Developing Effective

Managers and Leaders

Chris Mabey is Professor of Human Resource Management at Birmingham University Busi-

ness School. During his career, Chris has worked for a Christian charity, as an Occupational
Psychologist for British Telecom and more recently, he headed up Management Training
for Rank Xerox UK. For the last 15 years he has combined independent consultancy with
teaching and researching.
At Birmingham Business School he is Head of the International Management and Organ-
ization (IMO) Group and Director of the DBA. Chris teaches International HRM on the
Masters programmes and leads a European partnership researching management devel-
opment and knowledge transfer. This includes scholars from nine countries. Chris, who
is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, has written numerous books and papers on
HR issues. The latest, published by Sage, takes a critical and international approach to
management and leadership development. He is married with four daughters and lives
in Buckinghamshire, UK.

ML-A1-engb 2/2007 (1042)

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HERIOT-WATT UNIVERSITY

Developing
Effective
Managers
and Leaders
Chris Mabey
First published in Great Britain in 2007.

© Chris Mabey 2007.

The right of Chris Mabey to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Release ML-A1-engb 2/2007 (1042)

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of
the Publishers. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed
of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published, without the prior consent of the Publishers.
Contents

Module 1 What Is Management and Leadership Development and Why Is it

Important? 1/1
1.1 Why Is the Study of Management and Leadership Development Important? 1/1
1.2 Outline of the Course 1/6
1.3 Management and Leadership: a Dubious Dichotomy? 1/7
Case 1.1: Developing Global Leaders at HSBC 1/11
1.4 What Do We Mean by Management Development? 1/13
1.5 Who Are Managers? 1/21
1.6 What Is Needed to Deepen Our Understanding of Management
Development? 1/26
Learning Summary 1/32
Review Questions 1/32
Case 1.2: Could Management and Leadership Development Have Saved Enron? 1/32

Module 2 Why Does The Promise of Management Development often

Remain Unfulfilled? 2/1
2.1 Introduction 2/1
2.2 Why Do Firms Undertake Management Development? 2/2
2.3 Why Are Attempts to Develop Managers Often Frustrated? 2/8
2.4 Two Promising Approaches to Management Development 2/10
Case 2.1: Is 360-degree feedback a unique HRM tool? 2/14
2.5 Training and Development in an International Context 2/18
2.6 Conclusion 2/22
Learning Summary 2/22
Review Questions 2/23
Case 2.2: Competency-Based Leadership Development at Saint-Gobain 2/23

Module 3 What Determines the Way Managers and Leaders Are Developed? 3/1
3.1 Introduction 3/1
3.2 Culture 3/2
Case 3.1: Implications of national cultural impacts for conflict resolution
and team learning in Spain (Part 1) 3/12
3.3 International Strategy 3/18
3.4 Sector and Size Effects 3/20
3.5 Which Factors Are Most Influential? 3/24
3.6 Institutional Approach 3/28
3.7 Conclusion 3/33
Learning Summary 3/34
Review Questions 3/35
Case 3.2: implications of national cultural impacts for conflict resolution
and team learning in Spain (Part 2) 3/35

Module 4 What Are the Extent and Effectiveness of Management and

Leadership Development? 4/1
4.1 Introduction 4/2
4.2 The Design of Management Development 4/2

Developing Effective Managers and Leaders Edinburgh Business School v

Contents

4.3 The Delivery of Management Development 4/15

Case 4.1: Using a development centre to launch leadership in a UK university 4/21
Case 4.2: SimCorp: Balancing informal and formal management
development in Denmark 4/24
4.4 Patterns of Management Development in European Organisations 4/29
4.5 Conclusion 4/38
Learning Summary 4/40
Review Questions 4/40
Case 4.3: Using external pressures to stimulate targeted management
development in an SME 4/40

Module 5 What Are the Opportunities and Pitfalls of International

Management Development? 5/1
5.1 Introduction 5/2
5.2 Why Is International Management Development Important? 5/2
5.3 The Distinctive Nature of International Management Development 5/4
5.4 Understanding Host Cultures 5/8
5.5 International Management Development Policies 5/15
Case 5.1: Western management development in China: a collision of cultures? 5/22
5.6 Using Expatriation to Develop Managers 5/23
5.7 Conclusion 5/26
Learning Summary 5/27
Review Questions 5/27
Case 5.2: Developing international managers: is it fair? 5/27

Module 6 Does Management Development Improve Organisational Performance? 6/1

6.1 Introduction 6/2
6.2 Framing Management Development 6/3
6.3 Evaluating Management Development 6/10
6.4 Management Development As a ’High-Performance Work Practice’ 6/17
6.5 Links Between Management Development and Organisational
Performance 6/21
Case 6.1 Developing managers in Europe. What is being done, and what works? 6/23
6.6 Methods for Evaluating Management Development 6/33
6.7 Conclusion 6/37
Learning Summary 6/37
Review Questions 6/38
Case 6.2: Evaluating Management Development Programmes 6/38

Module 7 What Are the Individual Benefits of Management Development? 7/1

7.1 Introduction 7/2
7.2 The Human Resource Frame 7/3
7.3 Theories Informing the Human Resource Frame 7/4
7.4 Conditions for Effective Development 7/9
7.5 Evidence of Impact on Individual Capability/Performance 7/11
7.6 The MBA 7/13
7.7 Executive Coaching 7/18
7.8 Management Development: The Normative View 7/21

vi Developing Effective Managers and Leaders Edinburgh Business School

Contents

7.9 Conclusion 7/22

Learning Summary 7/23
Review Questions 7/24
Case 7.1: Using MBAs to develop managers in a public sector organisation 7/24
Case 7.2 : Executive coaching in the UK government sector 7/25

Module 8 Are There Other Ways of Viewing Management Development? 8/1

8.1 Introduction 8/1
8.2 The Political Frame 8/3
8.3 The Symbolic Frame 8/11
8.4 What Does Political Frame Research Reveal About Management
Development? 8/16
8.5 What Does Symbolic Frame Research Reveal About Management
Development? 8/24
8.6 What Is the Value of Political and Symbolic Framing? 8/34
8.7 Conclusion 8/37
Learning Summary 8/38
Review Questions 8/39
Case 8.1: Reframing management development 8/39

Module 9 Developing Managers and Leaders: Is It Worth the Effort? 9/1

9.1 Introduction 9/1
9.2 Is Management Development Failing to Deliver on Its Promise? 9/2
9.3 Indications of Progress 9/4
9.4 Reframing Management Development 9/9
9.5 What Are the Potential Synergies for Management Development
Between the Four Frames? 9/10
9.6 Implementing Management Development Effectively 9/21
9.7 Conclusion 9/25
Learning Summary 9/26
Review Questions 9/27
Case 9.1: Executive coaching in a high street retailer: an example of
reframing management development 9/27

Appendix 1 Answers A1/1

Module 1 1/1
Module 2 1/7
Module 3 1/12
Module 4 1/22
Module 5 1/28
Module 6 1/44
Module 7 1/51
Module 8 1/65
Module 9 1/68

Developing Effective Managers and Leaders Edinburgh Business School vii

Contents

Appendix 2 Practice Final Examinations A2/1

Practice Final Examination 1 2/2
Examination Answers 2/4
Practice Final Examination 2 2/7
Examination Answers 2/9

Index I/1

viii Developing Effective Managers and Leaders Edinburgh Business School

Module 1

What Is Management and

Leadership Development and Why
Is it Important?
Contents
1.1 Why Is the Study of Management and Leadership Development Important?1/1
1.2 Outline of the Course 1/6
1.3 Management and Leadership: a Dubious Dichotomy? 1/7
Case 1.1: Developing Global Leaders at HSBC 1/11
1.4 What Do We Mean by Management Development? 1/13
1.5 Who Are Managers? 1/21
1.6 What Is Needed to Deepen Our Understanding of Management
Development? 1/26
Learning Summary 1/32
Review Questions 1/32
Case 1.2: Could Management and Leadership Development Have Saved Enron? 1/32

Learning Objectives
After reading this module you will be able to:
• provide a justification for a fresh analysis of management and leadership devel-
opment;
• identify a number of reasons why the distinction between managers and leaders
is largely artificial;
• define what is meant by management development and how it relates to the
fields of management education and management learning;
• identify some contrasting historical/cultural conceptions of managers and lead-
ers and the implications of these for management development;
• explain why the development of leaders and managers is so important;
• describe a number of guiding principles that are needed to deepen our under-
standing of management development.

1.1 Why Is the Study of Management and Leadership

Development Important?
There are several compelling reasons to justify a fresh, empirical and critical ana-
lysis of management and leadership development. (We discuss the distinction

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Module 1/ What Is Management and Leadership Development and Why Is it Important?

between the two in the second module; for now we use the term ‘management
development’ to refer to both managers and leaders.) The first is economic. There
has been a long-standing belief that national productivity can be attributed to three
types of investment: in firm-specific production, in distribution, and in managerial
capabilities. The last is widely recognised as the most important. Although the
logic and plausibility of this skills–performance link is open to question, this does
little to diminish government concern, both national and international, about the
calibre of managers, often accompanied by the notion that lessons can be learnt
from competitor countries. So in Europe, for instance, the globalisation of business
and the emergence of a new knowledge-based economy are seen to be challenging
the adaptability of European education and training systems. And the EU’s poor
productivity relative to the USA and other industrialised countries has been linked,
in particular, to the inferior quality of management in SMEs, especially in the use
of information and communication technologies (O’Mahoney and Van Ark, 2003).
This is also reflected in the developing economies of Europe, where in some cases
the needs are more fundamental (see Box 1.1).

♦ Box 1.1
In 1998 and 2000 a cross-country analysis of management training was conducted in
nine CEE countries, including several preparing to join the EU (Gudic, 2001). Based on
interviews in over 1000 companies the following findings were highlighted:

• There is passive, even negative, attitude towards change, culturally embedded from
a long experience of living in a static environment: this is limiting the managerial
capabilities desperately needed to conceive, develop and implement appropriate
strategic responses.
• The HR function is focused primarily on staffing activities while neglecting those
dealing with HRD and management development.
• According to general managers, the greatest capabilities are concentrated at the
highest levels of management. This reflects an attitude that the hierarchy remains
untouchable, or that managers are assessed according to their experience rather
than against criteria of innovative behaviour, social and cultural competence.
• Managers have difficulty articulating their training needs and tend to follow what’s
on offer from training providers, who market their current product/service portfolio
rather than investigate what their customers’ needs really are.
♦

Take a moment to benchmark your organisation, and the broader political and
economic climate in which it operates, against the four constraints referred to
by Gudic. On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 representing definite agreement and 10
representing definite disagreement), how would you rate your employer, or those
known to you in the following areas?

• A negative cultural attitude toward change/doing things differently

• A primary HRM focus on recruitment and reward strategies
• A tendency to focus management development on senior levels only
• Difficulty in identifying and articulating training needs

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A total rating of less than 20 suggests you are starting from a low base. Attitudes
and systems in your organisation will have to alter significantly if management
development is to be taken seriously and start reaping wider benefits.

