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Management is concerned with seeing that the job gets done. In this definition a manager is the one who guides the others in the performance of tasks and does not normally perform these tasks himself. A machine operator is not a manager because he operates the machine himself, but on this definition a foreman would be a manager because he arranges for the machines to be operated by others. A more sophisticated definition considers a management role as:

- A role which has subordinate to it authorized roles; the work of these subordinate roles is determined by the occupant of the Managerial Role - The Manager -. He is accountable for his subordinates work and, minimally, has authority to appoint employees to the subordinate roles, to remove them from these roles and to determine, within whatever policies he is set by higher authority, the differential rewards of his subordinates. This definition says at least two things about a manager:

A - He is accountable for his subordinates work. If this work is not done satisfactorily, the manager cannot avoid responsibility pointing at his subordinates because it is his duty to see that their work is satisfactory. He may delegate tasks but he must still bear the responsibility for their satisfactory performance.

B - The responsibility for selecting, training, and dismissing subordinates must rest with the manager to whom they report. If a manager considers that one of his subordinates needs a particular type of training and the manager is not allowed to provide this training, he cannot be held responsible for that subordinate inability to do what is required of him. Again, if a manager has a subordinate who cannot do his work properly, in spite of having received the appropriate training, the manager must be able to dismiss him, or at least to secure his removal from the post which he cannot fill adequately. If the manager cannot get rid of such a subordinate, the bad work which that subordinates does cannot be his responsibility; it is the responsibility of whoever says that subordinate must stay in the job. If, therefore, the head of a department has no authority to appoint subordinates, to prescribe their training and to dismiss them, he cannot properly be held responsible for the work of his department, consequently he is not a manager. The manager is the individual who makes these decisions.

Is the Foreman a Manager? All foremen satisfy this definition of a manager since all are concerned with seeing that the job gets done; but the fact that many foremen are not regarded as being part of the management team leads us to suspect that his definition is not in line with the normal use of the term. At the back of most people's minds there is probably the notion that something more than supervisory authority is required to make a man a manager and Brown defines this additional element as responsibility for the work supervised, pointing out that this responsibility implies a certain minimal authority. It seems probable that the kind and amount of authority is regarded as being minimal corresponds roughly with the amount of authority that is commonly thought of as being requisite to a manager. If this is so, then a foreman is not a manager unless he satisfies the definition of one.

By Artur Victoria
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