YOUR ROLE AS A MANAGER: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Your Role as a Manager: A Critical Analysis

Your Role as a Manager: A Critical Analysis



Introduction

The changing role of the middle manager has been a growing area of academic and professional literature over recent years (see Fenton-O'Creevy and Nicholson, 1994). Recent research investigating the apparent demise of traditional management structures suggests that wider socio-economic and technological change, a general decline in organisational growth and the introduction of flatter hierarchies within organisations are largely to blame (Goffee and Scase, 1986). As managers have been encouraged to move from “policeman” to “coach” (the central tenet of the Excellence literature, Peters and Waterman, 1982 and others), their authoritative position within the organisation has often become unclear (see, for example, Buchanan and Preston, 1992). This has often led to frustration and anxiety for middle managers (Goffee and Scase, 1986). Other studies have shown managers to perceive themselves as being in the middle area of a long structure of command having to cope with conflicting expectations from those both above and below them in the hierarchical structure (Torrington and Weightman, 1982; Dopson and Stewart, 1990). Watson's (1994) ethnographic study of the day-to-day lives of managers illustrates this vividly where he describes how managers have to shape their actions and behaviours to cope with the demands placed on them. Like other individuals, he suggests, … these managers are not supermen and women. They all have human anxieties, inadequacies and needs for meanings to be found in those they are meant to “manage”. Managers' work thus involves a double task: managing others at the same time as managing themselves. But the very notion of “managers” being separate people from the “managed”, a notion at the heart of traditional management thinking, undermines a capacity to handle this (1994, pp. 12-13)

Today's managers face the kind of problems that, traditionally, they are responsible for inflicting on others. Middle managers have been a target for organisational redundancies and have experienced increased responsibility, closer monitoring of performance and heightened job insecurity. Indeed, “squeezing out middle management has become a kind of virility symbol in the 1990s just as taking on the unions did in the preceding decade” (Harrison and Pollit, 1994, p. 144). This is rather different from Anthony's description of managers as an organisational group able to pursue their objectives “untrammelled by any political and moral constraint” (1986, p. 9). A recent study of the middle manager as an implementer of organisational strategy, for example, asks whether he or she is actually a “scapegoat” rather than a “saboteur” (Fenton-O'Creevy, 1999).

In addition to the academic interest in the changing role of managers, the coverage of managers in the popular press has also made terms like “grey suit” and “fat cat” common terminology. The influence of managers in organisations and the concept of managerialism in society at large are potentially immense, as we have seen, for example, in the UK public sector over the past 15 years. The fact that it is so “socially important ...