The example in Box 1.1 leads to a second reason for spotlighting management
development, namely the sociocultural insights it provides about national prior-
ities. The way countries and companies go about improving their management
‘stock’ tells us a good deal about the importance they place upon management
and leadership and the strategies favoured for achieving economic success. Within
China, for example, an initial focus from the late 1970s through the 1980s was on
basic technical training. Yet by the latter part of the 1980s the focus on management
development became a significant challenge and high priority within the govern-
ment. The immensity of this challenge, as viewed by government, was revealed
when the Chinese Vice Minister for Education in 1988 projected that, with 400 000
state-owned enterprises, 300 000 joint ventures and 200 000 township enterprises,
there was a need for 2.7 million trained managers. By 1994 it was estimated there
were still just 500 MBAs in China (Southworth, 1999). Of course, management
development continues apace via increasing numbers of Chinese managers ‘tak-
ing business and management courses outside China, the interaction of Chinese
managers with their Western partners in joint ventures, and the settlement of an
increasing number of Western educated overseas Chinese in China as managers,
experts and entrepreneurs‘ (Branine, 2005: 471).
A third reason is financial. Management development is big business, and gen-
erates an industry of its own throughout the world. Government departments,
professional institutes, training agencies, consultancies, business schools and cor-
porate universities are just some of the groups that stand to gain from the continued
and increasing preoccupation with creating a new generation of business leaders
and managers. The global investment in management development activity, estim-
ated to be $37 billion some years ago (Boyatzis et al., 1996), has increased markedly
since then. In developed economies such as the UK, some 20 million days per
year are spent on programmed management training, a figure that could well be
doubled if less formal development is taken into consideration (Burgoyne et al.,
2004). This is quite apart from the indirect aspects of investment, such as time
spent on design and delivery, opportunity costs, the setting up of training systems
and evaluation activities. In France there is a legal requirement for employers
to allocate 1.5% of total annual payroll to vocational training, although it is the
employer who decides how, and on whom, this is spent. Turning to emerging
economies in central Europe, the investment in training managers for individual
companies ranges from several thousand US dollars up to $135 000 in Romania
and up to $625 000 in Slovenia (Gudic, 2001). Naturally, given the number of days
devoted to manager training and the amount of investment in these activities, there
is keen interest in knowing whether these are resources well spent. Training days
and development budgets are only input measures. What is required is some meas-
ure of the outcomes, but such evidence about the quality and benefits arising from
management development is difficult to come by.

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Module 1/ What Is Management and Leadership Development and Why Is it Important?

A fourth reason is that, as yet, the field of management development lacks coher-
ent theory. In one sense, this is no bad thing. Authors have tended to invoke
a wide range of theories in their studies (economic, sociological, psychological,
institutional, to name just a few) and an array of methodologies (positivist, ethno-
graphic, interpretivist among others) in their quest to understand the rationale for
and returns on management development, and this makes for a rich and interest-
ing commentary. The disadvantage is that the fruits of research in such parallel
fields often fail to cross-fertilise and inform new research. At worst, researchers
remain so committed to their favoured paradigms that they are dismissive of the
findings of work from other traditions. To practitioners, this may appear like eso-
teric in-fighting between academics. However, management development is a field
particularly prone to anecdotal advice, to fashion, and to ‘genre training’. Using
appropriate methods and research tools to sift the claims, the rhetoric and the
true value of various management development initiatives may actually prove to
be a timely contribution to those responsible for designing, commissioning and
assessing such activities.
Fifth, there is the issue of social responsibility. The style, content and availability
of manager and leader development in a given organisation or sector or coun-
try/region are closely connected to the stance taken on matters such as diversity,
social responsibility and ecology.

Note down two or three ways in which an organisation might demonstrate a

corporately responsible approach to management development.
Possible responses might include a good employer considering the degree to which
their management development:

• favours certain ethnic or other groups (and possibly discriminates against

others);
• promotes ethical and socially responsible behaviour;
• monitors the propensity of burn-out among potential leaders;
• exposes managers to the ideologies of external pressure groups;
• encourages periodic questioning of its own values and policies;
• facilitates engagement with local communities and their concerns.

A UK report on leadership development poses the question: ‘Are [managers

and leaders] rewarded for behaving in accordance with good employment prac-
tice, not only in terms of health and safety requirements, which in many countries
include stress, emotional and mental welfare . . . ? (James and Burgoyne, 2002). It is
entirely possible that the way an organisation allocates its development opportunit-
ies (indeed the privileging of managers as against other staff for the more attractive
and expensive training opportunities is itself contentious), the values that are con-
veyed during such activities (actual rather than espoused), the expectations and
psychological pressure placed upon participants (to imbibe corporate values, for
instance) and the absence of post-development support are all factors that amount
to social irresponsibility.
A sixth reason is more individual. Few of us remain unaffected by management
development in our professional lives. Whatever our occupation or vocation, if

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we were to conduct a brief personal audit of the past year it is likely that we have
participated in some kind of training and development activity, whether formal or
informal, planned or more serendipitous. For many, we shall also have contributed
to the development of others. For those in management roles, in the early days of
our careers, training and development tends to be prescribed or even mandated.
However, as our careers progress, we exercise more choice. To put ourselves
forward for a development centre leading to guided personal development; to
accept an overseas assignment despite the fact that our partner will have to put
their career on hold; to accept the mentor that we have been assigned to or to
seek our own; to draw upon savings to study for a higher qualification; to move to
portfolio working or take a ‘career break’ – such choices are informed by a number
of internal and external factors, but the final judgement entails risk. Hopefully this
module will provide pointers as to the potential value of alternative development
opportunities and the assumptions underpinning them, and help to avoid some
of the regrets expressed by a senior manager during a research interview about
executive coaching (see Box 1.2).

♦ Box 1.2
‘I was a divisional director at the time and a number of us tried different people and
different approaches. When I look back on my first coach the good things about it were
– this sounds very damning, probably is – but I began to realise as things unfolded that
I had never worked for a really good line manager – in 20 years I had never worked for
a really good line manager that actually helped me develop my skills or use my talents.
In fact quite the reverse. I felt I had probably given an awful lot to loads of other
people in my team and upwards and not got much back – interestingly. So the coach
for me . . . was very useful in making me [ . . . ] think about my potential, my talents and
my development needs and thinking about what I could do myself.’
♦

Does the experience of this manager resonate at all with your own? How helpful
have your line managers been in terms of helping your personal development?
Have you benefited from effective coaching at times in your career? What was it
that made these coaches so valuable? Do you coach others in the workplace or in
social/recreational activities?

If anything, coaching and personal development are all the more valuable for
those managers operating in multi-ethnic, multicultural and/or international set-
tings. Understanding the subtle nuances of management development practices
as they apply in different cultures is becoming a prerequisite to successful cross-
national project working, collaboration and partnering, as well as representing an
opportunity for cultural learning and career self-management (Tayeb, 1996).
In summary, many stakeholders in and around organisations have a vested
interest in management development. As an activity it sits at the intersection
point between the (inter)national concern to create social capital, the organisational
need to build capability while improving their social responsibility, the aspiration

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Module 1/ What Is Management and Leadership Development and Why Is it Important?

of training agencies to provide a quality service, and individuals seeking self-

improvement. The situation in New Zealand, as summarised by Damian Ruth (see
Box 1.3) is not untypical of other countries.

♦ Box 1.3
The study ‘World Famous in New Zealand’ indicates that agility is central to successful
New Zealand companies. In particular, there is the capacity to learn rather than the
possession of any specific skill on the one hand and long-term staffing on the other,
with selection based on personal competencies such as problem-solving, interpersonal
skills and commitment to organisational values. Another report reveals that New Zea-
land middle managers are looking for leaders with confidence and conviction, who
can demonstrate and impart strong positive emotions for work, stimulate people to
exceptional efforts, and inspire enthusiasm and generate commitment. New Zealand
Leadership surveys reveal that top managers thought that only 51% of their imme-
diate subordinates had the capability to move into senior positions and be effective
leaders, and 42% of middle and senior managers did not consider the development of
subordinate leaders to be the organisation’s responsibility.
♦

It seems many countries face this conundrum. There is a shared conviction that
developing managers is the key to future prosperity; there is a vivid portrayal of
what effective management and exemplary leadership look like; and yet there is
widespread disappointment about progress towards reaching the agreed goal.

1.2 Outline of the Course

Latham and Seijts (1998: 269) conclude their review of management develop-
ment with a call for organisational psychologists ’to move from exhortations of
the effectiveness of management development to determining if, how, and under
what conditions, management development truly develops managers in enduring
ways’. We acknowledge this to be a worthwhile goal, and one that we address
in Modules 2 and 3, but the danger is that it neglects issues of politics, power,
control and interest groups with divergent needs and agendas within and outside
organisations. The difficulty with this functionalist stance is that stated managerial
objectives are taken as read, and the criterion for evaluating management devel-
opment is restricted largely to the extent to which such objectives have been met.
In such circumstances practitioners remain largely committed to a given approach,
with any perceived ‘failure’ being put down to a need for refinement, as opposed
to any fundamental questioning of the way the management development inter-
vention was conceived, publicised, implemented, interpreted and so on. Such an
approach has been criticised for failing to deal adequately with causality and for
taking a unitarist perspective, where organisational members are assumed to share
a single set of motives and interests.
It could be argued that the field of management development would benefit
from multiple theoretical perspectives: ’a most pressing need is to determine the
domain of strategic organisational training decisions and the processes that lead to
these decisions’, and to achieve this ‘researchers [should] expand their lenses for

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conducting research on strategic issues’ (Martocchio and Baldwin, 1997: 24, 35).
We agree that the study of management development could benefit from this kind
of approach, and Modules 4 to 7 of this course are devoted to this task of reframing.
Others take a more critical view, however. Management development is cast as
a largely one-sided attempt by senior management to impose control or advance
ideological power interests rather than a means to ‘develop’ employees in any
kind of holistic or benevolent sense (Ackers and Preston, 1997). Other critiques
regard management development as a bureaucratic and potentially harmful irrel-
evance, where standardised portrayals of management bear little resemblance to
the diverse worlds of ‘real’ managers. In contrast to these broadly negative cri-
tiques, other authors have suggested that deeper insight might be gained by trying
to look beyond questions of good or evil (Townley, 1998), success or failure (du
Gay et al., 1996), and by searching for more multifaceted ways in which manage-
ment development might simultaneously work for and against the interests of any
particular agent. It is in this spirit of critical exploration that Module 7 is written,
before offering some theoretical and practical conclusions in the final module.
Broadly speaking, the first modules of the course introduce the subject by draw-
ing upon empirical data from a variety of sources and country contexts. We then
encourage you to step back and review the (largely implicit) theoretical perspectives
that motivate and shape the study of management development. This is intended
to inspire and guide avenues of research that you may wish to pursue, perhaps as
a course assignment or an extended project/dissertation. The final modules offer
some tools and approaches to assist this more in-depth task of reflexive analysis.
Before we get started we need to define terms. The title of this course refers to
the development of leaders and managers. This distinction deserves explanation,
and we deal with this issue first. Next, given the burgeoning fields of learning,
education and training, we need to be clear how we are using the concept of
management development. The term ‘manager’ also requires some scrutiny, as
this too means different things to different audiences. Assisted by these reference
points we can begin to examine management development more precisely, and the
third section in this module outlines five principles that we believe should guide
such analysis.

