Management Development in the Organization

There are two main types of literature on management development: manuals which tell a manager how it should be done and anecdotal accounts of success stories in different organizations under varying circumstances. We see this book as an attempt to integrate the field of management development, believing it necessary both to define the boundaries of what constitutes management development and to explore their implications for the way that management development is carried out in organizations.

The opening chapter reviewed several perspectives of management development. In this chapter and the next one we want to illustrate the range of approaches that have been adopted in different organizations. We shall be concentrating on organizational units of medium and larger size (ranging from approximately 700 to 10,000 employees) and have divided the discussion in these two chapters between private and public sector organizations. The differences in autonomy and accountability between the two sectors are reasonably distinct. In addition there are differences in managerial roles. For example, in the public sector there tends to be a greater emphasis on ‘professionalism’ and status is not so clearly defined by managerial role as it is in the private sector. The meaning of managerial roles, and hence of management development, is therefore likely to be different in the two cases.

There are a number of ways in which public sector organizations can differ from business organizations — for example performance critieria, accountability relationships and the training of officers may be very different in the public sector. Hence it may be anticipated that the approaches adopted towards management development may also be different. In this chapter we are going to concentrate on one major area of the public sector — local government. The chapter covers the changing role of local government Officers in the UK, the current philosophies about management development and the issues that these raise for the wider debate. These are illustrated by a case study from a typical local authority organization. (The main part of this chapter was contributed by Mark Sheldrake.)

In the earlier parts of this book we have attempted to do two main things; firstly to describe the current state and practices of management development within organizations and secondly to suggest an analytical approach to management development which helps to generate information for decision-taking at different points in the organization. But analysis should not stand on its own — so we are also concerned to examine and discuss action. Specifically in this chapter we focus on an approach to management development which has been applied in a wide range of organizations. The approach is of interest because it appears to cope with some of the current problems of management development and to be applicable to a range of organizational situations. However we want to stress very strongly that our contingency view of management development means that in no sense would we recommend that project-based development is necessarily the most appropriate vehicle or main form of activity for management development in any or every particular organization. Rather in moving from diagnosis to prescription we would bring Project-Based Management Development (P.M.D.) to the attention of the reader because it is a comparatively new approach which appears to offer a number of advantages for in-house development activity.

In this book we have tried to indicate that the present state of management development is beset by three main problems. Firstly there is a lot of confusion about the nature and purpose of management development; secondly there are real conflicting objectives in the design of any management development system and thirdly, once an organization has decided to implement management development, it is extremely difficult for specialists to form a balanced judgement about how it is operating.