Katz

Mrs X, a married mother of two, is the manager of Company ABC, a retail outlet in xxxxxx, Perth Western Australia. Company ABC, based in Victoria, is a national chain of 33 retail outlets supplying xxx and xxx supplies to the public. During an interview, Mrs X gave an insight into the operation of her store and her position as manager. The interview identified functions of management, the skills required to be successful and the actual roles performed as manager and asked for responses to be a rating from 1 to 5 where 1 was very little and 5 very much. In the role of store manager within her organisation, Mrs X recognised her position as that of a first-line manager in charge of non-managerial employees whilst she herself reported to a regional manager (middle manager) who in turn reported to the owner of the business or top-line manager (Robbins, Bergman, Stagg & Coulter, 2006). Based on the results of the interview, it is clear that the human skills described by Robert Katz are reflected in Mrs X’s’s role as manager and that the management roles defined by Henry Mintzberg were relevant to her managerial role.

The Company ABC store at Karrinyup is a small organisation employing 10 people including Mrs X as manager. Robbins, et.al (2006, p 6) define an “organisation” as a deliberate arrangement of people to accomplish some specific purpose. Henry Fayol (1949 as cited in Robbins et.al.2006, p10) claims that these specific purposes are achieved through the functions of planning, organising, commanding, coordinating and controlling. Robert Katz argued that these functions required skills that had to be taught and developed. In his 1955 article in the Harvard Business Review, Katz described three basic skills – technical, human and conceptual. Technical skill involves specialised knowledge and analytical ability within that specialty. This skill is most important to lower levels of management. Conceptual skill involves the ability to see the enterprise as a whole...