On the nature of managerial tasks and skills: their distinguishing characteristics and organization

Article Abstract:

Managerial activities have grown in importance as large corporations co-ordinate and control an increasing number and variety of economic activities. Their distinctive characteristics derive from their constitutive role in establishing, maintaining and changing such organizations as relatively distinct and semi-autonomous units of resource combination and use. As a result, managerial tasks and problems are highly interdependent and systemic, relatively unstandardized, they combine both social reproduction and innovation and generate collective, indirect outputs. These characteristics mean that managerial skills differ considerably from other sorts of expertise in their limited standardization across industries, their susceptibility to change, their specificity to situations rather than problems and their diffuse, varied knowledge base. These differences imply management education and research should be more concerned with developing organizational skills and understandings than analytical skills derived from highly abstract and general models. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Methods, Organizational behavior

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Are the classical management functions useful in describing managerial work?

Article Abstract:

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a number of management textbooks set down what have since come to be known as the classical management functions. The functions of planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling are still used to describe managerial work in most management textbooks. However, some theorists have questioned the value of these functions as a description of the manager's job. These more recent conceptualizations have focused on the roles of the manager - interpersonal, informational and decision making. These two perspectives on management work are examined and integrated. The classical functions are still the most useful way to conceptualize the manager's job, but role analysis is a helpful way to clarify the nature of managerial work.

Publishing industry, Research, Management science, Behavior, Executives, Management research, Powers and duties, Middle managers

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Relationship of managerial ability to unit effectiveness in more organic versus more mechanistic departments

Article Abstract:

A survey of 103 department managers in industrial firms supports the proposition that unit organization can substitute for managerial competence. In addition, organic organizations were found to be more effective than mechanistic ones.

Analysis, Executive ability

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