Despite a proliferation of management gurus, management consultants, and management schools, it remains murky to many of us what managers actually do and why we need them in the first place. Unless someone has actually performed managerial work, it's hard to understand exactly what managers do on an hour-by-hour or day-by-day basis. In this course, we explore this role of managers.
A role is a set of expectations for a manager's behavior. The roles of managers can be divided into three conceptual categories. Informational, where we manage by information. Interpersonal, where we manage through people.
And decisional, where we're managing through action. Each role represents activities that managers undertake to ultimately accomplish the functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Although it's necessary to separate the components of a manager's job to understand the different roles of a manager, the real job of management isn't practiced as a set of independent parts.
All of the roles interact in the real world. Informational roles describe the activities used to maintain and develop an information network. 75% of managers time is about communicating with people. The monitor role involves seeking current information from many sources. The manager acquires and scans information to stay well informed.
The next two roles are quite the opposite. The disseminator role is where the manager transmits current information to others, both inside and outside the organization, who can use it. The disseminator role is where managers forward information within the organization, doing things like sending memos and reports, making phone calls, or holding meetings.
Likewise, the spokesperson role is where a manager transmits information to outsiders through various forms of communication. Interpersonal roles pertain to the relationships with others and are related to the human skills described earlier. The figurehead role involves ceremonial and symbolic activities for the department or organization. The manager represents the organization in his or her formal managerial capacity as a head of a unit.
The leader role encompasses relationships with subordinates including motivation, communication, and influence. The liaison role pertains to the development of information sources both inside and outside the organization. Finally, decisional roles pertain to those events about which the manager must make a choice or take action.
The entrepreneur role involves innovation of change. Managers are consistently thinking about the future and the changes needed to achieve a future goal or vision. The mediator role involves resolving conflicts among subordinates or between the manager's department and others.
The resource allocator role pertains to decisions about how to assign people, time, equipment, money, and other resources to attain desired outcomes. The managers must decide which projects receive budget allocations, which of several customer complaints receive priority, and how to spend his or her own time. And finally, the negotiator role is where the manager represents a team or department's interests when negotiating issues. Negotiation happens in budgeting, union environments, purchases, and many other management activities. Managers at every level perform these ten roles, which are grouped into informational, interpersonal, and decisional roles.
The relative emphasis that a manager puts on these roles depends on a number of factors, such as the manager's position in the hierarchy, natural skills and abilities, the type of organization, and department goals that need to be achieved.