Mintzberg's managerial roles
To determine what managers actually did, management theorist and researcher Henry Mintzberg closely observed several managers in their day-to-day activities by literally following them around and recording his observations. From these notes he distilled ten roles which he grouped into three broad categories:
- interpersonal — how a manager interacts with other people
- informational — how a manager exchanges and processes information
- decisional — how a manager uses information in decision making.
Note that Mintzberg’s work was published in 1973 and the study was predominantly of male managers. There is certainly an argument that management has changed somewhat since the 1970s, particularly with the impact of technology and there being more females now in managerial roles. However, this is likely to affect the proportion of time spent in each of these roles rather than the roles themselves.