Mintzberg’s Management Roles Essay

Managers’ roles are considerably critical for any kind of organization everywhere in the world. Managers have the responsibility to ensure that employees’ works are done correctly in order to accomplish organization’s goals. This managing process has become very important for an organization by dividing job responsibilities, so that the efficiency and effectiveness of tasks are more achievable. For instance, a manager is doing all three levels managerial roles at the same time. It’s not impossible, yet it’s highly energy consuming plus the works she/he had done wouldn’t be likely to get to certain standards. It concludes that the roles brought to a manager will reflect her/his actual job. Consequently, in this essay, most of the discussions are related to Mintzberg’s Ten Roles. Mintzberg’s Ten Management Roles (1973) were specified into three categories:interpersonal roles (figurehead, leader, liaison); informational roles (monitor, disseminator, spokesperson); and decisional roles (entrepreneur, handler, allocator and negotiator). All ten managerial roles stated above are essential to all three managerial levels with of course, different portion. The first category of Mintzberg’s management roles is the interpersonal roles. Interpersonal roles are managerial roles that involve people and other duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature. (Robbins et al. , 2008). In other words, interpersonal roles can be described as a managerial performance that is assumed to interact and coordinate with employees as a part of acknowledging organizational visions. Interpersonal roles are simplified into figurehead, leader and liaison. Figurehead is a symbolic head; obliged to perform a number of routine duties of a legal or social nature. (Mintzberg, 1973, as cited in Robbins et al. , 2008). A figurehead represents what tasks are done by his/her team, which things are necessary to get the jobs done more effectively and efficiently (at lower-level manager) and so on. At the top-level manager, this role usually has the responsibility to work with outside world, such as signing a new dealing contract with future corporate cooperation. It provides members and non-members alike with a sense of what organization is about. (Hahn, M. 2007). At middle-level manager, he/she is responsible for the representations carried from all lower-level managers. At first-line managerial level, figurehead plays as the representation of subordinates. The second role is leader. Leader can be simply defined as the one who leads or directs the way. An organization needs constant improvements so that it is able to compete in the real world. Consequently, a leader must be able to direct and nurture the workers under his/her responsibility through training and motivating in order to achieve the organization’s goals. These training and motivation programs will at least, diagnose workers’ needs. Therefore, the jobs will possibly be easier to be done up-to standards. At the first-line manager level, leadership is very substantial to organization’s improvements.