Managerial action, or how to integrate skills, roles and management styles to represent managerial work?

So far, I have presented three approaches to representing the work of a manager that are developing in parallel: managerial skills, managerial roles and management styles. Each of these approaches represented the manager from a different angle. But none provided an opportunity for us to answer the question – what does a manager actually do? What are the activities that he or she undertakes one after another? Managerial skills represented what a manager should be able to do. Managerial roles

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The Tenerife disaster – can you build a robot manager based on management styles?

What if you could use leadership styles, or the individual behavioral style of a person in the role of boss, to build a copy of a given manager? Whether it be Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Elon Musk or your team’s boss, it doesn’t matter. Imagine the consequences of choosing the qualities of just one man to build a manager who affects the operation of a company or the lives of hundreds of people. Not many people are interested in the

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How have management styles been used to study the work of a manager?

Management styles are the third theoretical concept that researchers and practitioners have tried to depict the work of a manager. On the one hand, the idea coincides with the intuition we use when we think of our own boss – either he has an autocratic or participative style. But again – what does it give us when we want to design a robot manager to manage a specific project? It doesn’t give us anything. Knowing about a single person, what

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How have managerial roles been used in studies of managerial work?

What about managerial roles? This way of looking at managerial work has also been very popular for years. Many researchers have used this perspective, as Mintzberg’s roles offer great potential for learning what a manager should do. However, they still don’t provide answers to what he or she actually does, so they are not directly suitable for automating a manager’s work. How important the different managerial roles are is shown in this short excerpt from an interview with Steve Jobs.

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How have managerial skills been used in studies of managerial work?

As I have shown in previous posts, managerial skills have become one of the dominant approaches to representing managerial work in research since 1967. This has done little to understand what a manager actually does. Why? Well, if we learn what skills a particular manager or group of managers had in a given situation, we will only get an answer to the question of what they were able to do, but we will not know what they actually did. Of

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