Compare and contrast the traditional roles of managers presented by Fayol’s early writings with more contemporary research of Stewart and Mintzberg.
Introduction
The roles of managers cannot be easily described as some people, such as Fayol, Stewart and Mintzberg, all have different interpretations of the phrase. Mullins (2005) said that the role of managers where that they are “essentially an integrating activity which permeates every facet of the operations of an organisation”. This essay is going to compare and contrast the interpretations of roles of managers as they are all different. There are two types of views, the traditional approach of the 19th and 20th century, and the systems approach from the 1960’s onwards. Fayol had a traditional approach to the roles of managers where as Stewart and Mintzberg had more of a systems approach.
Comparisons
Fayol’s approach is quite similar to Mintzberg’s way of classifying manager’s jobs. Fayol’s suggested that there were 5 main roles of managers, these being planning, organising, commanding, coordinating and controlling. Mintzberg suggests that managers have quite similar roles as they have to be able to be a leader and communicate well. These are the two main roles of any manager as they need to be able to a good leader. If they have good leadership skills then they will get the trust from employees and the job will get done effectively. If you were to have a very weak leader then they would not have the authority to get anything done. This would be a very bad thing for the business as it would mean that they will not get anything done. The classical approach was the framework to what management is all about. It was where all of the following theorists got their ideas from and then expanded on them. Therefore they can be said that they were the foundation thoughts for all the theorists. So most theorists are going