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Managers fulfill many different roles every day, for instance when leading a team a manager may have to resolve conflicts, negotiate new contracts or representing the department at a board meeting. Put simply a manager is constantly switching roles as tasks, situations, and expectations change. The Managerial Roles Approach which is one of the newer approaches to management analysis has been popularized by management expert and professor Henry Mentoring. Meltzer. He has given this approach a higher volleyball although many researchers have studied the actual work of managers.
More recently, studies have focused to determine whether managers really behave as they are said to by literature In field. Henry Meltzer, recognized this and he followed five top managers for one week, analyzing their behavior and attempting to categorize the functions they performed. Ultimately he found that these managers did not perform all the traditional functions described In the literature. However, He argued that there are ten primary roles or behaviors that can be used to categories a managers different functions. The 10 roles are then classified into three categories which are
Interpersonal roles which this assignment Is mainly focused on. The rest are informational and decisional roles. Interpersonal roles are managerial roles that Involve people and other duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature. The interpersonal category includes a figurehead, a leader and a liaison. A figurehead is where a manager has social, ceremonial and legal responsibilities. The manager Is expected to be a source of inspiration and someone to look up to as a person with authority, and as a figurehead, this role includes greeting visitors; signing legal documents.
A leader is where the manager provides leadership for the team, the department or perhaps the entire organization; and it’s where the manager manages the performance and responsibilities of everyone in the group, this role includes hiring, training, motivating and disciplining employees, ultimately leadership Involves Interpersonal relationships between the leader and the led. Finally a liaison is when managers communicate with internal and external contacts. A manager needs to be able to network effectively on behalf of the organization.
The manager by virtue of authority and associated status, develops external horizontal relationships in which information is traded for mutual benefits, this role includes acknowledging mail; doing external board work; performing other activities that Involve outsiders. For example, companies in the computer industry may use liaisons to keep other companies informed about their plans. This enables Microsoft, for example, to create software for interfacing with new Hewlett-Packard can Incorporate new Microsoft features into the printers they Introduce.
These interpersonal roles facilitate acquisition of information. Determining His activities, Roles and Programs by Structured Observation” at the MIT Sloan School of Management, based on study of work of five chief executives. In 1970, he reviewed and rearranged his thesis. However, it was not to be the same publication of his thesis but it was to be a new book titled The Nature of Managerial Work, dealing not only with his study of the work of five chief executives, at the same time with empirical studies of many other managers as well.
According to professor and author Henry Integer’s observation-based research of Coos, managers at large or small firm require several different skills in order to accomplish their organizational goals. For instance a CEO cutting a ribbon at an opening ceremony, this act portrays the CEO as a figurehead conducting social, ceremonial, and legal responsibilities. This is important as it provides inspiration by sharing the mission and vision of the organization and symbolizing authority.
This act would have the same purpose whether it’s her majesty Queen Elizabeth attending a public hospital opening ceremony or on a less grand scale, a department head giving a motivational speech at a quarterly sales meeting. The term figurehead’ is often used to describe a powerless person who represents an organization without having ell authority, but when the figurehead has responsibilities within the other nine managerial roles, there is not a negative implication.
Moving on, a ‘leader’ is a broad term and the most extensively examined of the ten roles, Mentoring precisely defines the leader managerial role as the act of directing goals and evaluating employee performance. For instance football mangers take on the leader role to drive their clubs to success; a good example would be the Chelsea manager Jose Mourning, like many managers, fixes team goals by giving each individual precise performance milestones to meet during each practice. Afterwards, he would meet with players and provide concrete, thorough feedback.
Mourning also mentored separate players, implemented a team wide training program, and maintained the combined drive and inspiration necessary for his team to become the English Premier League champions. Lastly, a liaison networks by linking people inside the company as well as externally. This role is not only about distribution of information. Being a liaison is about classifying the challenges and goals faced by others and linking them with resources that will allow them to overcome hurdles or advance an agenda.
Something as simple as giving a friend your barber’s name after you’ve been remarked favorably on your haircut makes you a liaison to a company. Moreover the Backbone founder Mark Seersucker revolutionized the liaison role by creating social networking broadly accessible. In conclusion, the Harvard business review validates Integer’s theories by portraying the roles in the actual world, however these roles overlap and a manager must learn to balance them in order to manage efficiently.
While a manager’s work can be analyses by these individual roles, in practice they are intermixed and inter- incentives never gets anything done, while the manager who only ‘does’ ends up doing it all alone. ” Therefore working well with others is a substantial component of a manger’s responsibilities. Inspiring the subordinates and becoming a symbol for objective of the organization would make the manager a figurehead, while mentoring, training, motivating, and evaluating the team puts the manager in the leader role. As a liaison, the manager links others to helpful resources to round out the interpersonal management roles.