1.3 Management and Leadership: a Dubious Dichotomy?

Where does the exercising of management stop and the art of leadership begin? For
every article or book on management development there are probably 20 devoted
to identifying and developing leaders. The idea of separating the qualities of
leaders and managers can be traced back to an influential paper by Zaleznick (1997)
in which he depicts ’the manager as a rational, bureaucratic, dutiful, practical
and unimaginative dullard but the leader as a visionary, restless, experimental,
even twice-born dynamo’ (quoted in Raelin, 2004: 132). Kotter (1990) is one of
many writers who have reinforced this distinction, extolling good management as
necessary to bring order, consistency and quality to otherwise chaotic organisations,
and contrasting this with leadership, which is about preparing the enterprise for

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change and helping employees to cope as they struggle through it. Such ideas
were still felt to have currency a decade later, when the same paper was reprinted
in the Harvard Business Review in 2001, but the basis of this dichotomy has to be
questioned on several grounds.

1.3.1 Delayering of Organisations

First, these characterisations were predicated upon large, hierarchically structured
and bureaucratised organisations, where managers had responsibility for well-
defined roles such as planning, budgeting, controlling, staffing and problem-
solving. Far fewer organisations fit this description of predictability now. The
decreasing numbers employed in workplaces, and the decline in the number
covered by systems of consultation and negotiation, have shifted the manager’s
power base from positional to personal. The increasing fragmentation of the work-
force, with differing patterns of working, contractual forms, outsourcing and home-
working, calls for a more flexible management style, as does the need to manage
their own and others’ work–life balance. All of this is happening in an HRM con-
text that is increasingly moving towards individualised employment contracts. The
capacity to scan boundaries, to establish strategic direction and to inspire others
to follow is no longer the exclusive preserve of those at the top of organisations.
Most staff with responsibility in organisations, whether they be entrepreneurs in a
small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), project managers in a matrix structure,
supervisors with remote working staff, or members of a virtual, international team,
will be called upon to lead – and follow – at different times in their working week,
irrespective of their job title.

1.3.2 Eclipsing of Leadership Theories

Second, studies of leadership have moved on. Trait theory pointed to a set of
intrinsic qualities possessed by some individuals and not others. Although largely
discredited for failing to account for social, historical or situational variables, the
idea was that leaders are born, not made, imbued with some kind of indefinable X-
factor. Contingency theories and leader–member exchange theory finesse this idea
by elevating the importance of considering the relationship between leaders and
their environment and/or their followers. However, these theories remain fairly
prescriptive and individualistic in their focus. More recent leadership development
approaches have emphasised the relational element of leadership residing in the
networks, commitments, trust and mutual exchange between members of a com-
munity, which collectively create social capital (e.g. Day, 2001). Here leadership is
emergent rather than prescribed, self-evident rather than appointed. As Paauwe
and Williams (2001: 94) point out: ’Management in the sense of controlling what
people do is hardly useful when dealing with knowledge workers. They have to
be rather supported and defended. They cannot really be managed. They can only
be led.’ So, again, the distinction between leader and manager becomes immater-
ial, where everyone is potentially a leader (or indeed a manager) and leadership
is seen as an effect not a cause. Although this concept of dispersed leadership

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is appealing, it can underestimate the power dynamic in organisations: those in

privileged positions as a result of historical antecedents will rarely relinquish their
differential status, and even if they do, followers may react by swiftly replacing
them with traditionally oriented alternative leaders: such is the natural superiority
of the leader in the collective psyche! (Ray et al., 2004).

1.3.3 Culture-Bound Concepts of Leadership

A third reason for caution is that much of the theorising about leadership has taken
place either in a Western context or from a masculine perspective (Vinnicombe
and Singh, 2002) – or indeed both (Van der Boon, 2003). An in-depth analysis of
leadership across 62 different countries called Project Globe is seeking to under-
stand whether and how leadership varies across different cultures (House et al.,
2002). Certain attributes associated with charismatic leadership, for example, may
be important for successful leaders worldwide, but the expression and meanings
of such attributes may depend on cultural context. So, although concepts such
as transactional and transformational leadership may be universally valid, specific
behaviours representing these styles may vary profoundly. Indonesian inspira-
tional leaders need to persuade their followers about the leaders’ own competence,
a behaviour that would appear unseemly in Japan. Vietnam, like its Chinese neigh-
bour, is a society based on Confucian values. The central Confucian principles are
harmony, hierarchy, collectivism and personal relations. Thus developing long-
term relationships is seen as critical for management success in Vietnam. Hierarchy
means the complete acceptance of the authority of leaders by subordinates in order
to maintain harmony.

1.3.4 Convenience
A fourth reason to be suspicious of the leader–manager split is the convenient
way it elevates the self-importance of corporate leaders. Popular management
theory – and again this originates primarily in the West, but is readily available
at the bookshops of international airports – is redolent with values that appeal
fundamentally to managers aspiring to be leaders. Clark and Salaman (1997)
argue that there is a very good reason for the enormous success and impact of
this literature. This is the fact that it appeals to managers not simply because it
displays qualities that managers themselves value and use, but because it enhances
their confidence in performing their role as corporate leaders through their mythic
storytelling. Whether it be self-help business handbooks, case accounts of success-
ful turn-arounds, or cult biographies of successful CEOs, such literature ‘defines’
the qualities necessary for effective leadership in the contemporary organisation.
The cumulative effect is to characterise and ultimately legitimise the ‘otherness’
of leaders. Part of the corporate attraction of these texts is that ’the questions
formulated and answered, the perspective taken, the sectional interests supported
etc. are grounded in a world view, a set of beliefs and values, which indicate that
the top managers of corporations and other organisations are a highly important
group’ (Alvesson, 1990: 27). The danger, of course, is that such leaders come to

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be seen, and come to see themselves, as above criticism, immune to dissent. The
mystique becomes a defensive device. But leadership is not an inherently moral
concept. Some leaders are trustworthy, courageous, generous. Many are not. And
even good leaders are not necessarily good people, as reports of corporate scandals
and exploitation of privilege constantly remind us.

♦ Box 1.4
This argument is echoed by Hansen (1996). He suggests that managers’ accounts of
their organisational experiences are an important element of popular management
literature sometimes referred to as the ’hero management school’, such as those books
written by Lee Iacocca, Donald Trump and Thomas J Watson Jr, which highlight the
prerequisite attributes for success as a senior manager. In their books these individuals
emphasise three key senior management qualities: leadership; decisiveness; and an
intuitive feeling for the market. Hansen argues that these particular characteristics
are seen as critical because they create ‘an image of strong-willed people at the top,
making decisions in a way that only they could’ (1996: 44). The implication is that you
cannot learn these crucial management skills at a business school, because ‘the abilities
you need to be a truly great business leader are ones you either have or you don’t. And
the few chosen ones, the select, have had them from birth’ (p. 44).
♦

Presumably, as a business school student, you would part company with those who
insist that leadership acumen is innate. If you were pressed on the matter, what
percentages would you give to these statements?

• Leadership ability is down to genes. (%)

• Leadership ability can be developed. (%)
It is fairly common to hear people say that true leaders are ‘born not made’.
However, you may be surprised to learn that, across Europe, the prevailing view
among HRD managers is that innate factors (inherent ability and personality) are
more important factors for effective management than training and development
(Mabey and Ramirez, 2004).

To conclude, in the context of management development, what are the implic-

ations of saying that managers are one thing and leaders another? It is true that
managers are often bureaucratically appointed, and thus have a mandate to get
things done in their part of the organisation. It is equally evident that, in some cul-
tures, inviolable respect is invested in leaders. But, as Raelin reminds us, managers
don’t have to be ’hired hands’ . . . who are condemned to a life of unimagin-
atively carrying out corporate goals or endorsing the status quo. Managers
[or indeed, we might add, non-managers] are hardly excluded from leadership.
They need to work with their peers, bosses, subordinates, and others, and in
this constant interaction there is opportunity for leadership to emerge from
anyone. What might be most impressive about the manager is not taking the
reins but supporting others to take them as the situation warrants . . . Might our
leadership development efforts be better directed toward the role of leadership
as a mutual social phenomenon rather than as a position of authority?’ (Raelin,
2004: 132).

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In this course we choose to use the term ‘management development’, but for the
reasons given and unless otherwise stated we take this to include the development
of leaders in an organisational context also.

Case 1.1: Developing Global Leaders at HSBC

Here is a personal account from the Group CEO, reflecting on the success of Hong
Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. It forms part of an article entitled ‘In
search of global leaders’ published in Harvard Business Review in 2003.
Source: From PERSPECTIVES • In Search of Global Leaders, HBR 2003: 40

Stephen Green (Group CEO, HSBC)

When I joined HSBC in 1982, it was essentially an Asian company, although
it did own 51% of Marine Midland Bank in New York. We had around 30 000
employees at that time, mostly English and Cantonese speakers. Today’s HSBC is
a very different organization, employing some 215 000 people across the globe. Of
the United Nations’ six official languages, our employees are very well represented
in all but one.
We expanded mostly by means of acquisition, starting with the Midland Bank in
the UK – a deal that doubled the size of HSBC, gave us a European presence, and
broadened our range of services. Later, we also bought CCF in France. Outside
Europe, our acquisitions included Bamerindus in Brazil, Grupo Financiero Bital in
Mexico, and, this year, Household Finance in the United States. Today, our assets
are evenly distributed between Europe, Asia, and the Americas. We are unusual
among the world’s largest banks in that significantly less than half our profits come
from any one jurisdiction. Even the largest banks typically have three-quarters or
more of their profits coming from one home base. In 2002, no single jurisdiction
accounted for more than 40% of our profits.
Despite the enormous changes in its demographics and business, HSBC has
retained a remarkably consistent corporate identity. That’s largely because of the
way we develop our senior management team. No one gets to the top at HSBC
without having worked in more than one market. If you look at the executives
currently running the company’s largest businesses, all of them have worked in
more than one, and nearly all in more than two, major country markets. We
strongly believe, as many others do, that travel broadens the mind. And if travel
alone does that, just think how much more you get from living and working in
different countries.
Most of our recruits are recent university graduates. We tend not to go out
of our way to look for MBAs or people in their thirties. In fact, I think it’s a
mistake for companies to have too much of their top talent join their organizations
in mid-career. (Though I should admit that I was a mid-career recruit myself!)
Our recruitment process is sophisticated, involving a complex process of tests,
interviews, and exercises. We don’t look so much at what or where people have
studied but rather at their drive, initiative, cultural sensitivity, and readiness to see
the world as their oyster. Whether they’ve studied classics, economics, history, or

