Roles of Managers as Perceived by Business Students

Abstract

Perception of the roles of managers by 77 business students in a Canadian university was studied by using Mintzberg's 10 roles. The 10 roles were put in a questionnaire and administered to the students to determine whether (1) three different kinds of managers, production, staffing and sales, will be ascribed different weights to the roles and (2) if the roles would be perceived to form the three categories, interpersonal, informational, and decisional, as suggested by Mintzberg. A minor objective was to examine whether students with business experience would perceive the roles differently than those who do not have the experience. The results show that (1) the role-questions in sentence form had high reliability as a self-report measure, (2) three roles for the three kinds of managers were shared in common, while on seven other roles the managers were perceived to be different (using χ² and multivariate analysis of variance), (c) Mintzberg's division of the roles into three classes could not be confirmed (using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses), and (4) the students with and without management experience did not seem to differ in their role perception. The results were discussed in terms of the use of the questionnaire for further studies which should focus on psychological aspects such as intellectual competencies of managers as well as nonintellectual ones such as sense of power and self-confidence.