Manager's Role

Mintzberg (1971) examined role of managers and found that managerial work had following characteristics : 

1. Managers perform a great quantity of work at faster speed. 
2. They prefer to deal with issues that are current and specific. 
3. Manager is placed between organisation and a network of contacts. 
4. Managerial activity is characterized by variety and brevity. 
5. Despite the volume of work managers are able to control their own affairs. 

These characteristics of managerial work require managers to perform a variety of roles. It implies that they should be able to shift from one role to pother role sickly. A role is 

a set of behaviour that occurs at a specific position in organisation Basically managers perform three roles : 

1. The informational role involves information processing. Managers gather information from reports, seniors, subordinates and other channels. This information is processed. They disseminate the information to other managers in the organisation for example, production managers pass information about number of units produced in a given time to marketing department. This information  is used by marketing department for delivery of products to consumers.  
2. A manager interacts with many other employees in his organisation. Simultaneously, he interacts employees of other organisations. He tries to influence his subordinates to maximize their performance. This is an example of interpersonal role. 
3. Most important role of manager is his decision role. As manager he works as resource allocate. Limited material and human resources force the manager to allocate, time, raw material and manpower for specific objectives of the organisation. These decisions facilitate achievement of goals of organisation.