Managerial work roles in Asia 22,8 An empirical study of Mintzbergs - PDF document

The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www .emeraldinsight .com/researchregister http:// www.emeraldinsigh t.com/0262-171 1.htm JMD Managerial work roles in Asia 22,8 An empirical study of Mintzberg’s role formulation in four Asian countries 694 Cecil A.L. Pearson Murdoch University, Murdoch, Perth, Australia, and Received July 2002 Samir R. Chatterjee Revised December 2002 Accepted December 2002 Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia Keywords Management roles, Economic conditions, National cultures, Asian studies Abstract In an increasingly competitive global environment, impacted by a myriad of social, economic and technological forces, managerial roles have, over the past two decades, undergone dramatic transformation. Indeed, managers around the world are struggling to redefine their roles and responsibilities against a backdrop of the classic ten roles of managers espoused by Mintzberg in the 1970s, which were based on research in the US context. Yet these traditional roles are still widely taught in universities and training programs, and particularly all over Asia with the spread of Western business education literature. The relevance of the Mintzberg formulation in the Asian context was the aim of this four country study. The study reports the importance and degree of use of the ten Mintzberg managerial roles in the contemporary Asian context. The findings suggest although the roles overlap considerably, they are acted out in a very different manner. Implications for the findings in an international market arena are discussed. Introduction The importance of managerial roles continues to attract a great deal of interest. Since the earliest written evidence (provided by the Chinese about 3500 BC), and later Sun Tzu’s Art of War (Griffith, 1963), reputed to be the oldest military treatise of Chinese classical works, military strategists, business executives and scholars have been obsessed with accounts of the roles and skills of the managers of those times (George, 1972; Seagrave, 1995). Later, how the ancient Romans decentralized communications across a vast empire provoked further examination of managerial behaviors (Wren, 1979). Although the early historical documents provided little specific insight into how these managerial roles were undertaken, greater clarification was to follow by contributions from the sixteenth century Italian philosopher Machiavelli, and the notable management pioneers of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century (Adam Smith, Karl Marx). Nearly a century later, broader principles and theories were conceptualized by the classical theorists and the human relationists for developing understanding of the metamorphosis of managerial roles. One of the most influential studies of managerial roles in this more recent Journal of Management Development Vol. 22 No. 8, 2003 pp. 694-707 q MCB UP Limited The authors would like to thank JMD Co-Editor, Professor Andrew Kakabadse and an 0262-1711 anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments and guidance. DOI 10.1108/02621710310487864

era was undertaken by Mintzberg (1973). He used a descriptive diary method in Managerial work observing senior managers at work and highlighted ten roles as the key to roles in Asia understanding the nature of managerial work. He defined major dimensions of managerial work in three categories: (1) interpersonal roles (figurehead, leader, liaison); 695 (2) informational roles (monitor, disseminator, spokesperson); and (3) decisional roles (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, negotiator). Despite the wide acceptance of Mintzberg’s work, in the Western context, the relevance of these roles in Asia can be observed through alternative manifestations. The Mintzberg roles in Asia are often embedded in the contextual variables through many proxy behavior (Shenkar et al. , 1998). Therefore, it is surprising that this acceptance of the Mintzberg role schema in the wider literature is still evident in spite of its well known methodological weaknesses (Campbell et al. , 1970). Many scholars have doubted the contextual relevance as well as validity of the Mintzberg work in alternative cultural settings (Shapira and Dunbar, 1980). Given the contemporary global context of international management, generalizability of Mintzberg’s work encourages greater research focus. Although Mintzberg noted national cultural forces may have implications for managerial role, very limited work has been evident in this area. This paper suggests that managerial work role constructs are not packagable as a “technology-transfer” item from one type of social system to the other. The work roles of a new generation of managers in the divergent non-Western contexts and in societies of varying stages of economic transition or orientation are bound to exhibit features other than the Mintzberg paradigm. This study chose four countries in Asia in terms of this idea of economic distance measures. Japan was chosen for its well known cultural and economic counterpoint to the Western concept, Thailand was chosen in view of its role as the epicentre of the economic crisis, while Malaysia and Brunei were included to illustrate two different economic models of Islamic societies. Background Henry Mintzberg provided a new perspective about the roles of managers of the 1970s. From previous eras, a viewpoint had been promoted that managerial roles were embedded in a rigid functional approach of planning jobs and organizing staff, while leading and controlling personnel. Using a methodology of diary analysis, Mintzberg demonstrated that the five chief executive managers of his study were seldom in this popular image of reflective, systematic planners who occupied a great deal of time in uninterrupted settings examining reports and documents. In contrast, Mintzberg found his managers worked at an unrelenting pace, they were required to address a diversity of

JMD issues of widely differing durations, and they strongly preferred to employ verbal communications by telephone, or in face-to-face interactions rather than 22,8 reading written memos or reports. Indeed, Mintzberg (1973, p. 182) wrote: The manager is not a planner in a reflective sense, and no amount of admonition in the literature will make him so. His milieu is stimulus-response. 696 This evidence revealed substantial differences with the less complex range of managerial roles that had been borne out of the pioneering approaches to classical management. Using an unstructured observation and interview procedure, over a two week period, Mintzberg concluded the work methods or activities of his study managers could be categorized into three sets of behaviors or roles. He conceptualized these clusters of roles as: (1) interpersonal; (2) informational; and (3) decisional. The interpersonal role, which evolves from position authority and is involved with duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature, is also a feature of developing and maintaining work relationships with colleagues and subordinates. Consequently, these themes give rise to the three subordinate sub-roles of figurehead, leader and liaison. In addition, Mintzberg observed managers receive information and act as a conduit to transmit this knowledge both within the organization as well as to outside bodies. These activities were classified as informational roles, which relate to sub-roles of monitor (seeking and perusing information), disseminator (transmitting information internally), and spokesperson (transmitting information externally). The third cluster of roles, decisional roles, involve managers in making significant decisions that affect the organization. Mintzberg presented this set of roles from the sub-roles of entrepreneurs (initiator of change and innovation), disturbance handler (corrector of unforseen problems), resource allocator (distributor of resources), and negotiator (represents organization in bargaining and discussion). The categorizing of these managerial roles provided insights into the nature of required skills, the different ways in how they are interpreted by managers in spite of their roles being largely predetermined by the nature of the position (Gordon, 1993; Yukl, 1981). Despite recent radical changes in organization activities, relatively little attention has been given to re-examination of traditional management roles. There is substantial evidence (Edwards et al. , 1999; Hornsby et al. , 1994; Kickul and Gundry, 2001) that rapid escalation in the development and availability of technology is reshaping organizational processes and practices. In the contemporary business arena, work settings are more complex, employees hold newer expectations, and collectively, these phenomena are leading to a