Managerial Work Essay

The aim of this essay is to discuss nature of managerial work. In this paper I will compare commonly accepted views about managerial work from a literature and discuss different views on this topic. A manager can be defined as someone whose role in an organisation involves planning, organising, coordinating, commanding and controlling. Management is the act of carrying out the five roles stated above and has been there since the world was formed. From the biblical point of view when God formed the earth he put man in charge of the earth and everything in it. Today managers are seen everywhere i.e., at home where the father is manager of family security and mother manager of family nourishment and in the community where there are business organisations

Some managers have bigger roles than others, for instance the United Sates President is the head of state in America and also overseas peace in almost all countries in the world. On the other hand, a manager at Boeing is not fully in charge of all the aspects of the organisation such as controlling all the resources of the company. He/she needs the approval of the board members who are stake holders in this company. Different authors such as Henry Mintz Berg, Linda and S.Tenglad have argued who is a manager and the activities that comes with being a manager.

Henry Mintzberg was baffled by the nature of managerial work from a young age. He was always curious on what constitutes managerial work because of his parents’ managerial positions in their field of work. For this reason he conducted a research through close observation of twenty-nine managers from different lines of work before publishing his book ‘Nature of Managerial Work.’ In his book he first starts by defining that a manager is ‘a person in charge of an organisation or one of its subunits” (Mintzberg, 1989, p.15). He also disagreed with the view that the four function of management which are , planning, leading, organizing and

S.Tengblad starts by pointing out important that there have been technological changes since in twentieth century, a period marked labelled as the era of ‘system rationalism’ (S.Tengblad, 2006, p.1439). This is a period where managers were expected to use computer technical skills in areas of management such as “planning and forecasting for efficient and effective running of the organisation” (S.Tengblad 2006, p.1439). Two, Mintzberg states in his book ‘Nature of Managerial Work’ that there is little room for the manager to deviate from the normal routine due to nature of managerial work itself. This notion has been rejected and S.Tengblad and other authors because in the twentieth century other factors such as ‘technology, globalization and increased competitive pressure’ (S.Tengblad 2006), have revolutionised the nature of managerial work and made it more complex. Three, Mintzberg research did not take in to account that he nature of managerial work could be affected by culture and geographical location of the organisation and the people themselves. Mintzberg book ‘Nature of Managerial Work’ has been published based solely on where the research was done in USA and the people’s culture. S.Tengblad compare nature of managerial role in USA, England and Sweden and notes that Sweden differs in both of their views.