Page 51 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 2 ■ Organization structures: choice and leadership
and power engineering activities, often engaged in major capital schemes for gov-
ernments in the developing world. Thus the local imperative is a strong one. How is
the business held together globally? The CEO spends much of his time visiting sub-
sidiaries articulating the group strategy and seeking to understand local needs. The
group has a well-developed information system for financial and management con-
trol. Much attention is given to identifying and then developing the careers of a cadre
of ‘high fliers’ seen as the future senior managers of the business. Thus considerable
effort is devoted to integrating diversity. The approach is not simply about organiz-
ing for coordination and control. The group appears to organize around local needs
and then wraps those local operations within arrangements designed to pursue inte-
gration across the world. Key technologies are managed by a senior executive with a
global remit to maximize the leverage of that technology for the group.

Managerial performance
Managerial performance is a combination of knowledge and skill applied in prac-
tice. Management is about ‘getting things done’, about action. Managerial work is
surrounded by circumstances which create problems including uncertainty, incom-
plete information, change in the environment or elsewhere in the organization
and conflict. Mintzberg (1973) has developed a comprehensive empirical picture of
the nature of managerial work through observing and recording what managers
actually do. He describes the managerial job in terms of roles (see Table 2.2).
From his empirical work Mintzberg characterizes managerial jobs as follows:

■ They are remarkably similar and can be described in nine roles (see Table 2.2)
and six sets of working characteristics (see below).
■ Much managerial work is challenging and non-routine, but every manager has
some routine and regular ordinary duties.
■ A manager is both a generalist and a specialist.
■ Information is an important part of the manager’s power.
■ The major pitfall for the manager is having to be superficial because the work-
load is too high.

■ Management science has little effect on how the manager works because when
under work pressure he or she fragments activity and uses verbal communica-
tion, making it difficult for management scientists to help.
■ The management scientist can only break this ‘vicious circle’ with real under-
standing of the manager’s job, and access to the manager’s own views of the
help he or she needs.

Table 2.2 Managerial roles (after Mintzberg, 1973)

Interpersonal roles Informational roles Decisional roles
Figurehead Monitor Entrepreneur disturbance
Leader Disseminator Handler resource
Liaison Spokesperson Allocator negotiator

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