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languages is irrelevant. What matter are the skills and qualities necessary to be
good, well-rounded executives in a highly international institution operating in a
diverse set of communities.
In fact, HSBC has long been famous for its cadre of global executives, formerly
known as international officers. We now call them international managers, which
sounds less militaristic. They are hired with the expectation that they will spend
their entire careers with the institution and also be very mobile. But we don’t limit
our international development to these managers. HSBC will give any promising
executive who expresses an interest in gaining international exposure the oppor-
tunity to work overseas. Take the chief operating officer of our UK business. He’s a
Welshman in his early fifties. Until about five years ago, he had never worked out-
side the United Kingdom – for his entire career, he had been a UK-based executive
at the former Midland Bank. One day, he put his hand up and said, ’I’m willing
to go overseas,‘ and so we made him country manager for India. He spent three
years there and took to it like a duck to water, later becoming country manager
for Malaysia, one of our biggest Southeast Asian businesses, before taking up his
current job.
Twenty years ago, most of our top recruits came from British schools and uni-
versities, and today’s top team reflects that bias. But we now have many able
non-British managers in our ranks due to recent acquisitions. Today, we recruit at
68 universities worldwide, this year hiring people from 38 different countries, so
that our team of the future will be much more representative of our geographic
spread of businesses.
Because of our recruitment and development practices, many of our people have
worked in multiple countries – some emerging, some developed – and in different
sorts of businesses, from retail and wholesale to banking and insurance. These
global employees act as a kind of organizational glue for the company.
The fact that they have all had those experiences also means that many of them
have a great deal in common. A British manager with international experience
will tend to identify more with a Japanese manager with international experience
than he will with another manager who has worked in only her home country. But
that doesn’t mean that we’re trying to develop identikit managers. Far from it. If,
for example, my French colleagues lost their Frenchness or my Brazilian colleagues
lost their Brazilian-ness, life would be a lot duller, and HSBC would be a lot less
profitable. We prize our diversity. That’s all part of the richness and fun of working
together, and it’s what makes us so creative and responsive to our clients’ needs.

1 Strangely, given that he is describing leadership in his organisation, Green does

not employ the term ‘leader’. Reading between the lines, therefore, what do we
glean about the distinction between management and leadership?

2 What, in Green’s view, are the key ingredients of a successful manager/leader

in HSBC?

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3 He talks about the ‘remarkably consistent corporate identity’ of HSBC, yet also
refers to ‘prizing diversity’. This appears contradictory. Is it possible to achieve
both at the same time? How?

1.4 What Do We Mean by Management Development?

It is generally agreed that management development refers to the process by which
individuals improve their capabilities and learn to perform effectively in managerial
roles. But the enduring simplicity of this definition is deceptive. Each element
attracts controversy. For instance, what exactly is included in the term development,
and how is this to be distinguished from management training, education and
learning? Why should we focus exclusively on managers and managerial roles?
What is meant by effective performance, and how is this to be interpreted and
measured?

1.4.1 What Is Distinctive About Management Development?

In a study of four European countries, nearly 500 managers were asked the question:
‘What was your most developmental experience last year?’ These are some of their
responses:
Being given the responsibility to implement redundancies; setting up a new
business unit; having to grapple with an ambiguous management strategy;
coping with the loss of an excellent colleague; opening an office in a new
country; involvement in an industry think-tank; managing a multiracial work
group (Tamkin et al., 2006).

Do these examples constitute training, education, development, or all three?

Before reading on, write down a brief definition for each of the following: train-
ing, education and development.

Management Development and Management Training

Training and development tend to go hand in hand in organisational terminology,
and are difficult to disentangle at a practical level. However, distinct theoretical per-
spectives have developed. Training usually refers to job-specific skills improvement
in a current job role, and is associated with the traditional, stable and long-term
psychological contract. Here the onus rests with the employer to train their work-
force, addressing skills gaps and resulting in linear career growth for the employee.
Training is a widely researched area within occupational and organisational psy-
chology, because the instruction and acquisition of job-specific skills are seen as
crucial to both organisational and individual effectiveness. To illustrate this, some
studies have focused on the impact of training at the individual level, showing
that training results in enhanced learning, increased motivation, and positive work
attitudes. Other studies have pointed to the important role of a supportive environ-
ment to facilitate the effective transfer of learning. Because training is job-specific,

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it generally relies on a predictivist perspective that views jobs as relatively stable

entities to which certain skills need to be matched. By contrast, the wider-ranging
objectives of development invoke a more mutual perspective, reflecting a new psy-
chological contract. Here the organisation is seeking to cultivate leadership talent,
and the manager is taking increasing responsibility for engaging in lifelong learn-
ing and possibly developing multiple careers. This has resulted in a growing body
of research on employee and management development, which has sprung from a
range of theoretical orientations, such as organisational and individual competence,
self-awareness, feedback effects and the validity/impact of specific development
approaches. For all this, we still know little about the effects on individuals and
organisations of a diverse range of development activities, such as development
centres, developmental appraisals, multi-source feedback, coaching and mentor-
ing. Clearly, the fields of management training and management development,
although different in emphasis, overlap considerably.

Management Development and Management Education

Another sister discipline to management development is that of management edu-
cation. There are two contrasting approaches to the development of managers
that have emerged since the 1960s (Fox, 1997). The first is management education,
which is provided largely by university and management schools and is subject to
the critical rigours of the wider academic and research community. The second is
management development driven more by market mechanisms. This is a subset of
human resource development (HRD) and provided largely by the private sector in
the form of in-house training and development and/or assisted by freelance con-
sultants and training agencies. Of the two, management education tends to be more
theoretical, emphasising a body of knowledge in the academic disciplines relevant
to management, and is delivered predominantly by traditional classroom methods.
Individuals usually exercise a good deal of discretion over which courses to pur-
sue. By contrast, management development tends to be more practitioner focused,
aimed at developing personal knowledge and a repertoire of skills. Although this
may involve classroom tuition, the range of methods for developing managers is
far more diverse, usually and typically initiated by the employer.

There has been a blurring of boundaries between management education and

management development, certainly in the US and Western Europe, over the past
10–15 years. Can you think of any factors that may have prompted this?

There has been a growing acceptance, from the 1980s onwards, of business and
management studies as a mainstream subject within the university curriculum.
The same period has also witnessed the growth in the post-graduate and post-
experience market for Masters-level courses that has required management schools
to move closer to corporate expectations in terms of style and syllabus. These two
factors have increased the number of academically qualified managers, who in turn
expect management development practitioners to be appropriately qualified. Fox

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(1997) also refers to the demand for new Masters degrees from independent con-
sultants (especially in areas such as training and development, management devel-
opment, HRD and change management) wishing to maintain their client credibility
and professionalism in an ever more competitive market place. Conversely, more
university faculties are offering bespoke consultancy, executive programmes and
virtual learning partnerships with private and public sector organisations. Corpor-
ate universities, with their concern for high-quality tuition, tailored learning and
corporate consonance, perhaps epitomise this convergence between management
education and development.

Management Development and Management Learning

A third discipline of relevance to management development is management learn-
ing. This has been characterised as a new disciplinary area of knowledge and
practice, which is both a subject area and a research community (Fox, 1997). It
encompasses management education, training and HRD, as well as informal man-
aging and learning processes. This perspective is helpful in recognising that ‘formal
education and development activities are merely the tip of a learning iceberg’ (1997:
25). It shifts the focus away from a set of practices to be learnt – what Lave and
Wenger (1991) term ‘intentional instruction’ – to understanding the processes by
which managers (and indeed people generally) learn. Management learning also
emphasises the role of the group in learning. This is something that an individu-
alised approach to management education and development often overlooks. By
removing individuals from the fabric of their everyday working–learning contexts,
off-the-job training maroons them away from the very communities of practice
that provide such a rich source of experimentation, reflection and learning in the
workplace. Viewing management development through the prism of management
learning also alerts us to wider institutional, cultural and political cross-currents
that influence the definition and formation of management capabilities in a given
regional context or knowledge domain.
So although the primary focus of this course is upon the training and devel-
opment of managers as a corporate activity, understanding the way management
development is undertaken and evaluated at an organisational level will neces-
sarily invoke research from other arenas of management learning. For example,
local training delivery cannot be divorced from wider institutional factors such as
national policies of skill formation and government intervention (policy-education
level); and the design of firm-level management development will be influenced
by industry- or sector-specific qualifications structures (policy-corporate level) and
informed by the fruits of research in the fields of training methods, transfer of
learning, training and the like (operations-education level).
Easterby-Smith and Thorpe (1997: 50) conclude that the overall coverage of
research in the various dimensions of management learning is ’variable’ and ’thin’.
Sponsors, whether they be governments or corporations, have tended to dictate the
questions being asked and dominate the methods being used, leading to outputs
that bolster establishment thinking. The possible exception is management learn-
ing research at the operations-education level: here the focus on the effectiveness

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of various teaching/learning processes has ushered in more critical and discursive

approaches and methodologies. These bring into question the functionalist treat-
ment of management development as an activity that exists exclusively, or even
primarily, to build the knowledge, skills and abilities of managers with a view
to ultimately enhancing ‘performance’ at the organisational and macroeconomic
levels of analysis (see below).
For the purposes of this course then, we use management development to refer
to the way it is structured, its mode of delivery and its underlying morality.
By structure we refer to the means by which organisations devise strategies
and establish internal systems for developing managers, including such activit-
ies as career planning and arrangements for diagnosis and review of development.
Depending on the country concerned, this will be influenced – possibly constrained
– by sectoral, professional and governmental policies.
The delivery dimension concerns the actual methods used for developing man-
agers – whether formal or informal, whether on the job or off the job, whether
internally or externally delivered. Whereas development of managers is the focus,
we take this to largely incorporate management training, to overlap considerably
with management education, and to be located within the wider domains of man-
agement learning (see Figure 1.1). This figure also reminds us that management
development is often a key element of wider organisational learning (Starkey, 1996)
and organisation development (OD) interventions (Oswick and Grant, 1996).

Organisational
learning
Management learning

Management
Management development
education

Training
Organisation
Development (OD)

Figure 1.1 The domain of management development

The moral dimension is far more implicit. It refers to the capacity for management
development to simultaneously promote diversity and discrimination, empower-
ment and exploitation, socialisation and marginalisation.
Although we locate management development in this way, we are not discount-
ing a good deal of management learning that takes place incidentally, experientially

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and/or beyond the boundaries of formal and informal development arranged by

the organisation. Nor do we imply that training and development activities auto-
matically result in an organisationally, or even personally, productive learning
experience. Indeed, these are crucial issues that thread their way through the
course.

