1.

Management and its Functions

The functions of management uniquely describe managers' jobs.

A Manager is an individual who achieves goals through other people.
An Organization is a consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two or more people
that functions on a
relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals.
1.1 Managerial Functions
The most commonly cited functions of management are planning, organizing, leading, and
controlling (as recognized by
Newman and Summer), although he identified additional functions also. The functions of
management define the
process of management as distinct from accounting, finance, marketing, and other business
functions.
Henri Fayol identifies 5 functions namely planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating
and controlling.
Mary Parker Follett, defined management as "the art of getting things done through
people".
Luther Gulick states 7 functions by coining a new term POSDCORB, which stands for
planning, organizing, staffing,
directing, coordinating, reporting and budgeting.
Warren Haynes and Joseph Massie identified management functions as decision making,
organizing, staffing,
planning, controlling, communicating and directing.
Koontz O’ Donnel divided these functions into planning, organizing, staffing, directing and
controlling. Dale (1985)
has added ‘innovation’ and ‘representation’ as two additional functions of management.
Lyndall F. Urwick stated (in his book the Elements of Administration) that the management
processes consisted of 3
functions: planning, organizing, and controlling. He added further that these functions are
guided by the sub-functions of
forecasting, coordination, and command.

Management Functions

According to the functions approach, managers perform certain activities or

functions as they efficiently and effectively coordinate the work of others.

Henri Fayol, a French businessman, first proposed in the early part of the
twentieth century that all managers perform five functions: planning, organizing,
commanding, coordinating, and controlling. Today, these functions have been
condensed to four: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.
Let’s briefly look at each function.
PLANNING
The organizations exist to achieve some particular purpose, someone must define that purpose and the
means for its achievement. Managers are that someone. As managers en- gage in planning, they set goals,
establish strategies for achieving those goals, and develop plans to integrate and coordinate activities.
 ORGANIZING

Managers are also responsible for arranging and structuring work to

accomplish the organization’s goals. We call this function organizing. When
managers organize, they de- termine what tasks are to be done, who is to do
them, how the tasks are to be grouped, who reports to whom, and where
decisions are to be made.
LEADING
Every organization has people, and a manager’s job is to work with and
through people to accomplish goals. This is the leading function. When
managers motivate subordinates, help resolve work group conflicts, influence
individuals or teams as they work, select the most effective communication
channel, or deal in any way with employee behavior issues, they’re leading.

CONTROLLING
The final management function is controlling. After goals and plans are
set (planning), tasks and structural arrangements put in place (organizing), and
people hired, trained, and motivated (leading), there has to be some evaluation
of whether things are going as planned. To ensure that goals are being met and
that work is being done as it should be, managers must monitor and evaluate
performance. Actual performance must be compared with the set goals. If
those goals aren’t being achieved, it’s the manager’s job to get work back on
track. This process of monitoring, comparing, and correcting is the con-
trolling function.

CASE STUDY:
Just how well does the functions approach describe what managers
do? Do managers always plan, organize, lead, and then control? In
reality, what a manager does may not always happen in this
sequence. Regardless of the “order” in which these functions are
performed, however, the fact is that managers do plan, organize, lead,
and control as they manage. To illustrate, look back at the chapter-
opening story. When Lisa is working to keep her employees
motivated and engaged, that’s leading. As she makes out the week’s
schedule, that’s planning. When she is trying to cut costs, those
actions obviously involve controlling. And dealing with unhappy
customers is likely to involve leading, control- ling, and maybe even
planning.

Although the functions approach is popular for describing what

managers do, some have argued that it isn’t relevant.15 So let’s
look at another perspective.
 Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles and a
Contemporary Model of Managing

Henry Mintzberg, a well-known management researcher, studied actual

managers at work. In his first comprehensive study, Mintzberg concluded
that what managers do can best be described by looking at the managerial
roles they engage in at work .
The term managerial roles refers to specific actions or behaviors
expected of and exhibited by a manager. (Think of the different roles you
play—such as student, employee, student organization member, volunteer,
sibling, and so forth—and the different things you’re expected to do in
these roles.) When describing what managers do from a roles perspec- tive,
we’re not looking at a specific person per se, but at the expectations and
responsi- bilities that are associated with being the person in that role—the
role of a manager.17 As shown in Exhibit 1-5, these 10 roles are grouped
around interpersonal relationships, the transfer of information, and decision
making.

The interpersonal roles are ones that involve people (subordinates and persons out- side
the organization) and other duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in
nature. The three interpersonal roles include figurehead, leader, and
liaison.

