Work Of The Manager In Practice And Theoretical Explanations

"Work of the manager in practice and theoretical explanations"

Introduction

"Manager is someone who works with and through other people by coordinating their work activities in order to accomplish organisational goals" (Robbins et al 2006, p8).

Management is the process of coordinating and harmonizing people and activities towards achieving a goal efficiently and effectively (Robbins et al 2006). This project is mainly focus on the research that I did by interviewing a manager. It is analysis of jobs perform by a modern manager comparing to the theoretical aspects of management.

The manager that I conducted the interview with is from a small organisation where staff level of less than twenty, established in Prahran. Their business is importing Chinies and Sri Lankan teas from those countries. This manager's tittle has been given as Business development manager. It was difficult for him to identify the distinction of his job because this is a small organisation and basically he is expected to have all levels of skills to perform any level of work whenever needed. He is one of my manager since I am working there as a bookkeeper.

Reflection of Mintzberg's managerial roles

According to Mintzberg (1975) the manager's job can be described in terms of various roles or organised sets of behaviours identified with a position. This comprises with 10 roles including three interpersonal roles, three informational roles and four decisional roles.

Interpersonal roles refer to duties that manager required performing, involving people. These people may be subordinates and persons outside the organisation (Robbins et al 2006). Interpersonal roles are subdivided in to figurehead, leader and liaison. As a head of an organisational unit, every manager must perform some duties of legal and social nature. As an example my manager greets customers when a customer walked in to their shop and he was one of the partners to sign the legal contract to rent the shop premises. A leader is someone who held responsible for the motivate subordinates and training staff. These qualities reflect through the activities such as interviewing staff for shop front, provide training and motivating them by giving commotions for sales by this business development manager that I interviewed. The liaison role is where manager makes contacts outside his vertical chain of command (Mintzberg 1975). These are reflect from activities what my manager does such as mail outs, sponsor charity organisations as community work and give special offers to regular customers. According to aggregates on Monash study online section, illustrates that most of the managers jobs reflect Mintzberg's interpersonal roles.

Informational roles are described as receiving, collecting and disseminating information (Robbins et al 2006). This separates in to monitoring, disseminator and spokesperson. Monitoring where seeks and receives wide variety of special information to develop thorough understanding of the organisation and its environment. The manager that I interviewed revealed an example, he does research about market trends and speak to market research organisations to find out information to market their product. Information that he received from outsiders and other sources, he usually use general emails, hand outs and meetings to transmit to other members of the organisation. In spokesperson, the manager send information to outsiders about company plans, policies, actions and results, etc. My interview disclose that activities such as general mail outs to clients about new products and events, promotion campaigns and advertising in media has been performed by that manager.

Decisional roles are playing a major unit of managerial work. These are the tasks involve decision making. These include entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator and negotiator. As entrepreneur, the manager seeks to improve his unit, to adapt in to changing conditions in the environment (Mintzberg 1975). As an example business development manager that I interviewed has organised to launch a new product to the market to set off with new market trends. Disturbance handler is being responsible to take care of the organisation when it faces an unforeseen event. Third decisional role is resource allocator, where responsibility falls to the manager of deciding who will get what in his organisational unit. According to Mintzberg (1975) this the formal pattern of relationships that determines how work is to be divided and coordinated. Corresponding to the research aggregates 42% of the managers interviewed, take responsibility for corrective action when the organisation faces important or unforeseen substances. As a resource allocator, the manager that I interviewed performs work such as making budget and allocates staff for sales activities. The last decisional role on Mintzberg's managerial roles is negotiator. As negotiator they are responsible for representing the organisation at major negotiations. According the interview, this manager does not contribute to a great extend on negotiating behalf of this business. However he has given an instance where he had to negotiate the rental agreement for their shop front with the shopping centre management.

Most of the work perform by this manager has been reflecting the managerial roles explained in Mintzberg theory. According to Mintzberg, managers are in contact with various people, to inform and be informed, and are in action and make decision. However, it's hard to categorise a modern manager just in to Mintzberg model.

According to Henri Fayol who French industrialist in early twentieth century, all managers perform four functions. Those are planing, organising, leading and controlling. Planing involves defining goals, establishing strategies for achieving those goals and developing plans to integrate and coordinate activities. Organising is determining what tasks are to be done, how the tasks are