The Management Process

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While the four major functions of management form the basis of the managerial process, there are several additional key elements in the process. As Figure 1-2 shows, work methods and managerial roles, as well as work agendas, feed into the core management functions. A manager's knowledge base and key management skills are other important factors that contribute to high performance (goal achievement). The management process applies not only to profit-making organizations, but also to not-for-profit organizations.

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A not-for-profit organization (sometimes called a nonprofit organization) is organization whose main purposes centre on issues other than making profits. Common examples are government institutions, educational institutions, cultural institutions, charitable institutions, and many health-care facilities.

Nature of Work Agenda

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A work agenda is a loosely connected set of tentative goals and tasks that a manager is attempting to accomplish.

Work agendas provide rough guidelines within which managers operate in determining how to orient their various activities and roles. There are three main factors that are likely to have an impact on a manager's work agenda: demands, constraints, and choices.

Job demands are the activities a manager must do in a job. For example, managers usually have responsibilities related to the major goals and plans of the organization (such as achieving a 10 percent increase in sales) that are difficult to ignore.

Job constraints are the factors, both inside and outside the organization, that limit what a manager can do. Constraints include such variables as resource limitations, legal restrictions, union contract provisions, technological limitations, and the degree to which the work of a manager's unit is defined.

Job choices are work activities that the manager can do but does not have to do. For example, without a directive to do so, a manager might initiate a proposal to develop a

Computerized customer service tracking system. Thus work agendas tend to reflect, at least to some extent, the personal preferences and career objectives of individual managers.

Figure 1-2.

Performance

(Goal achievement)

Work

Agenda

Work Methods and Roles

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We have discussed management in terms of four broad functions. We can look beyond these functions to identify a number of specific roles that managers may fill at various times. You are already familiar with some of the crucial roles required of managers - because you are already a veteran of many different relationships that have evolved over your life thus far! In your ties with your family, friends, classmates, and co-workers, sometimes you lead, sometimes you act as a go-between or liaison, and sometimes others look to you as a symbol of some worthwhile trait such as honesty or willingness to work hard. In these same relationships, you monitor what is going on outside the relationship, share information with your partners, and even act as a spokesperson for them. Furthermore, you sometimes take the initiative, sometimes handle disagreements, sometimes allocate resources such as money, and sometimes negotiate with your collaborators.

Henry Mintzberg has carefully studied what managers do. In his book "The Nature of Managerial Work" he describes the manager's agenda as consisting of precisely the ten activities discussed above. Mintzberg refers to the first three as interpersonal roles of a manager, the next three as informational roles, and the final four as decisional roles.