What are Roles of Management?

All of us play different types of roles in our life. At home, you might be a brother or a sister, a son or a daughter, with someone you might be a friend, and in a school or college, you are a student, so we play many roles during our life.

Here, it’s a talk about the role in a job or in an organization, which means that what is expected from an individual in a specific job. In 1989, a book was written by Henry Mintzberg, titled “Mintzberg on Management: Inside our Strange World of Organizations” have mentioned 10 different roles of a successful manager.

Every manager has to play different types roles in the organization. Mintzberg has identified mainly three types of role. They are interpersonal, informational and decisional roles, which are sub divided in 10 sub-categories.

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Role of Manager

These ten roles of a manager are explained here in brief, which is divided into three categories, they are:

Interpersonal Role

The three roles of figurehead, leader, and Liaison grow out of the Managers’ formal authority and focus on interpersonal relationships. By assuming these roles, the manager is also able to perform informally which, in turn, lead directly to the performances of decisional roles. All managerial jobs require some duties that are symbolic or ceremonial in nature.

The manager’s leadership role involves directing and coordinating the activities of the subordinates. This may involve staffing (hiring, training, promoting, dismissing) and motivating subordinates. The leadership role also involves controlling, making sure that things are going according to plan.

Figurehead Role

In this type of role, manager becomes symbolic head and performs a number of routine duties of a social or legal in nature. E.g. – Greeting visitors, taking an important customer to a lunch and signing legal documents.

Leader Role

As a leader, he has to select and train best employees, motivate them and doing their performance appraisal. E.g. – Announcing awards in sales department for best performance in his territory.

Liaison Role

In liaising role, manager has to develop and maintain network with outside people for information. E.g. – Meeting formally or informally CEO of other company.

Information Role

Informational role means receiving, collecting and disseminating information for the organization,which has three sub-types within it: Monitor, Disseminator and Spokesman.

Monitor Role

In monitor role, manager has to try to find out and receive variety of internal and external information for thorough understanding of business environment. E.g. – Reading annual reports of other company or read research journals for market update.

Seek and receive information, i.e. scan periodicals and reports i.e. maintain personal contact with stakeholders.

Discriminator Role

As a discriminator role player, a manager has to provide collected information of outside world to employees of the organization, which is useful to them. E.g. – Sending an email of necessary information to staff members or conducting a staff information meeting.

Spokesman Role

In a spokesman role, a manager provides important information is provided to the outside world. E.g. – Launching of a new product announcement in media, Inform to Chamber of Commerce or government bodies for the necessary information.

Decision-al Role

Exchange of information from different sources is required for quality decisions in the organization, but better performance and goal achievement will be based on, timely and qualitative decisions taken by managers. This decision-al roles have four sub-categories: Entrepreneur, Disturbance handler, Resource allocate and Negotiator.

Entrepreneur Role

In this role, manager has to be in search of new initiatives and innovative projects and develop it for bringing changes and development in the organization for future. E.g. – Review sessions to develop a new project.

Disturbance Handler Role

Manager has to face and solve any critical situation or unexpected disturbances of the organization in the role of a disturbance handler. E.g. – Managing a strike of a workers for their demand of salary increment.

Resource Allocator Role

As a resource allocator, manager has to decide who will get resources and how many resources they will get. E. g. – Budgeting, Time scheduling etc.

Negotiator Role

Negotiator role is the responsibility for representing the organization for the work of negotiation. E.g. –Deal in the negotiation for taking a big project loan from private bank.

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