IFSM 380

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The Roles Managers Play

2. What are the roles that managers play in organizations?

In Mintzberg’s seminal study of managers and their jobs, he found the majority of them clustered

around three core management roles.

Interpersonal roles. Managers are required to interact with a substantial number of people in the

course of a workweek. They host receptions; take clients and customers to dinner; meet with

business prospects and partners; conduct hiring and performance interviews; and form alliances,

friendships, and personal relationships with many others. Numerous studies have shown that

such relationships are the richest source of information for managers because of their immediate

and personal nature.14

Three of a manager’s roles arise directly from formal authority and involve basic interpersonal

relationships. First is the figurehead role. As the head of an organizational unit, every manager

must perform some ceremonial duties. In Mintzberg’s study, chief executives spent 12% of their

contact time on ceremonial duties; 17% of their incoming mail dealt with acknowledgments and

requests related to their status. One example is a company president who requested free

merchandise for a handicapped schoolchild.15

Managers are also responsible for the work of the people in their unit, and their actions in this

regard are directly related to their role as a leader. The influence of managers is most clearly

seen, according to Mintzberg, in the leader role. Formal authority vests them with great potential

power. Leadership determines, in large part, how much power they will realize.16

Does the leader’s role matter? Ask the employees of Chrysler Corporation (now

DaimlerChrysler). When Lee Iacocca took over the company in the 1980s, the once-great auto

manufacturer was in bankruptcy, teetering on the verge of extinction. He formed new

relationships with the United Auto Workers, reorganized the senior management of the company,

and—perhaps most importantly—convinced the U.S. federal government to guarantee a series of

bank loans that would make the company solvent again. The loan guarantees, the union response,

and the reaction of the marketplace were due in large measure to Iacocca’s leadership style and

personal charisma. More recent examples include the return of Starbucks founder Howard

Schultz to re-energize and steer his company, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his ability to

innovate during a downturn in the economy.17

Popular management literature has had little to say about the liaison role until recently. This role,

in which managers establish and maintain contacts outside the vertical chain of command,

becomes especially important in view of the finding of virtually every study of managerial work

that managers spend as much time with peers and other people outside of their units as they do

with their own subordinates. Surprisingly, they spend little time with their own superiors. In

Rosemary Stewart’s study, 160 British middle and top managers spent 47% of their time with

peers, 41% of their time with people inside their unit, and only 12% of their time with superiors.

Guest’s (1956) study of U.S. manufacturing supervisors revealed similar findings.18

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Informational roles. Managers are required to gather, collate, analyze, store, and disseminate

many kinds of information. In doing so, they become information resource centers, often storing

huge amounts of information in their own heads, moving quickly from the role of gatherer to the

role of disseminator in minutes. Although many business organizations install large, expensive

management information systems to perform many of those functions, nothing can match the

speed and intuitive power of a well-trained manager’s brain for information processing. Not

surprisingly, most managers prefer it that way.

As monitors, managers are constantly scanning the environment for information, talking with

liaison contacts and subordinates, and receiving unsolicited information, much of it as a result of

their network of personal contacts. A good portion of this information arrives in verbal form,

often as gossip, hearsay, and speculation.

In the disseminator role, managers pass privileged information directly to subordinates, who

might otherwise have no access to it. Managers must not only decide who should receive such

information, but how much of it, how often, and in what form. Increasingly, managers are being

asked to decide whether subordinates, peers, customers, business partners, and others should

have direct access to information 24 hours a day without having to contact the manager directly.

Exhibit 1.2 Howard Schultz Howard Schultz, executive chairman of Starbucks

Corporation, speaks after receiving the Distinguished Business Leadership Award

during the Atlantic Council’s Distinguished Leadership Awards dinner in

Washington, D.C. The awards recognize pillars of the transatlantic relationship

for their achievement in the fields of politics, military, business, humanitarian,

and artistic leadership. (Credit: Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff/ flickr/

Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0))

Download Principles of Management for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected].

In the spokesperson role, managers send information to people outside of their organizations: an

executive makes a speech to lobby for an organizational cause, or a supervisor suggests a product

modification to a supplier. Increasingly, managers are also being asked to deal with

representatives of the news media, providing both factual and opinion-based responses that will

be printed or broadcast to vast unseen audiences, often directly or with little editing. The risks in

such circumstances are enormous, but so too are the potential rewards in terms of brand

recognition, public image, and organizational visibility.

Decisional roles. Ultimately, managers are charged with the responsibility of making decisions

on behalf of both the organization and the stakeholders with an interest in it. Such decisions are

often made under circumstances of high ambiguity and with inadequate information. Often, the

other two managerial roles—interpersonal and informational—will assist a manager in making

difficult decisions in which outcomes are not clear and interests are often conflicting.

In the role of entrepreneur, managers seek to improve their businesses, adapt to changing market

conditions, and react to opportunities as they present themselves. Managers who take a longer-

term view of their responsibilities are among the first to realize that they will need to reinvent

themselves, their product and service lines, their marketing strategies, and their ways of doing

business as older methods become obsolete and competitors gain advantage.

While the entrepreneur role describes managers who initiate change, the disturbance or crisis

handler role depicts managers who must involuntarily react to conditions. Crises can arise

because bad managers let circumstances deteriorate or spin out of control, but just as often good

Exhibit 1.3 Thomas Pendergast Thomas F. Prendergast, the president of the

Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York State, updates media on today’s

labor negotiations with the LIRR unions. In his role negotiating a new contract

with the union, he must take on several managerial roles. (Credit: Metropolitan

Transit Authority of New York State/ flickr/ Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0))

Download Principles of Management for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected].

managers find themselves in the midst of a crisis that they could not have anticipated but must

react to just the same.

The third decisional role of resource allocator involves managers making decisions about who

gets what, how much, when, and why. Resources, including funding, equipment, human labor,

office or production space, and even the boss’s time are all limited, and demand inevitably

outstrips supply. Managers must make sensible decisions about such matters while still retaining,

motivating, and developing the best of their employees.

The final decisional role is that of negotiator. Managers spend considerable amounts of time in

negotiations: over budget allocations, labor and collective bargaining agreements, and other

formal dispute resolutions. In the course of a week, managers will often make dozens of

decisions that are the result of brief but important negotiations between and among employees,

customers and clients, suppliers, and others with whom managers must deal.19 A visual

interpretation of the roles managers play is illustrated in Exhibit 1.4 below.

This work "The Roles Managers Play" is a derivative of The Roles Managers Play by OpenStax used under a Creative

Commons Attribution 4.0 License. "The Roles Managers Play" by UMGC is licensed under Creative Commons

Attribution 4.0 License .

Exhibit 1.4 The Roles Managers Play (Attribution: Copyright Rice University,

OpenStax, under CC-BY 4.0 license)