In the figurehead role, managers perform ceremonial duties such as greeting company visitors, speaking
at the opening of a new facility, or representing the company at a community luncheon to support local charities.

In the leader role, managers motivate and encourage workers to accomplish organizational objectives (see box
“Seven Deadlies—Things Great Bosses Avoid”). One way managers can act as leaders is to establish
challenging goals.

Seven Deadlies—Things Great Bosses Avoid

A manager is responsible not only for providing direction and guidance to employees but also for making
sure to create a work environment that allows them to be the best. Author and columnist Jeff Haden identifies
seven things that managers often do that create an uncomfortable and unproductive work
atmosphere:
1. Pressuring employees to attend social events. When your
employees are with people from work, even at some party,
it might just end up feeling like “work.”
2. Pressuring employees to give to charity.
3. Not giving employees time to eat during mealtime hours.
4. Asking employees to do self-evaluations.
5. Asking employees to evaluate their coworkers.
6. Asking employees to do something that you don’t want to do.
7. Asking employees to reveal personal information in the spirit of “team building.”
Source: J. Haden “7 Things Great Bosses Never Ask Employees to Do” Inc.com, March 12, 2015, accessed March 28, 2015. http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/7-
things-the-best
-bosses-refuse-to-ask-employees-to-do.html.
In the liaison role, managers deal with people outside their units. Studies consistently indicate that
managers spend as much time with outsiders as they do with their own subordinates and their own bosses.
 Informational Roles Not only do managers spend most of their time in face-to-face contact
with others, they spend much of it obtaining and sharing information.

Mintzberg found that the managers in his study spent 40 percent of their time giving and getting information
from others. In this regard, management can be viewed as gathering information by scanning the business
environment and listening to others in face-to face conversations, processing that information, and then sharing
it with people both inside and outside the company.

Mintzberg described three informational subroles:

Monitor:

In the monitor role, managers scan their environment for information, actively contact others for information,
and, because of their personal contacts, receive a great deal of unsolicited information. Besides receiving first
hand information, managers monitor their environment by reading
local newspapers and the Wall Street Journal to keep track of customers, competitors, and technological
changes that may affect their businesses. Today’s managers can subscribe to electronic monitoring and
distribution services that track the news wires disseminator, and spokesperson.

The informational roles involve collecting, receiving, and disseminating information.

The three informational roles include monitor, disseminator, and
spokesperson.

The decisional roles entail making decisions or choices. The four decisional roles
include entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and
negotiator.

As managers perform these roles, Mintzberg proposed that their activities

included both reflection (thinking) and action (doing).
A number of follow-up studies have tested the validity of Mintzberg’s role cate- gories and
the evidence generally supports the idea that managers—regardless of the type of
organization or level in the organization—perform similar roles. However, the emphasis that
managers give to the various roles seems to change with organizational level.

At higher levels of the organization, the roles of disseminator, figurehead, nego- tiator,
liaison, and spokesperson are more important;

while the leader role (as Mintzberg defined it) is more important for lower-level managers
than it is for either middle or top- level managers.

Recently, Mintzberg completed another hands-on and up-close study of managers at work
and concluded that, “Basically, managing is about influencing action. It’s about helping
organizations and units to get things done, which means action.”

Based on his observations, Mintzberg went on to explain that a manager does

management in three ways:
( 1)by managing actions directly (for instance, negotiating contracts, managing
projects, etc.).
(2) by managing people who take action (for example, motivating them,
building teams, enhance the organization’s culture, etc.),

(3) by managing information that propels people to take action (using budgets,
goals, task delegation, etc.).

The manager at the center of the model has two roles

Framing, which defines how a manager approaches his or her job; and
Scheduling, which “brings the frame to life” through the distinct tasks the
manager does.
A manager enacts these roles while managing action in the three “planes:”
i) with information,
ii) through people, and
iii) sometimes by taking action directly.

It’s an interesting perspective on the manager’s job and one that adds to our
understanding of what it is that managers do. So which approach is better—
managerial functions or Mintzberg’s propositions? Although each does a good
job of depicting what managers do, the functions approach still seems to be the
generally accepted way of describing the manager’s job. “The classical functions
provide clear and discrete meth- ods of classifying the thousands of activities
that managers carry out and the techniques they use in terms of the functions
they perform for the achievement of goals.” However, Mintzberg’s role
approach and newly developed model of man- aging do offer us other insights
into managers’ work.