Management Roles

Fundamentals

Because management is difficult to define, it is not always possible to draw clear distinctions between managerial and nonmanagerial work. Tasks considered managerial in one country or a sector may be categorized as employee tasks in other countries and sectors. However, as researchers, if we look at the roles managers perform, we may reach a better understanding of how managerial work differs from nonmanagerial work. From the lowest supervisory level to the highest executive level, managers lead other people, often assuming interpersonal, economic, and operational responsibilities. These responsibilities have an important impact on various management roles.

Before describing these management roles, it is useful to briefly discuss roles and role theory as developed mainly in the fields of sociology and social psychology. In role theory, the role concept is associated with the division of labor that assigns heterogeneous and specialized tasks to (work) roles. There are many work roles other than management roles, for instance, teachers, nurses, police officers, and sales persons, all of which are unique work roles.

In all such work roles, in addition to prescribed rights and duties, there are expectations and norms of appropriate behavior. For example, it is assumed managers will take leadership responsibility competently and authoritatively. Yet as the ongoing discussion about management roles indicates, the specific expectations and norms are rarely static. Managers are change agents. Therefore, as they help their organizations change, they too are required to adapt to new expectations and norms.

There are several ways to look at how expectations and norms associated with management roles are shaped. Evaluations are influential. People (other managers and/or employees) evaluate managers’ performance, and managers evaluate their own performance. Is he or she acting competently in this situation? And what about oneself? Such self-evaluation is strongly related to identity regulation. In addition, the responsibilities and obligations of work tasks influence the expectations and norms of managerial roles.

In his 1973 book, The Nature of Managerial Work, Henry Mintzberg presented what is now the most renowned model of managerial roles. The model consists of 10 roles divided into three categories: interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles. These 10 roles are summarized next. The term organization is used here in a general sense to mean the entity, the unit, the department, and so on.