I found several publications on the topic matter. Below are two
articles that I think best describe different approaches to Cognitive
Dissonance and Management.
Abstracts:
Publication #1
<i>"The ideal use of the trainer's time leading up to a training event
is a balance between building the trainees' motivation level and
reinforcing his own understanding of the subject material. To boost
the trainees' motivation level, help them see the gap between the
current reality and what the training material will allow them to
achieve. Having a fierce conversation that creates cognitive
dissonance will motivate the person to change behavior. After the
trainees' motivation level is high, get involved in preparing the
material for the course. By feeling empowered to control the content
and direction of the training course, the trainees will take more
ownership of the material and have a vested interest in achieving a
positive outcome. Involving the trainees in preparing the material
before the session can take many forms. Because the trainees have
prepared the material before the session, they achieve a deeper, more
personal level of understanding as a result."</i>
Publication #2
<i>Although the ideals of management development inform much of the
literature on the subject, in organizations there is often a gulf
between ideals and practice. This sets up a cognitive dissonance among
managers that leads to contradictions, rationalizations, and rhetoric.
These in turn create alternative justifications for management
development activities, which are captured in the form of 10 different
rationales, or faces. These faces are identified as: 1.
functional-performance, 2. agricultural, 3. functional-defensive, 4.
socialization, 5. political reinforcement, 6. organizational
inheritance, 7. environmental legitimacy, 8. compensation, 9. psychic
defense, and 10. ceremonial."</i>
_______________________________
Publication #1
Don't Train; MOTIVATE
Ryan Hale. Quality. Troy: Aug 2005.Vol.44, Iss. 8; pg. 48, 2 pgs
Full Text:
The boss's phone call made the challenge clear: next week's training
seminar for all the plant managers is critical to improving the
overall defect rate in the division this year. And the boss will
evaluate the trainer's performance in delivering the course based on
the results the plant managers achieve in the next six months. How
will the trainer spend the critical days leading up to the training
event? If his first impulse is to focus entirely on preparing the
material, a decision has been made that will doom the event's outcome.
Of course, knowing the material inside and out will build the
trainer's confidence and keep him from being stumped in the spotlight.
Snazzy slide animations, coupled with a bit of comic relief, will keep
the audience smiling until the coffee break. The challenge, along with
high expectations from the boss, is enough to put anyone into high
gear in the days leading up to the event. But will this guarantee that
the trainees burst out of the room with a drive to change their
behavior and get results? Not without one critical factor-the
trainee's motivation to learn.
EMPOWERING TRAINEES
The ideal use of the trainer's time leading up to a training event is
a balance between building the trainees' motivation level and
reinforcing his own understanding of the subject material.
The aforementioned scenario is specific. The decision facing the
trainer, however, applies to any adult learning situation. There are
many training courses in industry that might not have all the
participants kicking down the classroom doors to attend-safety and
environmental compliance, customer service techniques, software user
groups. But when the same topics are framed in a way highlighting the
trainee's personal benefit-prevent injury to himself and others, build
stronger customer relationships that boost commissions or spend less
time working at the computer terminal-the trainee is more likely to
take away learning points that help change behavior.
First, let's focus on the trainer's role in preparing the trainees for
the session. Specifically, this means increasing both trainee
motivation to learn and his own general understanding of the subject
matter. To boost the trainees' motivation level, help them see the gap
between the current reality and what the training material will allow
them to achieve. Having a fierce conversation that creates cognitive
dissonance will motivate the person to change behavior. Here are some
tips for having that conversation:
* Choose a time and place that allows the trainer and the trainee to
focus on the conversation
* Understand what the trainee wants to learn from the seminar
* Prepare and discuss the trainer's role as a leader
* Listen and ask open-ended questions
* Provide preliminary material that will help the trainee participate
The amount of time and resources devoted to preparing trainees will
improve the overall success of the seminar. What trainees gain will
have been expressed by what they want to learn. Tailor the depth and
duration of the conversation to match the level of the existing
relationship with the trainee. If this is a new concept, be prepared
to practice and improve each time.
After the trainees' motivation level is high, get them involved in
preparing the material for the course. This requires the trainer to
keep a firm grasp on the end goal of the training course while being
flexible with the details. By feeling empowered to control the content
and direction of the training course, the trainees will take more
ownership of the material and have a vested interest in achieving a
positive outcome. Strive to give trainees a real choice in the
following areas, for example:
* Choose the training topic
* Prioritize a list of topics to select the order
* Arrange the venue or schedule of events for the training course
* Choose which trainee prepares which subtopic
TRAINEE PREPARATION
Involving the trainees in preparing the material before the session
can take many forms. The underlying idea is to help them absorb the
subject matter in advance so that the group's interactions can
strengthen each person's understanding of the material and extend the
learning points to different applications. Some specific ways for
trainees to prepare material include:
* Reading and summarizing reference articles
* Compiling a list of personal experiences with the subject
* Researching and evaluating potential solutions to a problem
The level of trainee preparation can affect the outcome of a session.
