Building Effective Management Teams

As Carlson! first observed, senior managers in large organisations, spend a very large amount of time in conference with other managers and a rather smaller amount of time in undertaking those kinds of activities that are popularly associated with managers directing and communicating with subordinates and organising the work that their underlings are to undertake. If this pattern seems at variance with the traditional role of the manager the explanation lies not so much in some changing fashion in managerial thinking but in the nature of the problems posed by large-scale organisations and by the social and technical complexities of decision-making at high levels. The freedom of the individual manager to act exactly as he thinks fit is being constrained not only by the need to combine with others effectively but by the pressures of the society to which he belongs. If the autocrat is unacceptable in a well-educated, democratic society he is unacceptable no less among his managerial colleagues. The authoritarian manager in favoured circumstances may exert control over a small entourage, but in groupings of a more federal nature where