What Is Management?

When it comes to the word Manager, the first thing that comes up to anybody’s mind is, a person, who manage things. A more sophisticated definition of management is “the activity of getting things done with the aid of people and other resources” (Boddy 2011:10). This specific description gives us enough information to see the main idea, however in order to get the big picture, we must go further and deeper. In this assignment, the meaning of management will be deliberated by comparing and contrasting different definitions and reviewing two management theories of the competing values framework. In the first part of the essay, firstly there will be drawn a comparison between the more traditional Fayol’s theory of management and the contemporary one of Mintzberg, fallowed by Elton Мayo and his countertheory of Frederick Taylor. The second part is comprised of the discussion of the internal process and open system models.

Henri Fayol was a French mining engineer, who after retiring wrote the book General and Industrial Management (published in French in 1916) based on his experience of his career as a managing director (Boddy 2011). According to Nancy (1986:454) because of his work he became from someone not popular to “the father of the first theory of administration. Fayol is most famous for identifying five key functions of management – planning, organizing, coordination, command and control, which according to a lot of people nowadays are the main day-to-day activities of the executives. (Boddy 2011; Fayol 1949)

Henry Mintzberg is an academician, who studied how 5 chief executives spent their time, in what activities they were involved and based on his observations he spotted 10 roles, divided into three categories:

• informational (Monitor, Disseminator, Spokesperson) – roles related to scanning and monitoring external and internal information and making announcements

• interpersonal (figurehead, leader and liaison) – they basically represent the relationships in and outside the organization

• decisional (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, Negotiator) -those roles that outline the innovative ones and those who are making decisions and taking advantage of arising opportunities.

The main idea of these three roles is to motivate and influence people. Fayol. (Boddy 2011)

Most people’s idea of managers are “executives sitting in desks”, whose job is “well ordered, carefully controlled”. Mintzberg (2010:12) But in the reality it is a bit different. Sometimes this concept could be true, however according to Mintzberg (2010:12) the environment of the managers is actually “a hectic pace, lots of interruptions, more responding than initiating”. This dissimilarity actually outlines one of the most significant differences between the two theorists. Whereas Fayol is practitioner and