What are the informational roles?

As a manager, you probably fulfill many different roles every day.

For instance, as well as leading your team, you might find yourself resolving a conflict, negotiating new contracts, representing your department at a board meeting, or approving a request for a new computer system.

Put simply, you're constantly switching roles as tasks, situations, and expectations change. Management expert and professor Henry Mintzberg recognized this, and he argued that there are ten primary roles or behaviors that can be used to categorize a manager's different functions.

In this article and video, we'll examine these roles and see how you can use your understanding of them to improve your management skills.

Click here to read a transcript of our management roles video.

What Are Mintzberg's Management Roles?

Mintzberg published his Ten Management Roles in his book, "Mintzberg on Management: Inside our Strange World of Organizations," in 1990.

The ten management roles are:

1. Figurehead.
2. Leader.
3. Liaison.
4. Monitor.
5. Disseminator.
6. Spokesperson.
7. Entrepreneur.
8. Disturbance Handler.
9. Resource Allocator.
10. Negotiator.

From MINTZBERG ON MANAGEMENT by Henry Mintzberg. Copyright © 1989 by Henry Mintzberg. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The 10 roles are then divided up into three categories, as follows:

Let's look at each of the ten managerial roles in greater detail.

Interpersonal Management Roles

The managerial roles in this category involve providing information and ideas.

1. Figurehead – As a manager, you have social, ceremonial and legal responsibilities. You're expected to be a source of inspiration. People look up to you as a person with authority, and as a figurehead.
2. Leader – This is where you provide leadership for your team, your department or perhaps your entire organization; and it's where you manage the performance and responsibilities of everyone in the group.
3. Liaison – Managers must communicate with internal and external contacts. You need to be able to network effectively on behalf of your organization.

Informational Management Roles

The managerial roles in this category involve processing information.

1. Monitor – In this role, you regularly seek out information related to your organization and industry, looking for relevant changes in the environment. You also monitor your team, in terms of both their productivity, and their well-being.
2. Disseminator – This is where you communicate potentially useful information to your colleagues and your team.
3. Spokesperson – Managers represent and speak for their organization. In this role, you're responsible for transmitting information about your organization and its goals to the people outside it.

Decisional Management Roles

The managerial roles in this category involve using information.

1. Entrepreneur – As a manager, you create and control change within the organization. This means solving problems, generating new ideas, and implementing them.
2. Disturbance Handler – When an organization or team hits an unexpected roadblock, it's the manager who must take charge. You also need to help mediate disputes within it.
3. Resource Allocator – You'll also need to determine where organizational resources are best applied. This involves allocating funding, as well as assigning staff and other organizational resources.
4. Negotiator – You may be needed to take part in, and direct, important negotiations within your team, department, or organization.

Applying Mintzberg's Management Roles

You can use Mintzberg's 10 Management Roles model as a frame of reference when you're thinking about developing your own skills and knowledge. (This includes developing yourself in areas that you consciously or unconsciously shy away from.)

First, examine how much time you currently spend on each managerial role. Do you spend most of your day leading? Managing conflict? Disseminating information? This will help you decide which areas to work on first.

Next, get a piece of paper and write out all ten roles. Score yourself from 1-5 on each one, with 1 being "Very skilled" to 5 being "Not skilled at all."

Once you've identified your weak areas, use the following resources to start improving your abilities in each role.

Figurehead

Figureheads represent their teams. If you need to improve or build confidence in this area, start with your image, behavior, and reputation. Cultivate humility and empathy, learn how to set a good example at work, and think about how to be a good role model.

Leader

This is the role you probably spend most of your time fulfilling. To improve here, start by taking our quiz, How Good Are Your Leadership Skills? This will give you a thorough understanding of your current abilities.

Next, learn how to be an authentic leader, so your team will respect you. Also, focus on improving your emotional intelligence – this is an important skill for being an effective leader.

Liaison

To improve your liaison skills, work on your professional networking techniques. You may also like to take our Bite-Sized Training course on Networking Skills.

Monitor

To improve here, learn how to gather information effectively and overcome information overload. Also, use effective reading strategies, so that you can process material quickly and thoroughly, and learn how to keep up-to-date with industry news.

Disseminator

To be a good disseminator you need to know how to share information and outside views effectively, which means that good communication skills are vital.

Learn how to share organizational information with Team Briefings. Next, focus on improving your writing skills. You might also want to take our communication skills quiz, to find out where else you can improve.

Spokesperson

To be effective in this role, make sure that you know how to represent your organization at a conference. You may also want to read our articles on delivering great presentations and working with the media (if applicable to your role).

Entrepreneur

To improve here, build on your change management skills, and learn what not to do when implementing change in your organization. You'll also need to work on your problem solving and creativity skills, so that you can come up with new ideas, and implement them successfully.

Disturbance Handler

In this role, you need to excel at conflict resolution and know how to handle team conflict. It's also helpful to be able to manage emotion in your team.

Resource Allocator

To improve as a resource allocator, learn how to manage a budget, cut costs, and prioritize, so that you can make the best use of your resources. You can also use VRIO Analysis to learn how to get the best results from the resources available to you.

Negotiator

Improve your negotiation skills by learning about Win-Win Negotiation and Distributive Bargaining.

You might also want to read our article on role-playing – this technique can help you prepare for difficult negotiations.