1.4.2 Why Focus on Managers?

In one way the task of management might be regarded as a trivial and inglorious
occupation, hardly meriting sustained analysis. The profession of management has
a serious identity crisis. Other professions have established national if not interna-
tional credentials, sophisticated routes for continuous professional development,
powerful lobbies for policy-making, and assessment processes for monitoring qual-
ity, standards and accreditation in their respective fields. ‘Management’ struggles
on all these fronts. In the UK, for instance, the last 20 years have seen a succes-
sion of ambitious attempts to establish a coherent and credible national approach
to improving management and leadership capability. None appears to have had
an enduring impact. There is a similar though not identical story in the rest of
Europe. EU environments are increasingly influenced by a series of general direct-
ives on academic and professional recognition; to date, management education and
development has remained largely outside this regulatory framework. Especially
pressing is the perceived need to create future accreditation mechanisms for man-
agement practice for present and future member states, in a manner that supports
cultural diversity, subsidiarity and market transparency.
Yet, despite this identity crisis, it could be argued that managers are a pivotal
part of the workforce.

Reflect on your own role or that of others in your organisation. What is it about
what you/they do that is distinctively managerial? To put it another way, what do
managers do that other employees do not do?

My belief is that as formulators of strategy, as decision-makers, as role mod-

els, as facilitators of innovation, as motivators of staff, managers represent a key
constituency, and their sustained development constitutes an activity of supreme
importance. It could be argued that the label ‘manager’ is not that important.
However, you will remember that, in the HSBC case, Green refers to international
officers becoming international managers, which suggests that labelling can signify
important shifts in thinking. Let’s consider four aspects of management in a little
more detail.

Managers as Brokers of Knowledge

It is now widely argued that the one unique source of sustained competitive advant-
age available to a given enterprise is the so-called ‘intellectual capital’ it possesses.
Broadly speaking, this refers to the way an enterprise acquires, creates and utilises
specialist knowledge and expertise. There are two features of these assets. First,

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they are much less tangible than they used to be, and more deeply embedded in
the way an enterprise organises itself. Second, they are highly dependent on the
particular ways of working, or ‘routines’, of a given organisation, whether this be
the preferred style, language, courseware, software and so on. The challenge for
managers is to make such tacit knowledge meaningful. This can be done – astute
management development can help – perhaps by exploring the necessary skills to
systematise and facilitate knowledge-sharing behaviours by creating conditions of
trust, and by building communities of practice where diversity is celebrated, not
ignored, and where non-conformity is valued, not penalised.

Managers as Linchpins of Learning

If management can be learned, can learning be managed? How can control over the
learning process be relaxed while at the same time channelling the benefits from
it? Jones and Hendry (1992) quote Illich in this regard: ’Learning is the human
activity which least needs manipulating by others. Most learning is not the result
of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful
setting’ (Illich, 1971: 39). So a second pivotal role for managers is to help construct
a meaningful learning environment around them. According to Argyris (1987),
most managers are actually skilfully incompetent at achieving this sort of deeper
learning. By this he means that managers may be more expert at using a series of
cognitive processes than they are at recognising and thinking about the processes
themselves, usually because the latter activity is potentially too threatening to
existing relationships and mindsets. This explains why senior executives, who
are perfectly aware of the importance of learning – innovation, risk-taking, critical
analysis, knowledge exchange – frequently do not display these qualities in their
behaviour or support them in others. Their thinking may be characterised by
skilfully deployed defensive routines that are actually anti-learning.
Not all organisations are guilty of this. Some international firms use their mul-
ticultural environment as a growth opportunity. For instance, they plan strategic
secondments to promote learning, especially between different areas of technology
and between functions such as R&D and marketing, to help their staff understand
the organisation from a multiplicity of perspectives. Or they encourage conflict and
disagreement in a team setting, because this can push managers to question exist-
ing premises and cultural blind spots, and make sense of their experience in a new
way.

Managers as Makers of Meaning

The character and morality of the employee have always been central concerns
of managers as they seek to govern and structure organisational life. One of the
hallmarks of a strategic approach to HRM in the 1990s was the bold attempt to ‘win
hearts and minds’ by setting up culture change projects. The boldness came from
their explicit and vigorous attempt to reconstitute work activities and employment
generally – in effect, to redefine what work and organisational membership mean.
The labels of these programmes differ, and will continue to do so as fashions change:

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total quality management, business process re-engineering, supply chain manage-

ment, six sigma leadership have followed in quick succession. But invariably their
underlying philosophy is simultaneously hard – increased flexibility and continuous
improvement – and soft – to induce entrepreneurial and customer-focused attitudes
in staff (Keenoy, 1997).
This, of course, places invidious demands upon middle managers. They may
be uneasy about the role cast for them as managers of (new) meaning, but find
themselves unable to resist or contradict the rhetoric they find themselves part
of. Again, management development is central here, because of the way senior
teams look to such training programmes as the means to usher in, exemplify and
legitimise a new cultural order (Kamoche, 2000).

Managers as Arbiters of Efficiency?

However, while, the approaches described above are directly concerned with the
pursuit of management objectives and controlling the workforce, they typically
present themselves as products of neutral, academic/scientific research and ana-
lysis. They claim to represent objective scientific analyses of the way the world is –
or organisations are – but in fact they represent the way managers see the world,
and the interests they pursue. In other words, they deny their nature and origins.
The questions formulated and answered, the perspective taken, the sectional
interests supported etc. are grounded in a world view, a set of beliefs and values,
which indicate that the top managers of corporations and other organisations
are a highly important group, whose actions are normally supposed to support
the social good . . . managerial actions . . . are worthy of support and it is the duty
of management writers to provide it (Alvesson, 1991: 217).
And all of this in an environment that is loaded to favour masculine values
(Kerfoot and Knights, 1998).

Thus, under the banner of management development, ‘tools’ such as ability tests,
assessment centres, performance–based reviews and competency-based develop-
ment programmes may be enlisted. Despite the claims of organisational initiat-
ives to be about improving efficiency or exploring ‘the way we do things around
here’, such analyses in fact studiously ignore certain key elements of organisational
structure and process – the nature and role of power, of conflicts, of exploitation,
of difference (Townley, 1994; Bartrum, 2005). Some of the basic assumptions and
taken-for-granted ‘realities’ of organisational life are left unquestioned and unana-
lysed.
Once again this positions managers simultaneously as participants in and con-
sumers of a dominant discourse. By discourse I mean a way of speaking, writing or
thinking that incorporates particular things as given – as unchallengeable truths.
An example is an attempt by the government in the UK to increase accountability,
deliver achievement and quality in further education in a measurable way, using a
schools inspection scheme called Ofsted (see Box 1.5).

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♦ Box 1.5
Changes in recruitment and training of teachers, in common with other public sec-
tor workers, can be seen as part of a drive to increase efficiency. This is essentially a
process new to further education in the UK. Groundwater-Smith and Sachs (2002) see
this as part of a national drive for an ‘audit culture’: an attempt to make practices
and processes more transparent, leaving little room for negotiation and professional
judgements. Such a culture supports a very hierarchical and top-down form of human
resource management. This can be contrasted with the more traditional view of ‘act-
ivist professionals’, who draw their inspiration and motivation from holding the best
interests of their clientele at heart, recognising that needs vary, are contextualised, and
require careful thought and decision-making.
Much of the centralist and managerialist drive in quality can be seen as an ambi-
guity over ‘trust’ in employees and definitions of professional practice. The highly
prescribed nature of standards indicates a lack of trust in professional judgement and
choice. Under the new public service management, auditing has become a way to
ensure routinised, institutionalised practice rather than rational choice. It requires the
construction of specific performance measures and ‘political technologies’ that bring
persons and objectives into alignment. ’In short, the audit society requires a kind of
meta-performativity, where standards are met for their own sake, whether they are
appropriate and ethical or not’ (Groundwater-Smith and Sachs, 2002: 347).
♦

The discourse discussed here is obviously one of ‘raising standards’. However,

it is also about the wish to monitor and control performance, to shape pedagogy,
practice, and what it is to be a teacher in this sector. An initiative that at first
glance appears to benefit the individual teacher by providing further development
opportunities could actually be construed as centralist interest in regulation and
surveillance (Avis, 2003).

1.4.3 What Is ‘Effective Performance’?

The last part of our working definition is that management development will enable
individuals to ‘perform effectively’ in their managerial roles. When presented with
a management development activity most of us would have a clear picture of
successful outcomes.

Consider a development activity you have been involved in or have observed

recently. What were the expected outcomes? What, for you, were the real bene-
fits, if any? Who were the real ‘winners’, and were there any ‘losers’?

The discussion so far has emphasised the fact that it is easy to presume our
personal success criteria will be shared by others. In particular, because of their
dominant position in organisations – structurally, ideologically and according to
gender – top teams have a way of galvanising opinion about the value of a given
development intervention around their own interests, and drowning out contrary
views. But there are a variety of stakeholders: participants, their subordinates,
peers and line managers (all of whom will be members of either majority or minor-
ity groupings), HR professionals, senior managers, business planners, external

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consultants and government funding agencies. Each has a different interest in,
influence over and ownership of training and development interventions. Indeed,
given the actors involved, the reputations at stake, the budget invested and the
proximity of most management development activity to the power nexus of the
organisation, it is no wonder that it remains one of the most contested of human
resource interventions.
Burgoyne and Jackson (1997) discuss the example of a competency-based leader-
ship programme, and note how hierarchically defined stakeholders might support
or block the programme for contrasting and congruent reasons. This reminds us
that, depending on the particular management development activity, a varying
constellation of constituencies will coalesce around a particular issue or group of
issues, each with different objectives in mind. ’Different factions can support the
same action for entirely different reasons. Support for a particular initiative can be
garnered from a plurality of purposes and, therefore, does not have to conform to
the same unitarist definition of its purpose’ (Burgoyne and Jackson, 1997:63)
Certainly this begins to explain how the very same management development
intervention can come to be evaluated quite differently by a range of stakeholders.
What it possibly overestimates is the freedom with which these differing views
can be expressed and achieve currency. As discussed in the previous section, the
degree to which such constituencies are free to act, intervene and shape outcomes
will be subject to the prevailing discourse.

1.5 Who Are Managers?

So far we have been talking about managers in the context of development as
though they represent a commonly understood, circumscribed and homogeneous
group of employees. This is clearly not the case.

1.5.1 Historical Conceptions of What It Means to Manage

In the same way that the definition of management development is not self-evident,
neither is the notion of management itself. The roots of the concept are revealing.
The French verb ménager connotes the comparatively humble role of housekeeping,
the Italian term menaggiare refers to the idea of handling or training horses, and the
original Latin word manus means a ‘hand‘. The term ‘manager’ was later extended
to war, and to a general sense of taking control, taking charge and directing. The
semantic root is instructive, because it conveys ’the social divisiveness of manage-
ment as a contradictory process – a process in which a person simultaneously takes
responsibility for and seeks to control a valuable, yet wilful and potentially resist-
ant resource‘ (Willmott, 1997: 163). This social division of labour, Willmott argues,
is neither universal nor inevitable, but owes its existence to historical and polit-
ical processes through which managerial work comes to be defined and ascribed
to a privileged social group. Grey (1999) also alludes to the distinction between
management as an activity and management as a (privileged) category of person.
Several writers, keen to become liberated from such modes of colonialist discourse

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and speech –whether this occurred in the distant past or continues in the present –
have critiqued the Western/non-Western divide in management thinking (see Box
1.6).

