Henry Mintzberg's Ten Management Roles

As a manager, you probably fulfill many different roles every day. For instance, as well as leading your team, you might find yourself resolving a conflict, negotiating new contracts, representing your department at a board meeting, or approving a request for a new computer system.

Mintzberg’s Ten Management Roles are a complete set of behaviors or roles within a business environment. Each role is different, thus spanning the variety of all identified management behaviors. Management expert Professor Henry Mintzberg has argued that a manager’s work can be boiled down to ten common roles. According to Mintzberg, these roles, or expectations for a manager’s behavior, fall into three categories: informational (managing by information), interpersonal (managing through people), and decisional (managing through action).

The Ten Management Roles

The ten roles explored in this theory have extensive explanations which are briefly
developed here:
 

INTERPERSONAL

• Figurehead: All social, inspiration, legal and ceremonial obligations. In this light, the manager is seen as a symbol of status and authority.
• Leader: Duties are at the heart of the manager-subordinate relationship and include structuring and motivating subordinates, overseeing their progress, promoting and encouraging their development, and balancing effectiveness.
• Liaison: Describes the information and communication obligations of a manager. One must network and engage in information exchange to gain access to knowledge bases.

INFORMATIONAL

• Monitor: Duties include assessing internal operations, a department's success and the problems and opportunities which may arise. All the information gained in this capacity must be stored and maintained.
• Disseminator: Highlights factual or value based external views into the organization and to subordinates. This requires both filtering and delegation skills.
• Spokesman: Serves in a PR capacity by informing and lobbying others to keep key stakeholders updated about the operations of the organization.

DECISIONAL

• Entrepreneur: Roles encourage managers to create improvement projects and work to delegate, empower and supervise teams in the development process.
• Disturbance handler: A generalist role that takes charge when an organization is unexpectedly upset or transformed and requires calming and support.
• Resource Allocator: Describes the responsibility of allocating and overseeing financial, material and personnel resources.
• Negotiator: Is a specific task which is integral for the spokesman, figurehead and resource allocator roles.

In the real world, these roles overlap and a manager must learn to balance them in order to manage effectively. While a manager’s work can be analyzed by these individual roles, in practice they are intermixed and interdependent. According to Mintzberg: “The manager who only communicates or only conceives never gets anything done, while the manager who only ‘does’ ends up doing it all alone.”