What are the roles of management in a company?

Management is comprised of a body of managers or a group of individuals responsible for providing leadership to various departments in a company.

Management has several roles in a company, but their six main roles include planning, organizing, staffing, leading, motivating, and controlling.

Planning - Management is responsible for defining the objectives of the company for each financial or operational period of the year. Simply, based on historical data from previous years of operation or data collected from market research, management creates achievable targets for the next financial or operational period of the business.

Organizing - After the quarterly and/or annual objectives have been defined, management delegates duties amongst employees and sets targets for each department. This is to ensure that all employees in each department are working collectively in the attainment of the company's objectives.

Staffing - Once an employee needs to be hired or fired the Human Resource manager will see to it that this is done. Staffing of departments also involves the issuance of memos, checking of attendance and punctuality, ensuring that all required documents are in an employee's file,  the training of new employees in some specialized operations of the company, and the training of existing employees in new skills.

Leading - Management, thereafter, monitors the progress of each department in attaining these targets and provides leadership where necessary. Leadership can take the form of rewarding or demoting an employee as well as providing feedback to employees on previously completed tasks.  

Motivating - Management recognizes that motivated employees usually have higher productivity levels. Therefore, managers typically try to keep the workers motivated with both monetary and non-monetary incentives such as bonuses, health insurance, scholarships for employees' children and vacation days.

Controlling - Most importantly, management controls the operations of the company. Management should be flexible to facilitate the revision of plans if it is realized that outlined objectives are no longer attainable in order to control company costs and prevent the wasting of company resources. Control by management also involves the maintenance of standards in product quality and operations.