What Do Managers Do

WHAT DO MANAGERS DO?
A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE EVIDENCE
COLIN P. HALES
Department of Management Studies for Tourism and Hotel Industries, University of Surrey
INTRODUCTION
IN this article, I consider the extent to which the question 'What do managers do? ' has been satisfactorily answered by published empirical studies of mana- gerial work and behaviour. Two aspects of this enterprise require justification: the pertinence of the question posed and the need for another review of the evidence. Certainly, the question 'What do managers do? ' has an air of naivete, insolence, even redundancy about it. Yet it is a question which Is begged by many management-related issues. Arguments that the quality of manage- ment is decisive in both organizational and national economic performance presuppose that the exclusively 'managerial ' contribution to that performance is both tangible and identifiable. Claims for managerial authority invariably rest not upon de facto status and power, but upon an implicit 'job of managing" for which authority is the necessary resource. The vast and growing industry of management education, training and development presumably rests upon a set of ideas about what managers do and, hence, what managers are being educated, trained and developed/or, Finally, nowhere is the question of what managers do more insistently begged than in that substantial portion of the literature on management which is concerned with 'effective ' management (or managerial effectiveness). Indeed 'effective management ' has ceased to be a purely contingent pairing of adjective and noun and has become a self evident object whose causes and concomitants may be investigated unambiguously.
In contrast, I contend that the term 'effective management ' is a second-order
normative

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