♦ Box 1.6
Colonial theories cast management as a distinctly Western concept. A clear exponent,
according to Frenkel and Shenhav (2006: 867), is Drucker, who in his early work argues
that management ’is not only a salient product of Western thought, it is also one of the
factors that distinguishes the West from other civilisations, and accounts for the West’s
economic and social superiority.’ Like many other ‘one best way’ theorists, Drucker sees
‘other’ cultures as exotic and inferior, identifying universalism with Westernisation.
Post-colonial theories point out the ethnocentric bias of management practices. Because
such ideas were and are shaped in a colonial context, ‘they define the West directly or
indirectly as modern, rational, and homogeneous, whereas the ‘other’ (the ‘East’, the
‘Third World’, the ‘native’, and the ‘ethnic’) is perceived as less progressive and rational
[ . . . .] Much like the ‘classic’ colonial project, the neo-colonial project of Americanisa-
tion meant the introduction of a colonial productivity discourse and its practices in an
attempt to bolster and legitimize a cultural and economic hegemony around the globe‘
(Frenkel and Shenhav, 2003: 1540, 2).
Hybrid theories emanate from a particular stream of post-colonial research that has
sought to demonstrate that the binary distinction between Western and non-Western
(whether Orientalism or any other) is not sustainable. Rather, it is argued, management
discourse should be seen as a hybrid product of the colonial encounter. ‘A non-binary
epistemology suggests collapsing the boundary between West and non-West and allow-
ing a hybridity to filter in, without denying the asymmetrical power relations between
them. From a non-binary perspective we need to show, therefore, how Western and
non-Western experiences (and representations) are inseparable; and how binary per-
spectives may purify the colonial practice and mask its hybrid history. We submit that
the binary distinction between the West and the Orient employed by organisation and
management theorists often masks the hybridity of their origins‘ (Frenkel and Shenhav
(2006: 860).
♦

What are the implications of this critique for management development? First,
it encourages us to explore historical, cultural conceptualisations of who managers
are, what they do and how, therefore, they can best be developed. This we consider
in a moment.
Second, it alerts us to the way management development activities, perhaps
more potently than most other HR practices, can serve to legitimise established
priorities and values in the enterprise concerned. Deetz (1985) refers to legitimation
as the process by which decisions and actions that distort communication are
rationalised by invoking ’higher-order explanatory devices’ (1985: 127). So, for
example, the need for the leadership programme described above might be justified
in relation to a set of core competencies for aspiring managers to become more
results-oriented and customer-aware. Quite apart from the potential contradiction
in behaviour and psychological stress these goals may induce for the individual
manager, the point about legitimation is that the competency framework becomes
an explanatory device, and remains beyond examination or question. In a similar

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vein, Frost (1987) describes socialisation as a mechanism of learning and orientation

that directs and shapes desired attitudes, behaviours and interpretative schemes of
some players to the benefit of others. Most of us can identify with this dimension of
management development, encountered most vividly when we are newcomers to
an organisation: whether explicitly in the guise of training programmes, or more
subtly in the form of mentoring, buddying and modelling, we discover what is
acceptable, tolerated, overlooked and outlawed.
Third, and following on directly from the idea that managerial knowledge is his-
torically sectioned and situated, we note that management might also be regarded
as a predominantly masculine and Western form of constructed knowledge, or dis-
course. As management development is a prime diffuser of such knowledge, its
ability to promote diversity must be seen as suspect.

1.5.2 Cultural Views of What a Manager Should Do and Be

Earlier I asked you to consider what you feel is distinctive about the work of a
manager. Now I’d like you to think about the extent to which your definition of a
manager is influenced by your national or regional culture. This is probably best
done by comparing managers in your country with those you have encountered
in another.

The North American model of management has been traced back, not uncontro-
versially, to the frontier mentality of the early settlers (Prasad, 1997). By contrast,
the attributes necessary for senior management and leadership in South East Asia
include patience, sincerity, honesty, consensus, flexibility, and a willingness to
learn: this finding by Van der Boon (2003) leads her to conclude that, in the Asian
business environment, the ‘best man for the job is a woman’ (2003: 141), noting
that women hold key management and political positions, particularly in the Phil-
ippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. Leadership and management in Japan
are ‘predicated on power and knowledge relations in which the ‘common instinct’
that is generated by long-term interaction amongst insiders guides practice with
an elegant simplicity (wabi-shabi) that is not commensurate with precious displays
of individualism and Anglo-Saxon models of leadership’ (Ray et al., 2004: 325)
Yet even to talk about Anglo-Saxon models may gloss over important differences.
For example, whereas British managers may emphasise the need for communic-
ation and interpersonal skills, and see the organisation primarily as a network
of relationships demanding negotiation, influencing skills and image promotion,
German managers may be more likely to emphasise individual creativity, and to
see the organisation as based on competence, rationality, knowledge and technical
expertise. In contrast, French managers may emphasise the importance of being
recognised as ’high potential’, and see the organisation as based on power, authority
and political trade-offs (Laurent, 1986).
Attitudes towards management are naturally forged from political processes and
cultural values. For example, Turkey can be described as being ‘medium high’ on
the uncertainty avoidance index (Hofstede, 1991). Hofstede describes how young

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democracies (which he defines as being those that have developed their forms of
government since World War I, such as Turkey) tend to show higher uncertainty
avoidance than older democracies. This notion fits with Ataturk’s reforms, which
coincided with a Turkish republic salvaged out of the Ottoman Empire in the years
following World War I. A Romanised alphabet, Western dress, and a society no
longer founded on religion but on secular values were among the sweeping changes
that patriotic, forward-thinking Turks were expected to embrace. Yet traditional
Turkish values, especially around status, remain (see Box 1.7).

♦ Box 1.7
The cultural syndrome of status identity embodies the notion that cultural members are
stratified into hierarchies or groups based on culturally relevant information. Turkish
organisations are distinguished by central decision-making, highly personalised, strong
leadership, and limited delegation, together with steep hierarchies indicating the sub-
ordination of employees to their leaders – yet are also described as ‘families’. Turkish
leaders are characterised by paternalistic attributes. Within this notion of hierarchy
versus egalitarianism, hierarchical cultures like Turkey’s favour differential social status,
implying distributions of power. And within hierarchical cultures lower-status individu-
als are respectful and defer to higher-status individuals. This status identity syndrome
manifests itself in the Turkish context, with paternalistic leaders demonstrating parental
consideration towards their subordinates (from Ashford, 2005).
♦

This glimpse into the way managers manage in one culture suggests that different
countries will have quite different ways of identifying, grooming and developing
their managers. This is driven partly by educational priorities, corporate strategies,
historical legacies and cultural values. Table 1.1 shows how the interplay of national
culture/organisational culture and career orientation and strategy lead to contrast-
ing pathways of management development.

Table 1.1. Favoured ways of identifying and developing managers

Potential identification Potential development
Unmanaged functional trial Managed potential
development
MANAGED DEVELOPMENT • Little elite recruitment • Careful monitoring of high
APPROACH • Decentralised recruitment potentials by management
The ’MNC’ Model for technical or functional review committees
jobs • Review to match up per-
• 5–7 years’ trial formance and potential
• No corporate monitoring with short- and long-term
• Problem of internal poten- job and development
tial identification via assess- requirements
ments, assessment centres, • Importance of manage-
indicators ment development staff
• Possible complementary (often report to CeO/GM)
recruitment of high poten-
tial managers

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Table 1.1. (cont.) Favoured ways of identifying and developing managers

Apprenticeship Functional ladders

FUNCTIONAL APPROACH • Annual recruitment from • Functional careers, relation-
The ’Germanic’ Model universities and technical ships and communication
schools • Expertise-based competition
• 2-year ’apprenticeship’ trial • Multifunctional mobility lim-
− job rotation through ited to few elitist recruits, or
most non-existent
functions • Little multifunctional con-
− intensive training tact below level of division
− identification of person’s heads and ’vorstand’ (execut-
functional potential and ive committee)
talents
• Some elitist recruitment,
mostly of PhDs
Managed elite trial Time-scheduled tournament
ELITE COHORT APPROACH • Elite pool or cohort recruit- • Unequal opportunity, good
The ’Japanese’ Model ment jobs to the best
• Recruitment for long-term • 4–5 years in a job, 7–8 years
careers up-or-out
• Job rotation, intensive train- • Comparison with cohort
ing, peers
mentoring • Multifunctional mobility,
• Regular performance monit- technical-functional track
oring for minority
• Equal opportunity (mistakes
allowed and no immediate
sanctions for poor perform-
ance due to job misfit, diffi-
cult boss etc.)
Elite entry, no trial Political tournament
ELITE POLITICAL APPROACH • Leadership potential identi- • High flyers
The ’Latin’ Model fied at entry • Competition and collabora-
• Elite pool recruitment (non- tion with peers
cohort) • Typically multifunctional
• Predictive qualities • Political process (visible
• From schools specialised achievement, get sponsors,
in selecting and preparing coalitions, read signals)
future top managers • If stuck, move out and on
− ’Grandes écoles’ • The ’Gamesman’ [sic]
− MBAs
− Scientific PhDs

Source: Adapted from Evans et al., 2002.

However, the example in Box 1.8 reminds us that cultural stereotypes can be mis-
leading. We return to this framework in Module 3, where we introduce more fully
the complicating factors of size and sector when analysing management develop-
ment.

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♦ Box 1.8
Michael Marks, CEO of Flextronics, describes his attitude towards cultural stereotyping.

’About ten years ago, right after NAFTA took effect, I had the idea of locating
a Flextronics manufacturing plant in Mexico. I clearly remember people saying
to me, ‘Don’t do it. That’s a siesta culture,’ implying that any labor or other cost
savings to be gained there would be offset by the workers’ laziness. I made a
trip anyway and checked out three factories, one making cables for the auto
industry, one making toasters, and one doing electronic assembly. I came away
thinking, ‘It’s not humanly possible to work harder than these people or to
produce products faster than this.‘ We built a plant near Guadalajara in 1997,
and within five years its revenues grew to more than $1 billion.
’About ten years ago, right after NAFTA took effect, I had the idea of locating
a Flextronics manufacturing plant in Mexico. I clearly remember people saying
to me, ‘Don’t do it. That’s a siesta culture,’ implying that any labor or other cost
savings to be gained there would be offset by the workers’ laziness. I made a
trip anyway and checked out three factories, one making cables for the auto
industry, one making toasters, and one doing electronic assembly. I came away
thinking, ‘It’s not humanly possible to work harder than these people or to
produce products faster than this.‘ We built a plant near Guadalajara in 1997,
and within five years its revenues grew to more than $1 billion.
♦

1.6 What Is Needed to Deepen Our Understanding of

Management Development?
So far in this module I have clarified what is meant by the term management develop-
ment. I prefer not to see managers and leaders as distinct entities, but rather to see
them on a continuum, with any responsible employee potentially able to operate
as a manager and exercise leadership as circumstances demand. I have proposed
that focusing on development does not preclude reference to related fields of man-
agement learning, education and training, because the boundaries between these
domains are relatively permeable anyway. I have also suggested that an elastic
use of the term manager is called for, partly because being a ‘manager’ has quite
different cultural connotations in different parts of the world and, in particular,
it is helpful not to be constrained by the politico-historical undertones peculiar to
the West. For a number of reasons, managers play a pivotal role in organisations,
and a systematic, critical study of the way they are trained and developed is over-
due. Finally, despite being a hot topic for governments, enterprises and individual
managers alike, much remains to be discovered about how and why managers are
developed, or indeed how and why they even exist as a distinct category of person.
Here in the final section we outline five principles that we believe should guide
such an exploration. In order to chart the territory of management development
more fully, we propose that such an analysis needs to be international, meso-level,
multi-paradigmatic, diversity-sensitive and empirically driven.

