Managerial skill (2).

pdf
Made by Wordtune Read | Open

Page 3
Management research has been challenged by the altering realities of organization
life, job roles, and individual motivations. The results suggest that the current
organizationally based theoretical taxonomy is not relevant to organizational and
individual learning and effectiveness.
Management education, management effectiveness, managerial competencies

INTRODUCTION
Researchers have shown that content knowledge alone is not sufficient for job
advancement or upward promotion, but rather a combination of various capabilities
and personality factors. However, there is a deficiency of empirical and applied
research that clearly defines the relationship between managerial roles and context.
Page 4
In this study, we analyze how managers conceptualize and utilize managerial roles
in 200 US companies. We also investigate the foundational parameters of
managerial roles as related factors that may influence managerial engagement and
ultimately organizational performance.
Scholars have argued that many of the managerial roles and requirements were
identified over a century ago and are essentially the same, but the relevance of
these factors has fluctuated over time. This study examines how contemporary
managers behave and align with the traditional and generally accepted managerial
domains, and offers empirical insight into levels of engagement based on newly
found groupings of managerial role relevancy.
There is a need for revising theoretical managerial research as organizations have
become more competitive and confusing entities. However, immediate practicality
appears not to be the central focus of most business schools, nor is it an orientation
widely distributed in otherwise well-intentioned faculty. Theoretical research has
received harsh criticism for its general exemption from time-based limitations and its
scant focus on practice application.
Page 5
There is evidence that time, technology, and social progress may alter the relevance
of business domains and specific competencies nested within the broader generic
taxonomic categories.
Given the changing business and social climate, continuously evolving corporate
needs, interest in expansion towards emerging markets, foreign direct investments
and globalization, and requests by accrediting bodies for continuous curriculum
revision at business schools in the United States, it is essential to first review these
well-known theoretical managerial domains.
MANAGERIAL PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS: OVERVIEW AND
CHALLENGES
The past century has yielded numerous theories, empirical data, and practical insight
into managerial performance requirements. We have selected a small number of
managerial typologies for comparison purposes based upon a review of widely used
managerial textbooks and models that were identified in the literature as particularly
significant. These typologies include Golman's (2000) five areas of emotional
intelligence, Judge's (1995) seven key managerial practices, and Yukl's (2012)
thorough leadership behavior and taxonomy. There is wealth of theoretical
taxonomic research, yet few empirical studies that have explored role taxonomy in
relation to applied practice or utility.
Page 7
There is little substantive variation from Henri Fayol's six functions of management to
the work of Gulick (1937), Mintzberg (1973), Borman and Brush (1993), Tett et al.
(2000) and other researchers in terms of resulting taxonomies.
A comprehensive study of managerial work and performance literature spanning a
50-year period found that 18 managerial roles may be categorized in three areas:
conceptual, interpersonal, and technical/administrative. However, these studies did
not capture the broader and more dynamic component relationships of roles, skills,
and mindsets from the perspective of practising managers.
Henry Mintzberg set out to analyze what managers do, without focusing on how well
they performed.
Page 8
Mintzberg's taxonomy of managerial roles is a subjective determination of what
managers do, how they spend their time, and what pressures they face on the job. It
is not surprising that four CEO's and one top executive behaved similarly to one
another.

MANAGERIAL BEHAVIORS: ROLES, SKILLS, AND MINDSETS

There are clear distinctions in the job content, strategies, personalities, attributes,
philosophies, and execution capability required by each of the generally accepted
managerial levels: top managers, middle managers, first-line managers, and team
leaders.
The 10 characteristics found in Schor et al. (1995)'s skills analysis are specific to
behaviors, as opposed to personality traits or managerial styles. The overlap
between the skills identified by Katz (1955) and DuBrin (2012) would suggest the
same.
Page 9
According to Gosling and Mintzberg (2003), managers have five mindsets: the
reflective mindset, the analytic mindset, the worldly mindset, the collaborative
mindset, and the action mindset.
Although the five mindsets appear to be worthwhile, they are not linked back to the
three major role categories originally presented by Mintzberg in 1973, and their
derivation raises a concern as they stemmed from a need for a learning structure in
an in-depth global executive education program.
Mindsets are beliefs about the nature of human behavior, and Gosling and
Mintzberg's framework of five mindsets presents a constructive and qualitative
approach of not only what conceivably needs to be accomplished, but how
managers need to think about it.

