Professor Henry Mintzberg

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 work-related information

Scan/read trade press, periodicals, reports; attend seminars and training; maintain personal contacts

Disseminator

Communicate/ disseminate information to others within the organization

Send memos and reports; inform staffers and subordinates of decisions

Spokesperson

Communicate/transmit information to outsiders

Pass on memos, reports and informational materials; participate in conferences/meetings and report progress

Interpersonal

Figurehead

Perform social and legal duties, act as symbolic leader

Greet visitors, sign legal documents, attend ribbon cutting ceremonies, host receptions, etc.

Leader

Direct and motivate subordinates, select and train employees

Includes almost all interactions with subordinates

Liaison

Establish and maintain contacts within and outside the organization

Business correspondence, participation in meetings with representatives of other divisions or organizations.

Decisional

Entrepreneur

Identify new ideas and initiate improvement projects

Implement innovations; Plan for the future

Disturbance Handler

Deals with disputes or problems and takes corrective action

Settle conflicts between subordinates; Choose strategic alternatives; Overcome crisis situations

Resource Allocator

Decide where to apply resources

Draft and approve of plans, schedules, budgets; Set priorities

Negotiator

Defends business interests

Participates in and directs negotiations within team, department, and 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.”

References

http://kalyan-city.blogspot.com/2011/06/4-phases-of-business-cycle-in-economics.html http://www.business-case-analysis.com/business-cycle.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cycle