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.