Mintzberg's Observations as Compared to Other Classical Management Scholars

According to Mintzberg’s “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact, he mentioned that most managers do not always know when being asked what they do. Mintzberg disagreed with the concept of management proposed by classical management scholars that manager organizes, coordinates, plans and controls. He observed managers daily routine and come up with 10 roles a manager holds and categorizes them into 3 categories. Interpersonal roles consist of figurehead, leader, and liaison role. Informational roles consist of Monitor, Disseminator and spokesperson role while Decisional roles consist of entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator role. Classical scholar like Fayol talks about managers should motivate their subordinates so that they can work together to obtain the formal goal set by the company while Mintzberg stressed that many managers mainly deals with making decision themselves as the information is too centralized (to themselves) that they found they would spend less time solving things themselves sometimes rather than having to explain and have their subordinates to do it for him. Although there are information system in place to aid managers to “offload” their information but some of the managers don’t use it very often as they prefer verbal media, telephone calls, and meeting over documents resulting information to be centralized to themselves and the company might face problems when the manager leaves the company as they’ll be leaving along with the information. Other than that, classical scholars thinks that managers are decision makers and they have no other task other than to organizes, coordinates, plans and control, but in Mintzberg said in the real world, managers have to deal with more than that. According to Mintzberg’s study, a lot of modern day managers these days could work without interruptions for more than half an hour or more once every two days. This is because their work involves other duties such as ritual and