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1.6.1 International
It is clear that any study of the ways in which managers and leaders are developed
would benefit from an international approach. Not only does this, one hopes,
avoid ethnocentric bias and assumptions, it also offers the possibility of rich,
cross-cultural insights. It might be argued that, although governments in dif-
ferent countries pursue quite different goals in their early education systems and
adopt varying levels of corporate intervention at a policy level, there is a general
trend toward regarding management development as market-driven. Globalisa-
tion and the increasing reach of multinationals are creating common expectations
of managers across the world, and corporate cultures are arguably becoming more
influential than national cultures. For example, having examined the particular
historical emphases of management models in Germany, France, Japan, UK and
US, Thomson et al. (2001: 61) note that
The general trends are similar. All the models expect something from the indi-
vidual manager in terms of self-development over and above what might be
done by the organisation. All five countries favour development beyond the
initial education and induction; in Germany and Japan it is more formalised,
especially in the large companies, than in France, the United States, and Bri-
tain. All the countries have problems with management development in small
businesses . . .

But this idea of convergence in the realm of management development, fuelled

by the inexorable diffusion of best practices, has been questioned, particularly
where it is assumed that global HR practices are inevitably converging on a US
model (Gooderham and Brewster, 2003). Based on extensive survey data gathered
over the last decade, Brewster et al. (2004) reach a more nuanced conclusion
concerning 23 countries in Europe. They point to directional convergence of HR
practices, with increasing training and development as one example of a generic
trend. However, they differentiate this from final convergence, noting that there is
very little evidence that countries are becoming more alike in the way they manage
their human resources. If this is true in the relatively homogeneous arena of the
European Community, then it is even more starkly the case when we consider
approaches to developing managers and leaders in other continents (see Box 1.9).

♦ Box 1.9
To understand the nature of management development within Asia, it is important to
consider the historical and cultural influences that have formed the system of personnel
practices used to ensure the availability of qualified employees for key positions. For
countries such as Singapore and China, where there is a deep collectivist orientation
influenced by Confucian values, the evolution of management development has been
heavily guided by planned economies controlled by the respective governments. As
Singapore became a self-ruled country under the influence of Lee Kuan Yew, and as
China emerged after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1976, these governments
have aggressively focused on how to ensure adequate managers to support the success
of these societies.
The implications of the planned economy within China can be most clearly evidenced
through the growth of MBA programmes, which are relevant as business schools

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have become increasingly focused on corporate management development (Beeby

and Jones, 1997). In China and Singapore the implications of this focus on business
schools by the government have had a significant impact on the practice and policies
of management development (Wang, 1999). As the graduates of these programmes
facilitated the rapid development of joint ventures and high technology within China,
these massive corporate transformations profoundly influenced the structures, social
processes and individual behaviours within these firms (Tsui et al., 2004). For example,
some of the trends reported within management development in China have included a
shift from an academic to a professional orientation, from general knowledge learning
to competency development, from technical orientation to managerial focus, from a
common programme to an adaptive curriculum planning, and from ’one shot’ training
to strategic distributive development (Wang, 1999).
♦

1.6.2 Meso-Level
What the example above (Box 1.9) also demonstrates is that, to reach an adequate
understanding of management development, we need to engage with and seek to
integrate different levels of analysis, incorporating both individual and contextual
factors. This so-called meso-level analysis indicates a desire, particularly by policy-
makers, to move beyond the more traditional macro and micro thinking that have
dominated organisational analysis in the past. As Evans (2001: 542) puts it:
Experience has shown that macro level theories are often too abstract and fre-
quently applied to concrete situations with little attention to the mediating
processes, while micro level theories tend to ignore the impact of broader struc-
tural factors on micro level decision-making settings.

In fact theorists in the field of international human resource management have

been seeking to address such issues for some time. These authors propose an integ-
rative framework of international HRM in multinational corporations that maps the
twin influences of exogenous factors (industry/regional characteristics and coun-
try culture) and endogenous factors (structure and orientation of parent company
and competitive strategy) upon human resource management issues, functions and
policies. However, such accounts tend to focus entirely on the multinational cor-
porate experience, and lack worked examples. In this course we apply meso-level
thinking as an analytic tool for tracing the intricate web of institutional, cultural,
structural, organisational and micro-political/agential factors that shape the prior-
ity, content, impact and significance of development activities in different parts of
the world.

1.6.3 Multi-Paradigm
It has already become apparent that, if we are to understand the full significance of
activities conducted under the banner of management (and leadership) develop-
ment, we need to invoke different/competing paradigms or perspectives (Alvesson
and Deetz, 2000). To date, much research in the field has been atheoretical and

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acontextual. Studies that have sought to theorise have drawn on a diverse range
of approaches, utilised their favoured methodologies, and remained firmly rooted
in a single paradigm. This has led to a fragmented picture and a confusing set of
findings.
Common-sense logic tells us that the careful development of managers is likely
to have a positive influence upon individual capability and organisational perform-
ance. Work within the normative paradigm has begun to identify those variables
that facilitate and those that frustrate such impact. Employing both quantitative
and qualitative research designs, functionalist research therefore has its value in
delineating more carefully the linkages between activities and outcomes, with the
intent of creating a coherent, robust model of management development. How-
ever, this does not tell the whole story, partly because it relies on self-reported data
and partly because it assumes organisations operate rationally to achieve unitarist
goals. The interpretative paradigm is well suited to gaining insights concerning
the more perplexing, local and emergent processes associated with management
development interventions. The approach allows the investigators to privilege par-
ticipant responses and reflections by giving attention to the feelings, intuitions and
meanings ascribed to development activities they have experienced.
There is a growing body of literature that takes a critical perspective on the
evaluation of management development. For example, some authors have drawn
attention to the various ways in which management development offers technolo-
gies that act to ‘normalise’ the managerial self, thereby suppressing diversity in the
pursuit of order, predictability and control (Hopfl and Dawes, 1995). Therefore,
to fully appreciate the potency, whether hegemonic or subversive, of management
development we need to move beyond issues of ‘good or evil’, ‘success or failure’
by investigating the ways in which such programmes and activities might simul-
taneously work both for and against the interests of any particular stakeholder.

1.6.4 Diversity-Sensitive
The notion of diversity management rose rapidly to prominence during the 1990s,
and continues to gather momentum even today. We are now at a point where
many organisations devote significant resources aimed (ostensibly) at valuing and
leveraging diversity to the benefit of both individual and organisation. In many
cases this involves the training and development of managers with a view to sens-
itising them to the benefits of diversity, and then providing them with the apparent
wherewithal to ‘manage’ it. However, diversity-specific interventions will most
likely form only a very small part of a typical manager’s development experiences.
This begs the question as to how mainstream forms of management development
(being the main focus of this course) fare when it comes to their impact on diversity.
We consider such a question to be all the more pertinent, given that most analyses of
management (let alone management development!) tend implicitly to take a neutral
stance when it comes to diversity and inclusion – which is a polite way of say-
ing that they typically ignore such issues altogether. At this juncture we should
be clear as to exactly what we might mean when we refer to diversity. This is
less straightforward than it might seem. Not only is there much controversy on

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the issue, certainly within academic circles, but any particular definition will have
political consequences for the very people whom diversity might be expected to
affect. From a practitioner’s point of view, however, the typical pragmatic stance is
to adopt a notion of diversity based around essentialist forms of group difference,
expressed in terms of, for example, age, disability, race, religion, sex and sexual
orientation.
There are many indications to suggest that management development frequently
struggles to provide a ‘level playing field’ with regard to difference along such
dimensions. In a sense, this should come as no surprise. Indeed, there are power-
ful theoretical reasons for a degree of scepticism concerning management devel-
opment’s alignment with diversity. The few authors who have taken the trouble
to delve into the origins and evolution of management have found its knowledge
and practices to be dominated by influences that are white/Western and masculine
(e.g. Kerfoot and Knights, 1998; Grey, 1999; Vieira da Cunha and Pina e Cunha,
2002). And all this despite the overwhelming tendency for management to be
represented as a scientific and value-neutral activity (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000).
Theoretically, then, if we consider management development to be a prime diffuser
of knowledge and practice that is inherently sectional, should we really expect it to
provide equal access for all demographic groups? An emerging body of empirical
evidence supports the view that we should not, and we explore this evidence in
Module 8. Given this experience, management development might usefully be
held (at least partly) accountable for the continuing and lamentably low represent-
ation of minority groups within the upper echelons of management (EOC, 2005).
However, we do not wish to imply that all management development automatic-
ally deserves to be considered equally to blame for this. Our approach throughout
the course will therefore be to try, wherever possible, to interrogate management
development (on both theoretical and empirical grounds) for its alignment with
the assumed interests of those who are traditionally under-represented within the
ranks of management.

1.6.5 Empirical
In its early days, the field of management development attracted more than its share
of prescription, with varying degrees of rigour. In the UK we have seen success-
ive national manifestos and critical success factors for management development
being proposed, along with typologies of effective and less effective approaches
to management development from both British (e.g. Burgoyne, 1988) and North
American authors (e.g. McLagan, 1989). The following decade saw a growth of
more empirically based work, focusing on the education and corporate sectors at
both policy and organisation levels; but, as discussed above, this research was
variable in quality, tended to have a strong establishment bias, and was invari-
ably conducted to make a political point. Where the focus was on development
in the workplace, it was usually descriptive. In order to navigate our way around
management development we are presented with an incomplete map, as Box 1.10,
which briefly traces the contours of European research, shows.

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♦ Box 1.10
In Europe, research into the education and development of managers is less advanced
than research into general education and higher level, technical education and training
(Nyhan, 1998). Current knowledge on what constitutes good practice in Europe is
inadequate in five respects.

