Mid Term Exam (there are 4 questions) Scholarship Essay

Mid Term Exam (there are 4 questions) - Scholarship Essay Example The sum of these roles covers all aspects of managerial performance though Mintzberg was careful enough to state that they might not describe the process of managing comprehensively. Mintzberg (1973) defines the role as "a set of certain behavioral rules associated with a concrete organization or post" (p.36) and groups the manager's roles into the three large blocks: interpersonal, informational and decisional. Each of these blocks consists of several roles: Figurehead - involves obligation of manager to act as symbolic head performing many routine duties (social or legal). This role is inspirational and activities associated with it are not central to the manager's job. Leader - involves responsibility for motivating of employees and also staffing, training, development and associated duties. This role is especially important during organization of group: it facilitates adequate integration between organizational goals and individual needs of subordinates. Each of these roles is important and may be viewed as the most essential for a manager under a specific set of circumstances. Therefore, ranking them in order of importance is a very difficult task. One possible way to fulfill this task is to use the existing models of managerial work as the basis. Thus, one of the most popular models of management known as POLCA includes planning, organizing, leading, controlling and assessing (Morgan, 1986). This model suggests that Mintzberg's roles may be ranked as follows: Resource allocator (planning), Liaison (organizing), Leader/Figurehead (leading), and Monitor (controlling and assessing). However, when an organization faces inevitable changes other roles such as Disseminator or Disturbance handler may be more important than others. 2. Managers sometimes make poor decisions because of cognitive bias in their decision-making process. Discuss three of the four sources of bias that can adversely affect the ability of managers to make a good decision, and illustrate each of them with a realistic business decision-making situation. Cognitive biases represent a broad group of observer effects that often distort our perception of phenomena related either to external environment or inner world of human being. There are several categories of