Succesful Managers Research

Based on the above four activities (communication, traditional management, networking and human resource management) that Luthans (1988) has found he concludes and defines the two types of ''real'' managers; the successful - this ''who have been promoted relatively quickly''- and the effective - this ''who have satisfied, committed subordinates and high performing units''. Luthans (1988) noticed that successful managers spent most of their time performing networking activities and the least on human resource and traditional management activities while the effective ones spend most of their time on communication and human resource management activities and the least on traditional management and networking activities.

Thus, very few managers achieve to be both successful and effective. Luthans (1988) states that in practice the successful managers are promoted instead of the effective ones since the formers emphasise the most on networking, which finally results in performing organisational issues. Hence, Luthans (1988) suggest that in order to tackle these problems organisations, especially the Americans which mostly promote the successful managers, should encourage effective managers to get promoted while they have to learn networking skills so as a balance between successful and effective managers to be reached.

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In other words, in this way managers would manage to be quickly promoted, efficient and productive which would contribute to the organisation's good performance and reputation.

On the other hand, Mintzberg (1945) believes that effective managers are more likely those who have developed an introspective sense of their work and perform efficiently under job pressure. Mintzberg (1945) states that managers' formal authority results in them performing three dependable interpersonal, informational and decisional roles with great emphasis to be given the informational roles and its communication activities since 40% of CEos' contact time was about information sharing and 70% of their received mails was only for informational purposes.

Consequently, it seems that Mintzberg's (1945) managers and Luthans's (1988) effective manager spend most of their time in communication activities and at the same time Luthans's (1988) successful manager activities have great similarities with those of Mintzberg's () interpersonal managerial role. Nevertheless, both Luthans (1988) and Mintzberg's' (1945) managerial activities models seem to include elements from Fayol's (1920) five functions of management; planning, organisation, command, co-ordinating and control, with Mintzberg to comment that managers' decision-making processes ''are the same as the procedures used by nineteenth century managers''.

Luthans's (1988) works with Kyle W. Luthans (2004) and Brett C. Luthans (2004) and also with Carolyn M. Youssef (2003), have concluded that today's organisations should replace the traditional economic capital and invest in human and social capital and in positive psychological capital, so as organisations at first to achieve competitive advantage and afterwards maintain it. Jeffery Pfeffer (1988) states that ''only half of today's organisations and managers and their managers believe that human resources really do matter'' while ''half of those who ''believe'' that human resources are their most important asset and ''do something about it'' ''. Jeffery Pfeffer (1988) also concludes that global organisations with high productivity, innovation, quality, customer satisfaction, and bottom-line profitability, such as Southwest Airlines Co., General Electric Co., Microsoft Corp. actually invest in human resource and thus they do not treat it as an expenditure. For instance, the heads of Intel Corporation's Andy Grove and Microsoft's Bill Gates have commented that ''our most important asset walks out the door every night.''

According to Luthans (1988) and Carolyn M. Youssef (2003) the human resource capital with special emphasis on tacit knowledge is the key that provides competitive advantage and can maintain organisations' long run profits since it cannot be copied unlike elements such as organisational structure, high tech environment, and employees' technical training programmes, work experience, education, and specialisation. Investing organisations in tacit knowledge, positive psychological capital - one's development and improvement through self-efficacy, hope, optimism and resiliency - and social capital's elements; networks, norms and trust, seems to contribute significantly in employees' clear understanding of the organisation's structure, goals, vision, culture, philosophy, norms and values, and improvement of innovation and creativity (Luthans & Youssef (2004)). However, Luthans (1988) approach on social capital seems brief and not much in detail and as a result, it does not make enough clear the role and the relationship between society and organisations. Despite, in organisations such as the Armed forces and the police this managerial model seems not practical since they do not need to survive high innovation or creativity. Instead, such kind of organisations are based on Max Weber's (1950) bureaucratic model and in order to be effective they depend on formal structure, tall hierarchy, individual's task specialisation and impersonal delivery of given tasks. Simultaneously, regarding their operating environment and structure, these organisations are also close to Burns (2000) and Stalkers' (2000) mechanistic model and Henry Mintzberg's (1945) machine bureaucracy model, meaning that such organisations' nature and level of efficiency is based on pure bureaucracy.

To sum up, Luthans (1988) throughout his work attempt to illustrate from a sociological and phycological perspective the importance of human element within an organisation as a mean of effectiveness and competitive advantage. Luthans's (1988) studies have given great emphasis on the daily activities that modern managers perform, in order to discover with scientific evidence, the real managerial activities and based on this introduce the different types of managers in relation to effectiveness and personal success. However, as mentioned Luthans (1988) has taken a step further Fayol's (1920) and Mintzberg's (1945) work on discovering the routine managerial activities. Luthans's (1988) findings and conclusions to have great similarities with those of Fayol's (1920), Mintzberg's (1945) and Kotter's (1950) but appears to be more accurate At the same time, Luthans (1988) has suggested managerial models and methods, such as creating a combination of an effective and a successful manager and investing in human resource management, social capital, tacit knowledge, and positive psychological capital, so as organisations to achieve high performance, innovation, and long-lasting competitive advantage. Luthans's (1988) managerial advice and models seem to apply in organisations such as Microsoft, Intel, and Southwest Airlines while in some other like the military appears not practical. Finally, every organisation has different needs and variables so based on those, it should choose its most applicable managerial model as still there is no universal and ideal managerial model for all types of organisations.