  • Interpersonal
    • figurehead
  • leader
  • liaison
  • Informational
    • monitor
  • disseminator
  • spokesperson
  • Decisional
    • entrepreneur
  • disturbance handler
  • resource allocator
  • negotiator

The details of Mintzberg’s ideas, and the general issues of management are beyond the scope of this chapter; but it should be noted that the concepts of organization, division of labour, and management are closely related to one another, although their actual realization in practice will depend on many factors, including economic, cultural and social ones; but more particularly for the purposes of this chapter the impact of technology.