What Do Managers Do? Preliminary Findings from The Ugandan Context

Abstract

There is an ongoing scholarly debate on management development in Africa. Managementtheory and practice have previously been accorded scanty scholarly scrutiny leading to agap in our knowledge of managerial work in Africa. This paper presents preliminaryfindings from exploratory study on what managers do in Ugandan organizations. It isunderpinned by the models in extant literature. We posit that there is no new thread ofthought in management thinking and the conventional tasks and skills defineproportionately what the managers were found to be engaged in; the skills were equallyproportionately distributed. The clustering around the same thematic areas could havebeen influenced by our conceptualization. We recommend grounded approaches to analyzemore deeply the task design and management work