2 - Management: work, identity and leadership

Summary

What do managers actually do? This is a question which has given rise to countless studies and articles over the past hundred years, yet despite this it is claimed from time to time that we do not know as much about managerial work or management as we think (Mintzberg 1991). This is undoubtedly due to the great complexity of managerial work and an extremely wide diversity in the question of what is hidden behind the apparently straightforward label “managers”. It is not particularly easy to see management as a special occupation, in the same way as for a baker, a firefighter or an accountant. We probably have a reasonable picture of what the person does as far as the latter are concerned, but if we think of management, it instantly becomes much more ambiguous and vague. Perhaps we think of managers as the people at the top of the pyramid who make decisions, but the question is whether this is better seen as organizational management rather than management in the more usual sense of managerial work. Organizational management consists of more than managing subordinates – it includes dealing with owner relations, external relations, questions of financing and market analyses, among other things – and typically also covers staff – CFO, CIO, COO, etc. – who work with financial markets and policies, follow up results, and so on. Most managerial work is not organizational management. The CEO of a large organization and the manager of a small sales department or production unit have little in common. On the other hand, managerial work and organizational management are often similar in smaller organizations, but organizational questions are less interesting in smaller organizations with a couple of dozen employees than in situations where it is essential to make a multitude of departments and roles work together to form a complex entirety. In this book we concentrate on managerial work in larger organizations and only touch on organizational management/top executive work activity.

We begin this chapter with an overview of management and address the classic principles of managerial work. Numerous studies of what managers do, however, have shown that managerial work deviates from the classic principles (Mintzberg 1973; Stewart 1999).