Changing Nature of Managerial Roles and Relevancy

Managerial roles have changed significantly over the past 50 years. They now
emphasize worker support, coaching, motivating, and facilitating. Mintzberg's
taxonomy of managerial roles was time-sensitive and reflected the work environment
in the early 1970's. However, today's managers have access to email, texting,
voicemail, cell-phone messaging, chat rooms, discussion boards, on-line
conferences, and social media outlets, as well as a number of virtual offices.
Page 10
This study focuses on Dubrin’s (2012) model with 17 role categories and examines
whether the four traditional functional categories will similarly align when evaluated
via practitioner perceptions of utility.
There is little information that links traditional role requirements to organizational or
individual effectiveness, and a potential trend towards individually driven motives at
the workplace could negatively impact the perceived relevancy, utility and level of
engagement of managers. Employee engagement is critical to improved
organizational outcomes, including profitability, productivity, retention, safety, and
customer satisfaction. This study will test empirically for the first time the degree to
which contemporary managers may be viewed as engaged based upon their
perspective of the utility of the 17 roles.
Page 11
Research design and procedures
This study conducted an extensive literature search on job roles and skills, reviewed
leading US management textbooks, and found that Henry Mintzberg's (1973) 10
roles model remains a mainstay of management education.
We were interested in studying how respondents related to the classical managerial
role definitions rather than exploring additional role classifications to add to already
well-established constructs and taxonomies. We chose consensual qualitative
research (CQR) to examine human experience, which allowed us to gain insights
beyond previous research. The findings were also coded to allow for empirical
analyses, validation of findings, and exploration of items not immediately apparent.
We conducted 281 semi-structured field interviews with managers to investigate
three main areas: 17 managerial roles, five managerial skills, and five mindsets. The
interviews lasted 1 h and were conducted by undergraduate honors students from a
management course at William Paterson University.
The MBA students received explicit training and guidelines to help quantify the
results, and 259 forms were retained for further analysis. The authors conducted
descriptive and inferential analyses to test the hypotheses relative to the categories,
groupings, or differentiators within the data sets.
Page 12
Sample organizations and demographic information
This study consisted of 259 useable questionnaires completed by individuals from
200 diverse organizations. The individuals had to be in top, middle, or first-line
management positions and have earned a BA, BS, BBA or other relevant higher
degree.
Page 13
Hierarchical cluster analysis of managerial roles, skills, and
mindsets
Hierarchical cluster analysis is a method for grouping objects into homogeneous
groups or clusters. It is used to determine whether roles, skills, and mindsets fall into
clearly separable sets of managerial attributes.
Page 14
Latent class analysis of managerial roles
We performed a latent class analysis on the 17 managerial roles to identify the
different types of managers in our sample. The latent classes were identified by the
proportion of the population that falls into each of the managerial classes.
Page 15
RESULTS
DuBrin (2012) stated that a manager needs to combine five essential skills:
technical, interpersonal, conceptual, diagnostic, and political. Gosling and Mintzberg
(2006) hypothesized that managers also need to combine actions with a reflective
mindset in order to accomplish the wide range of complex managerial objectives.
We performed a within-subjects analysis of variance to verify that the way managers
responded to the three domains was in fact different, and we conducted pairwise
comparisons to determine whether the domain-by-subject effects varied between
each pair.
The dendrogram in Figure 1 suggests that managerial roles can be split into four role
groupings, but the dendrogram did not align with the three functional areas as
theorised by Mintzberg (1973) or DuBrin (2012).
Page 16
Our cluster analysis identified four significantly different groupings of roles, including
Leadership, Workflow, Manpower, and Team roles. These groupings are more
descriptive of 21st century managerial activity and are consistent with actual
managerial activities.
We hypothesized that DuBrin's (2012) list of 17 managerial roles may not reflect
empirically the practicality or utility of the roles. A latent class analysis produced five
quantitatively distinct groups of managers.
Page 17
We produced a heat map to better understand the practicality and utility of
managerial roles and extent of role engagement in contemporary managers. The
heat map shows that managers tend to produce high scores on items associated
with specific roles.
To determine if the five groups were statistically distinct, we performed pairwise
comparisons of the responses to the role questions. The results support Hypothesis
3.
These groupings provide strong empirical evidence that organizational players may
participate in different role combination alternatives than previously thought, either by
choice or in response to organizational constraints. Only one group of executives
(19.4%) appeared to function at a high level of relevancy in all 17 roles, thus we
labeled this cluster highly engaged executives. The remaining four groups were
marked as somewhat engaged, somewhat disengaged, and actively disengaged.
Page 18
DISCUSSION
This study is distinctive within the numerous explorations of managerial work in
several respects, including the empirical approach, which revealed interesting role
clustering and construct domain separation.
The five managerial skills (interpersonal, technical, diagnostic, conceptual, and
political) were found to be a separate domain from both the managerial roles and five
mindsets. The importance of interpersonal skills was found to be the most important
factor in the overall proficiency of the respondents.
The cluster dendrogram provided support for Gosling and Mintzberg's (2003) five
mindsets as a distinct domain, and the analysis revealed a two-level hierarchy with
change, self and relationships as inseparable and statistically distinct from
organization and content.
Page 19
Our study revealed that there are four distinct groups of roles in which managers can
be grouped, namely Leadership roles, Workflow roles, Manpower roles, and Team
roles. The development of team skills has become relevant to practicing managers.
The proliferation of leadership studies over the past 70 years has made comparisons
between various behavioral constructs and research approaches difficult.
The majority of practitioners did not find the traditional managerial roles relevant, and
suggested that the taxonomy may be limited in its focus on specific managerial work
behaviors.
This study found that contemporary managers are not as strongly influenced by
organizational forces as perhaps managers were at the time of Mintzberg's (1973)
study, and that individuals may need to place their personal interests above the
collective well-being of the organization in order to advance their careers.
Page 20
We suspect that the new employer-employee compact is having a profound effect
upon the relevancy of the traditional 17 roles.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

