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Conclusion
The six working characteristics relate to the following:
1 The quantity and pace of the manager’s work.
2 The patterns of the activities.
3 The relationship in work between action and reflection.
4 The use of different communications media.
5 The relationships with contacts.
6 The interaction between rights and duties.

Mintzberg (1973), Stewart (1977), Dubin and Spray (1964) and Horne and Lupton
(1965) all confirm from empirical studies that managers’ workloads are substan-
tial. Managers work at an unrelenting pace. This is because the job is inherently
open-ended and the manager never finishes his or her work.
Managerial work is characterized by brevity, variety and fragmentation. The
manager is never able to concentrate on one aspect of the job alone or for any
length of time. The trivial and the important are mixed so that mood and tone shift
and change continually. Mintzberg found that half of the activities of five CEOs
took nine minutes or less and only 10 per cent lasted more than an hour. The man-
ager is seldom able or willing to spend much time on any one issue. He or she is
constantly interrupted. Rosemary Stewart found only nine periods of half-an-hour
without interruption in a four-week study of 160 managers.
The manager seems to stress the active element of work – activities that are cur-
rent, specific, well defined and non-routine attract more attention: for example,
processing most mail and reading written reports are low-priority jobs. The man-
ager may be seen as the conductor of the orchestra and, conversely, as a puppet
pulled by hundreds of strings. To find out the extent to which managers con-
trolled themselves, Mintzberg analysed whether in each activity managers were
active or passive and found only a small proportion of active work, with man-
agers spending much time reacting. The initial construction of the manager’s job
may, however, have included decisions to allow these reactions and passive par-
ticipation as a way of keeping up a flow of work and ensuring the involvement
of others in the management process.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined how organizations are structured and managed. It has
identified and described various management structures. But structures are not
everything. Overlaid on the question of structure are at least six ‘dilemmas’ of
organization. The reality of organizational life is that these ‘dilemmas’ are con-
stantly presented to managers as the circumstances around them change. In prac-
tice, managers have discretion and choice in the work they do. The extent to
which they will recognize and exploit this discretion will be related to the ‘cor-
porate culture’ of the organization. This is a question to which we will turn in a
later chapter of this book. For the moment I conclude by stating that defining an
organizational structure is to define a ‘moving target’. It only begins to establish
the boundaries within which managers act or choose not to act, and within

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