The Manager's Work in Context: A Pilot Investigation of the Relationship between Managerial Role Demands and Role Performance
| Date | 01 May 1987 |
| Pages | 26-33 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055577 |
| Published date | 01 May 1987 |
| Author | Colin Hales |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
The Manager's Work in Context: A Pilot
Investigation of the Relationship between
Managerial Role Demands and Role
Performance
by Colin
Hales,
Department of Management
Studies,
University of Surrey
Introduction
The evolution of an increasingly systematic approach to
management training, recruitment, appraisal and dev-
elopment has spawned an increasing interest in the nature
of managerial jobs as both a reference point towards which
training and development may be pertinently oriented and
a yardstick against which managers' performance and
potential may be appraised. Any discussion of managers'
training needs, potential, performance strengths and
weaknesses, incentives and rewards or development needs is
predicated on some idea, perhaps implicit, of what managers
should be doing and, hence, some assessment of the extent
to which managers are doing or could do it. But whilst
managerial performance and potential have been variously
investigated and measured, the question of what managers
should be doing in their respective jobs has not been so
systematically addressed. Certainly, there has been increasing
use of managerial job descriptions as formal statements of
managers' responsibilities, tasks and, perhaps, detailed
activities. However, these "descriptions" often contain a
heavy dose of prescription, not to say exhortation, and tend
to be non-behavioural, abstract and open to considerable
interpretation. In particular, it is often difficult to deduce
unambiguously from them which observable behaviours or
performance indicators would be consistent with "doing the
job"
or, indeed, doing it well. Moreover, the content of
managerial job descriptions tends to derive from limited
sources — either the manager's immediate boss's beliefs
about what the manager should be doing, or a process of
negotiation between manager and immediate boss. Both of
these approaches are at odds with the general recognition
that managers' jobs are neither static nor neatly circum-
scribed, but lie at the intersections between shifting networks
of organisational relationships. In short, there has not,
hitherto, been a serious attempt to evolve, through a process
akin to triangulation, accurate descriptions of managerial
jobs as they are constituted by the expectations, demands
and requirements of the managers' network, and then to use
those descriptions as a yardstick for training, development,
recruitment, appraisal and reward.
Among studies of managerial work, there has been a
bifurcation of interest between, on the one hand, analyses
of what managers
actually
do in the course of their work[1]
and, on the other hand, analyses of what managers are
expected
to
do[2].
Moreover, individual research studies have
tended to be confined to either one or other of these and,
predominantly, the former. This has meant that the growing
body of research on what managers do often suffers from,
among other limitations[3], the absence of a contextual
framework into which identified behaviour can be located.
In particular, it has been difficult to judge whether the
described behaviour is, in fact, appropriate to the
circumstances of the job — or, to employ a term common
in management literature, "effective"
[4].
This is despite
recognition that "managerial effectiveness" may be regarded
as the relationship between actual and expected behaviour[5].
This has recently been expressed in the notion of
"reputational effectiveness"[6] or the capacity of a manager
to satisfy a number of possibly conflicting constituencies in
the course of his/her work.
The reluctance of much of the research on managers to
attempt to relate actual to expected behaviour is exacerbated
by a further tendency to focus on the form, rather than the
content, of managerial work. Some studies have analysed
the way managers distribute their time between interaction
and paperwork; the form of
these
interactions or paperwork;
with whom they interact, where and on whose initiative; from
whom paperwork originates and how it is dealt with. What
they have omitted, yet what some might regard as the more
interesting information, is the content of the work; what all
the interactions and paperwork are
about[7].
This article reports part of the findings of
a
research study
which relate to the work of
two
managers, not only in terms
of content, but also in relation to what others expected of
the managers. The purpose here is twofold: firstly, to discuss
the method used to examine managerial work in these terms
and to indicate some of the problems encountered in doing
so and, secondly, to report some data which illustrate the
kind of insights furnished by the employment of this
approach. In neither case is the article definitive; the method
requires further refinement and the data on the managerial
jobs reported here cannot claim to describe managerial work
in general. What the study does show, however, is that it is
possible to develop an interlocking picture of the role
"demands", role "conception" and role "performance" [8] of
managerial jobs and, from that, gain further insights into
the way in which, and the effectiveness with which, those
jobs are carried out by their incumbents.
In particular, the findings suggest and illustrate an area
of variation between managerial jobs additional to those
previously identified. Managerial jobs, it would seem, vary
in the extent to which conflicts in role demands hinder role
performance which harmonises with these demands. Thus,
managerial jobs are not simply constituted differently by
others' demands and expectations, nor do different managers
simply vary in the extent to which, by choice or constraint,
they acknowledge these demands and expectations. Jobs also
vary in the extent to which the fulfilment of role demands
26 • PR 16,5 1987
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