This study has several limitations, but offers a number of interesting areas for future
research. It should be noted that the sample base was exclusively from the United
States, and that further segmentation and analyses would be useful in determining if
role requirements, skills, and mindsets are more specific to various population
interests.
This study confirmed our Hypothesis 1 that the constructs of roles, skills, and
mindsets are distinct domains, but the low scores on role relevancy raise a concern
about the theory versus practice debate.
The three domains of the taxonomy are interesting for academic researchers, but the
translation to improving student or practitioner advancement is questionable. Further,
the taxonomy is skewed toward specific work-related tasks, and fails to address the
significant effort that managers expend on soft skills.

IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The following recommendations are made to strengthen the relevancy of the
taxonomies and enable individuals, academic research communities, business
students, and schools to acquire and develop more meaningful theoretical and
practical knowledge.
Page 21
Interpersonal skills were ranked number one in the emerging hierarchy by both mid-
and upper-level managers, but technical and diagnostic skills were ranked higher
than conceptual and political skills by both mid- and upper-level executives.
We found that the identified roles are not of equal importance to individuals, and that
different cohorts of managers use different skill groupings. Our recommendation is to
regroup roles based upon actual implementation alignment.

CONCLUSION
This study provides empirical evidence that certain widely accepted managerial
typologies created some 40 years ago may warrant modification to a more holistic
model that better reflects contemporary managerial interests.