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Keywords Management accountability, Management styles, Management theory, Work study, Management technique, Australia
Abstract During the twentieth century, much of the discussion about managerial behaviour centred on the difference between management functions and manager roles, with much of the debate centring on "Who is right, Mintzberg or Fayol?" Reports on a study, involving 523 Australian managers, which suggests both are right - Fayol gave us management as we would like it to be and Mintzberg gave us management as it is. In doing so, promulgates a set of new constructions of managerial behaviour - preferred managerial style (management as we would like it to be) and enacted managerial style (management as it is). Taken together, we now have available to us a more integrated theoretical base for research on management and managerial behaviour, and a measure that can be used to progress the required research.
Introduction
A little over 50 years ago, English-speaking managers and academics were introduced directly to Henri Fayol's (1949) ideas about managerial work. His treatise, General and Industrial Management, in which he outlined the key functions of management as planning, organising, coordinating, commanding, and controlling, has had a significant impact on managers and the practice of management around the world. Indeed, Carroll and Gillen (1987, p. 38) argued that Fayol's functions "represent the most useful way of conceptualising the manager's job". Similarly, Wren (1994, p. 193) states that "Fayol's elements of management provided the modern conceptualisation of a management process; his principles were lighthouses to managerial action". A quarter of a century after the English translation of Fayol, however, Henry Mintzberg (1973), in The Nature of Managerial Work, dismissed as "folklore" Fayol's (1949) conception of managerial work. Management is not, Mintzberg (1973) said, about functions. Rather, it is what managers do. He said his findings were "as different from Fayol's classical view as a cubist abstract is from a Renaissance painting" (Mintzberg, 1989, p. 9). Since that time, much of the debate has centred on "Who is right, Mintzberg or Fayol?" (Duncan, 1999, p. 32).
Meanwhile, Wren (1994) has suggested that the works of Fayol (1949) and Mintzberg (1973) represent different rather than competing views, while Tsoukas (1994, p. 295) has argued that they represent theoretical descriptions that are logically related...