• It often deals with training generally (without separating out managers), and is
uncontextualised, telling us more about the quantity and types of training under-
taken than explaining its quality and effects (Larsen, 1994).
• The few previous studies that have focused exclusively on training for managers
have tended to examine specific issues, such as the development of competences
(Winterton and Winterton, 1997) or the usage of training procedures and practices
in different countries (Bournois et al., 1994), rather than the overall significance of
management development.
• The favoured methodology has been the use of broad-brush surveys (Brewster and
Hegewisch, 1994; Gudic, 2001; Brewster et al. (2004)) that lack analytical detail.
Exceptionally, in-depth case studies of a few organisations have been conducted
(e.g. Storey et al., 1997): these are rich in detail but limited to a small range of
sectors.
• There have been several country-specific studies of management development, for
example in the UK (Thomson et al., 2001), in Ireland (Graham et al., 2000), in
Romania (Cseh, 1999), in the New Independent States (ETF, 1997) and in Holland
(Paauwe and Williams, 2001), as well as non-European studies (e.g. Branine, 1996),
but cross-national comparative studies remain rare.
• Various studies have analysed management training and development from an inter-
national perspective, but the chosen lens has invariably been that of the MNC (Noble,
1997; Tregaskis, 2001).
♦

In many ways, this sets the research agenda and the challenge for this course.
We need to move on from prescriptive advice and descriptive data. We need to
understand more fully what is happening in the realm of management development
by discerning and making more visible the theory/assumptions underlying such
policies and practices. To achieve this, we need empirical substantiation, preferably
in an international setting. In their review and critique of international HRM,
Schuler et al. (2002) call for more qualitative research to study the processes by
which international human resource management policies (including training and
development) evolve, diffuse and become institutionalised. If this can be done in a
way that gives equal weight to both macro and micro factors in a given country or
region, that gives due consideration to issues of diversity and, in its attempt to offer
explanation, avoids reliance upon a single paradigm, then we shall have made real
progress in illuminating the arena of management development.

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Module 1/ What Is Management and Leadership Development and Why Is it Important?

Learning Summary
• For several reasons, it is probably unhelpful to make a sharp distinction between
leaders and managers (and their development).
• Management training and management learning are separate fields of enquiry
from that of management development, but in practice the boundaries are
becoming increasingly blurred.
• The label ‘manager’ varies widely in its meaning according to context and,
certainly in the West, comes with a good deal of historical baggage.
• Whatever the cultural and historical expectations of what managers should do,
they play a pivotal role in organisations, and their development needs to be
taken seriously.
• In research terms, the field of management development is relatively immature
and would benefit from cross-national, meso-level and multi-paradigm analysis.

Review Questions
1.1 What is distinctive about management and leadership development as against, training,
education and learning?

1.2 Module 1 describes three levels that influence MLD: policy-education level, policy-
corporate level and operations-education level. Give practical examples of each.

1.3 Why invest effort in the development of managers and leaders?

Case 1.2: Could Management and Leadership Development Have Saved Enron?

Introduction
This case is based on the demise of Enron, as recounted by Mangham (2004). It provides
interesting insights into two issues discussed in this module: first, the shifting nature of
management and leadership; and, second, the fact that any analysis of management
and management development needs to encompass structure, delivery and morality.
We let Mangham take up the story:
Until shortly before its problems became public Enron was seen to be a very well-
managed company. In February 2000, for example, Fortune magazine’s survey of
America’s most admired companies named Enron the most innovative US firm for the
fifth straight year. In the same survey, Enron also topped ‘the quality of management’
list, coming in ahead of Jack Welch’s General Electric. Later that year the magazine
included Enron in its list of ‘MO stocks to last the decade’. Fortune was not alone in
its assessments: many newspapers, articles and analysts hailed its management and its
stock. Business schools – notably Harvard – fell over themselves to write case studies
demonstrating the strength of the company and the skilled leadership of Enron. None
of those cheering Enron on in its good years questioned its integrity or the moral
leadership of the company.

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Module 1/ What Is Management and Leadership Development and Why Is it Important?

A model of leadership
So how might a theory of leadership re-describe the spectacular demise of companies
such as Enron? Perhaps what is required is a theory that can accommodate the per-
ception that the company was managed well in what we may call the technical aspects
of management and leadership, a framework that also focuses on the moral aspects
of managing that so many perceive to be a major reason for Enron’s fall from grace.
Badaracco and Ellsworth (1989) offer such a tool. It is informed by the literature on
leadership, and tested and refined through extensive discussions with high-achieving
senior executives. The authors hold that integrity lies ‘at the very heart of understand-
ing what leadership is’. For them, integrity suggests wholeness and coherence. It also
suggests ‘rightness, a sense of moral soundness’.
The authors hold that the key to high achievement lies in consistency and coherence
among three elements:
The first comprises a leader’s personal values, a leader’s aspirations (for the organisa-
tion) and a leader’s actions. They describe the personal values that lead to outstanding
managerial performance under three headings: strong personal ethics, positive belief
in others, and a compelling vision for their company.
The second, central, element of their model of leadership is that high-achieving leaders
have visionary aims for their companies. Overlapping somewhat with their description
of personal values, Badaracco and Ellsworth maintain that there are five aspects to
a leader’s aims for the company: recruiting, developing and promoting people with
high intellectual ability and the desire to excel; ensuring that members of the organ-
isation have a deeply shared sense of community and of the company’s goals and
purpose; seeing that communication is open and candid, even to the point of heated,
emotional debate; structuring the company in such a way that subordinates have sub-
stantial autonomy; and determining that a desire for high ethical standards pervades
the company.
The third element of the model – action – consists of the link that a leader makes
between his/her personal beliefs and the aims he/she has for her/his organisation. It is
through action that a leader will ‘move a company toward the ideal organisation, one
that is consistent with the leader’s personal values’ in a world beset with choices and
dilemmas. Consistency is the essence of leadership.
Applying these ideas to Ken Lay at Enron, it is possible to argue that he espoused
a strong personal ethic. He was instrumental in setting up the company’s code of
ethics, and he was a ‘prominent speaker on business ethics before his company bit
the dust’ (McCrae, 2003). Badaracco and Ellsworth argue that the principal standards
against which personal ethics should be adjudged are honesty and fairness. These were
attributes that Lay was proud to hold dear to himself and his company. They were the
attributes that he stressed in his introduction to the company’s code of ethics, which
everyone was required to sign: ‘We want to be proud of Enron and to know that it
enjoys a reputation for fairness and honesty and that it is respected (Cruver, 2002: 333).
They were the ‘core values’ that were drummed into new starts, and were printed
at the bottom of every sheet of Enron stationery – RICE: respect (‘We treat others
as we would like to be treated ourselves’), integrity (‘We work with others openly,
honestly and sincerely’), communication (‘We have an obligation to communicate’)
and excellence (‘We are satisfied with nothing less than the best in everything we do’)
(Cruver, 2002: 42; Fox, 2003: 79).
The second personal value is a strong belief in the ability of other people. Badaracco
and Ellsworth believe that good leaders can attract high-calibre individuals to their
organisations and can shape and motivate them to act for reasons beyond personal

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Module 1/ What Is Management and Leadership Development and Why Is it Important?

economic self-interest. Lay clearly attracted very high calibre people to Enron, who
in turn recruited and trained the brightest and the best. By the year 2000 over half
of Enron’s 17 000 employees had college or advanced degrees (Fox, 2003: 87). Lay
delegated responsibility, and gave many people the opportunity to show what they
could do. Many employees appeared to be proud to work for the company. Throughout
the 1990s the company increasingly developed a name as a centre for smart, ambitious
young professionals. They saw Enron as the ultimate launching pad for a business
career: ‘Highly respected, bitterly admired – if you were craving the fast track, you
dreamed of working at Enron’ (Cruver, 2002: 1). It is also possible to argue that –
together with Jeff Skilling – Lay was largely responsible for shaping the motivation and
behaviour of those he recruited. Although the desire for personal gain appeared to be
strong among Enron employees, to the point of greed in some of them, there is strong
evidence that many were enthusiastic about building a strong and respectable business.
To this extent they reflected the fact that Lay and Skilling in particular appeared to have
a compelling vision for the company. Badaracco and Ellsworth claim that this vision has
its source in ‘personal and imaginative creativity’ that extends beyond analysis and is
embodied in actions that reflect ‘initiative, risk taking, and an unswerving commitment
to its achievement’ (1989: 101). Few would dispute that Enron was such a company: it
aspired to become the world’s leading company, and it nearly made it.
Furthermore, there appears to be evidence of open communication, and of plans being
tested through vigorous debate. All three of the authors cited above provide instances
where the various levels and divisions of the company dialogue and debate ideas, plans
and procedures. Fox, for example, speaks of the circumstance where business groups
were set to compete against each other as though they were different companies (Fox,
2003: 86). Skilling boasted that ‘the whole organization is like a free market of people
and ideas’. However – as we have seen – these writers also provide strong evidence
that this challenge and testing was not a feature of the board – nor, it would seem, of
the accountants, bankers and analysts who so faithfully followed Enron into the abyss.
As an instance, Andersen clearly knew of Enron’s practices, and even described aspects
of them as ‘intelligent gambling’, but, after having decided to make some suggestions
to Enron in order to mitigate their concerns, when asked they said nothing.
It is clear that the aspect of leadership that Badaracco and Ellsworth hold dear – a
desire that high ethical standards should pervade the company – is the one that is
found wanting in Lay, Skilling, Fastow and the members of the board. For Badaracco
and Ellsworth ethical standards are the crucial links between leaders’ aims for their
organisation on the one hand, and their own personal beliefs and actions on the other.
The values that Badaracco and Ellsworth hold to be important to the promotion of high
ethical standards are ‘honesty, fairness, mutual respect and trust, and compassion and
sensitivity in the exercise of power’ (Badaracco and Ellsworth, 1989: 104). Lay claimed
that fairness and honesty were the watchwords of Enron, but, as others have claimed
since Enron’s fall, unfairness and dishonesty may well have been the order of the day
within the company (Cruver, 2002: 333). Rupert Cornwell writes, about an investigation
into Enron’s tax avoidance, that it apparently included the bribing of tax officials. He
reports the words of a Republican senator who claimed that the tax avoidance schemes
read like the plot ‘of a conspiracy novel’ (Cornwell, 2003: 21). Enron’s treatment of its
own employees when bankruptcy loomed – reneging on its pledge to meet the terms
of their individual employment contracts and restricting their rights to cash in the value
of their Enron stock until it was worthless – is seen to indicate the senior management’s
lack of fairness (Bryce, 2002: 210). More than one commentator has noted that the
senior managers realised much of the value of their own share options shortly before
the steep decline in the share price set in.

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Module 1/ What Is Management and Leadership Development and Why Is it Important?

[ . . . ] Clearly the leadership of Enron is seen to fall well short of the characteristics
that Badaracco and Ellsworth deem to be necessary for a high-achieving company.
Were they to take a look at Enron I feel that they would probably concur with Bryce’s
judgement that ‘Enron failed because its leadership was morally and ethically corrupt’
(2002: I 2).

1 What went wrong at Enron? Where did the rot start?

2 To what extent do current theories and concepts of leadership address such issues?

3 What role, if any, does leadership/management development have in creating

socially responsible and skilled cadres of managers and possibly averting such cor-
porate crises?

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