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Summary Management of Organizations
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Samenvatting Literatuur Management van OrganisatiesWeek 1:
Mintzberg
H1 The managers job
What distinguishes the formal organization from a random collection of
people is the presence of some system of authority and administration,
personified by one manager or several in a hierarchy to knit the whole
effort together.
No shortage of material on what managers should do, but much of this
advice has proved to be false and wasteful. Lack of a conceptual basis to
consider managerial work.
4 myths about the managers job
- The manager is a reflective, systematic planner
unrelenting pace, variety, discontinuity, action
- The effective manager has no regular duties to perform
in addition to handling exceptions, work involves performing a
number of regular duties (ritual and ceremony, negotiations,
processing of soft information)
- The senior manager needs aggregated information, which a formal
management information system best provides
managers strongly favor the oral media (telephone calls and
meetings)
2 important points:
Oral information is stored in brains, which means the strategic data
bank of the organization is not in memory of computers but in the
minds of managers.
The extensive use of oral media explains why they are reluctant to
delegate tasks, because when they can’t hand over a dossier to
someone.
- Management is, or at least is quickly becoming, a science and a
profession
the managers’ programs remain locked deep inside their brains
(judgment and intuition instead of science and profession)
Managers job is enormously complicated and difficult. Manager is
overburdened with obligations, yet they cannot easily delegate tasks. As a
result they are driven to overwork and forced to do many tasks
superficially. Brevity, fragmentation, and oral communication characterize
the work.
Various roles of managers
Interpersonal roles
Arise directly from formal authority and involve basic interpersonal
relationships
1. Figurehead
Ceremonial nature, little serious communication, and no important
decision-making.
, president greets the touring dignitaries
2. Leader
Responsibility for people that work in an organizational unit. Direct; hiring
and training staff. Indirect; motivate and encourage employees. Influence
is most clearly seen in this role.
3. Liaison
Manager makes contacts outside his or her vertical chain of command.
Spend a lot of time with peers and other people outside of their units.
Building up the managers external information system (informal, private,
oral).
Informational roles
Managers have formal and easy access to each of their subordinates. They
tend to know more about their own units than anyone else does. Their
liaison contacts expose the managers to external information to which
their subordinates often lack access. Many of those contacts with other
managers of equal status powerful database of information
4. Monitor
Scans environment for information, interrogates liaison contacts and
subordinates, and receive unsolicited information as a result of the
network of personal contacts they have developed. Good part of
information in oral form. Natural advantage in collecting this soft
information because of their contacts.
5. Disseminator
Share and distribute information they glean from outside contacts to
subordinates who would otherwise have no access to it. When
subordinates lack easy contact with each other, manager will sometimes
pass information from one to another.
6. Spokesman
Send information to people outside their units. Inform and satisfy
influential people who control their organizational unit. Dealing with hosts,
advise directors and shareholders, assure consumers that organization is
fulfilling responsibilities.
Decisional roles
Manager plays major role in their units decision-making system. Only the
manager can commit the unit to important new courses of action, and only
the manager has full and current information to make the set of decisions
that determines the units strategy.
7. Entrepeneur
Seek to improve their unit, adapt it to changing conditions in the
environment. Initiate a development project. Voluntary initiator of change.
2 interesting features;
These projects do not involve single decisions or even unified clusters of
decisions, but emerge as a series of small decisions and actions
sequenced over time
They supervise as many as 50 of these projects at the same time.
Appeared to maintain a kind of inventory of the development projects, and
like a juggler they seemed to keep a number of projects in air.
8. Disturbance handler
,Involuntary response to pressures, change is beyond managers control
(strike, bankrupt customer, etc)
Manager spends a good part of time responding to high-pressure
disturbances. Arise because of ignoring of situations by poor managers,
but also because good managers cannot possibly anticipate all the
consequences of actions they take.
9. Resource allocator
Deciding who will get what in the organizational unit. Most important
resource; managers own time. In this role the manager authorizes the
important decisions of the unit before they are implemented ensure that
decisions are interrelated.
10. Negotiator
Integral part of managers job, because only the manager has the authority
to commit organizational resources in ‘real time’ and only they have the
nerve center information that important negotiations require.
These roles from a gestalt = integrated whole. No role can be pulled out of
the framework and the job left intact.
Herein lies a clue to the problems of team management; 2 or 3 people
cannot share a single managerial position unless they can act as one
entity. Real difficulty lies with informational roles.
This does not mean that managers give equal attention to each role;
Sales man.= more time in interpersonal roles
Production man.= more time decisional roles
Staff man. = more time in informational roles
Toward more effective management
The managers’ effectiveness is significantly influenced by their insight into
their own work. Performance depends on how well they understand and
respond to the pressures and dilemmas of the job.
3 specific areas of concern;
- The manager is challenged to find systemic ways to share their
privileged information.
- The manager is challenged to deal consciously with the pressures of
superficiality by giving serious attention to the issues that require it
by stepping back from tangible bits of information in order to see a
broad picture, and by making use of analytical inputs.
- The manager is challenged to gain control of their own time by
turning obligations to advantage and by turning those things they
wish to do into obligations
a meeting is a chance to reorganize a weak department
free some time to do those things that they think is important by
turning them into obligations; free time is made, not found
Mintzberg
H3 Planning on the left side, managing on the right
Relationship between analysis and intuition relationship between staff
and line.
, Intuition was ignored as a psychological concept; intuition in a thought
process inaccessible to the conscious mind, how can you use scientific
methods to describe it?
2 hemispheres of the human brain
- Left hemisphere
Mode of operation appears to be largely linear, information is being
processed sequentially in an ordered way. language
Explicit thought processes (we can articulate them)
- Right hemisphere
Specialized for simultaneous processing, operate in a more relational
way. visual images
Holistic, intuition
One side of the brain may be more developed than the other.
Technique of planning and analysis are sequential, systematic, and
articulated. Logical and ordered steps, evolving explicit analysis. Processes
akin to those identified with the left hemisphere. Managers plan in some
ways too, and they engage in their share of logical analysis. Hypothesis;
the important processes of managing an organization rely to a
considerable extent on the faculties identified with the brains right
hemisphere.
Managing from the right hemisphere
Key managerial processes are enormously complex and mysterious,
drawing on the vaguest information and using the least articulated of
mental processes more relational and holistic than ordered and
sequential.
General findings;
Seem to support the hypothesis.
This does not imply that the left hemisphere is unimportant for policy-
makers. Truly outstanding managers are no doubt the ones who can
couple effective processes of the right with effective processes on the left.
Implications for the left hemisphere
Only under certain circumstances should planners try to plan; when an
organization is in a stable environment and has no use for an innovative
strategy, then the development of formal, systematic strategic plans may
be in order. But when the environment is unstable or the organization
needs an innovative strategy, then strategic planning may not be the best
approach.
Managers are very effective at securing soft information, but tend to
underemphasize analytical input that is often important as well.
Mintzberg
H6 Deriving configurations
The success of different businesses could be explained not by their use of
any single organizational attribute, but by how they interrelated various
attributes.
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