Mintzberg's 10 Management Roles model sets out the essential roles that managers play. These are:

1. Figurehead.
2. Leader.
3. Liaison.
4. Monitor.
5. Disseminator.
6. Spokesperson.
7. Entrepreneur.
8. Disturbance Handler.
9. Resource Allocator.
10. Negotiator.

You can apply Mintzberg's 10 Management Roles model by using it as a frame of reference when you want to develop your management skills. Work on the roles that you fulfill most often as a priority, but remember that you won't necessarily fulfill every role as part of your job.

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Henry Mintzberg proposed an alternative approach to defining what management is about. Instead of describing in theory what managers should do, he studied what managers actually spend their time doing. This led him to describe management in terms of the different roles that managers undertake. The ten major roles that he identified are discussed in 1.2.1 below.

1.2.1 The roles of managers

'Mintzberg shows a substantial difference between what managers do and what they are said to do. On the basis of work activity studies, he demonstrates that a manager's job is characterised by pace, interruptions, brevity, variety, and fragmentation of activities, and a preference for verbal contacts. Managers spend a considerable amount of time in scheduled meetings and in networks of contacts outside meetings.

The fragmentary nature of what managers do leads to the suggestion that they have to perform a wide variety of roles. Mintzberg suggests that there are ten managerial roles which can be grouped into three areas: interpersonal, informational and decisional.

Interpersonal roles cover the relationships that a manager has to have with others. The three roles within this category are figurehead, leader and liaison. Managers have to act as figureheads because of their formal authority and symbolic position, representing their organisations. As leader, managers have to bring together the needs of an organisation and those of the individuals under their command. The third interpersonal role, that of liaison, deals with the horizontal relationships which work-activity studies have shown to be important for a manager. A manager has to maintain a network of relationships outside the organisation.

Managers have to collect, disseminate and transmit information and have three corresponding informational roles, namely monitor, disseminator and spokesperson. A manager is an important figure in monitoring what goes on in the organisation, receiving information about both internal and external events and transmitting it to others. This process of transmission is the dissemination role, passing on information of both a factual and value kind. A manager often has to give information concerning the organisation to outsiders, taking on the role of spokesperson to both the general public and those in positions of influence.

As with so many writers about management, Mintzberg regards the most crucial part of managerial activity as that concerned with making decisions. The four roles that he places in this category are based on different classes of decision, namely, entrepreneurs, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator. As entrepreneurs, managers make decisions about changing what is happening in an organisation. They may have to both initiate change and take an active part in deciding exactly what is to be done. In principle, they are acting voluntarily. This is very different from their role as a disturbance handler, where managers have to make decisions which arise from events beyond their control and unpredicted. The ability to react to events as well as to plan activities is an important managerial skill in Mintzberg's eyes.

The resource allocation role of a manager is central to much organisational analysis. Clearly a manager has to make decisions about the allocation of money, people, equipment, time and so on. Mintzberg points out that in doing so a manager is actually scheduling time, programming work and authorising actions. The negotiation role is put in the decisional category by Mintzberg because it is 'resource trading in real time'. A manager has to negotiate with others and in the process be able to make decisions about the commitment of organisational resources.

For Mintzberg these ten roles provide a more adequate description of what managers do than any of the various schools of management thought. In these roles it is information that is crucial: the manager is determining the priority of information. Through the interpersonal roles a manager acquires information, and through the decisional roles it is put into use.

The scope for each manager to choose a different blend of roles means that management is not reducible to a set of scientific statements and programmes. Management is essentially an art and it is necessary for managers to try and learn continuously about their own situations. Self-study is vital. At the moment there is no solid basis for teaching a theory of managing. According to Mintzberg, "the management school has been more effective at training technocrats to deal with structured problems than managers to deal with unstructured ones."'

Source: Pugh and Hickson (2007) pp. 30-31.

Which of the two descriptions of management (functions or roles) do you find more helpful? If you have experience of rural development, try to identify how this has influenced your answer.

Mintzberg's roles were intended to provide a better description of management in practice than the classical list of management functions. Rather than spending their days planning and organising in an orderly fashion, many managers live hectic lives in constantly changing contexts. Hence, they have to be adaptable and responsive, not just pro-active and controlling.

Moreover, managers are not just involved in managing the internal resources of their organisation, but also spend a great deal of time in maintaining contacts with other people, both within and outside the organisation. This is partly because they need to be aware of any changes in the environment which may affect their (part of the) organisation, an activity known as 'boundary scanning'. Managers in business need to be aware of what their competitors are doing, of trends in consumer demand, and of changes in the economic environment. Managers in public sector organisations or NGOs in rural development may need to monitor prices and activity in certain (local or wider) markets, progress with a cropping season, political developments relevant to their organisation, what other organisations are doing and so on.

Mintzberg's analysis is also valuable in highlighting the importance of various forms of information to an organisation. Information may be seen as a resource to be set alongside personnel and capital.

However, what managers actually do is not necessarily what they want to be doing or should be doing. Even if Mintzberg's respondents were all pursuing good management practice, recognition of his ten roles does not invalidate the importance of planning, organising, leading and controlling. Some of Mintzberg's roles express 'how' managers inform their plans, lead and motivate their staff etc. Others (eg disturbance handler, negotiator) could even be seen as skills that managers need to develop, so as not to get sidetracked from the strategic priorities of their position and of their organisation.

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