Consider a one-hour training session on slips and falls at the
workplace. In version A, trainees do no preparation. The trainer
presents a detailed, professional 45-minute slideshow that summarizes
workplace injury statistics, employee interviews and case studies of
methods to prevent slip and fall injuries. In the remaining 15
minutes, the training group chooses which prevention methods to
implement at their facility and agrees to meet again in six months to
review their injury rate and the impact of the new policies. Out of
the 60 minutes, 45 were spent exchanging information and 15 were spent
interacting to solidify learning points and discussing future
applications.
Consider the same training session that places more emphasis on
trainee preparation. In version B, the trainer distributes the slide
show one week before the event and asks three trainees to prepare
five-minute summaries of sections of the presentation. Now the group
can spend 15 minutes reviewing the material as a refresher, delivered
from the trainee's perspective. That leaves the group 45 minutes to
engage in a discussion-facilitated by the trainer-to draw out deeper
learning points, discuss their personal experiences with the proposed
solutions and put together actions for the next six months. Because
the trainees have prepared the material before the session, they
achieve a deeper, more personal level of understanding as a result.
When organizing the next training session, remember that the trainee's
motivation level has a much greater effect on learning than the
trainer's. Trainee motivation level can be increased through
conversations that raise awareness of what the training course will
help them achieve. By raising the trainees' involvement in preparing
and delivering the training material, they achieve deeper
understanding of the material, and the potential for a lasting change
in behavior.
TECH TIPS
*Leading up to an event, the trainer should balance building the
trainees' motivation level and reinforcing his own understanding of
the subject material.
* When topics are framed in a way highlighting the trainee's personal
benefit, the trainee is more likely to take away learning points that
help change behavior.
* To boost the trainee's motivation level, help him see the gap
between the current reality and what the training material will allow
him to achieve.
* By feeling empowered to control the content and direction of the
training course, the trainees will take more ownership of the material
and have a vested interest in achieving a positive outcome.
______
Publication #2
Ten faces of management development
Lees, Stan. Management Education and Development. London: Summer
1992.Vol.23 Part 2. pg. 89
Full Text:
As management development has evolved during the last three decades,
there has been a shift in the popular perception of what the term
embraces. It has shifted from a set of activities which organisations
perform upon their own managers, towards those which external
professionals conduct on behalf of client organisations. This bias is
also to be found in much of the management development literature. It
predominantly reflects the concerns of external professionals in their
relationship with client organisations--their perceptions about the
task of management, and their ideals and preoccupations with what
development should and should not embrace. Largely overlooked has been
the internal organisational perspective on management
development--what it 'looks like' to managers on the inside. This
article aims to redress this imbalance.
JUSTIFYING MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT
A not unreasonable question to ask any organisation committing
resources to management development is: how do you justify your
decision? This is by no means an easy question to answer, not least
because the subject and the outcomes expected of it are highly
nebulous. Management development is an ambiguous concept, attracting
multiple and open conflicting definitions, and conveying different
things to different people both in the literature and in
organisations. The outcomes by which it might be measured are equally
ambiguous, with different stakeholders having different expectations
and likely to select very diverse sets of criteria for assessment.
Nevertheless, it is important to pose the question because when
managers commit resources to management development, they do so
according to some internal rationale and justification, with some
sense of its significance for the organisation, and with a spectrum of
expectations from the overt to the hidden. Exploring this internal
rationality, no matter how subjective, can usually shed more light on
why organisations back management development than any examination of
espoused goals, statements of intention, or other piece of public
rhetoric. It is especially important to do this when managers have
reservations about the efficacy of management development, yet
continue to commit sizeable resources to its activities.
During nearly 20 years of management development involvement with
organisations of most sorts, public and private, I have been probing
into how their managers justify investment in management development
and what they expect from it. In this article, 'management
development' is a term which embraces much more than simply education
or training. It is that entire system of corporate activities with the
espoused goal of improving the performance of the managerial stock in
the context of organisational and environmental change. It includes
performance appraisal; career and succession planning; assignments,
protects and other on-the-job development, and the more familiar
education and training activities. By probing into the inner world of
what these activities were expected to achieve, their corporate
significance, and the various internal justifications put forward for
them, a much broader agenda has emerged for interpreting management
development which goes far beyond the functional and performance
emphases in most of the current literature. Indeed, the agenda
suggests that a sizeable amount of management development activities.
is conducted for reasons which, superficially at least, appear to have
little to do with improving corporate performance.
Before examining these, some words of orientation and explanation are
necessary. It must be emphasised that many of these rationales are
seldom stated formally. They are unlikely to appear in documentation,
nor do they figure in public discussions about management development
or in negotiations with external parties. Rather, they slip out or are
implied in informal discussions, for example, over a pre-course drink,
at a course dinner, when goodbyes are said, or in other situations
when defences are relaxed. On many such occasions with management
development managers--i.e. those charged with coordinating the
activities nominally aimed at developing managers--the conversation
would gradually turn to the significance that they attached to their
work. When the public definitions and positivistic assertions were
exhausted, it was surprising how many had private misgivings about the
purpose and efficacy of what they were doing, and manifested a high
degree of ambivalence about their roles. Although on the surface
management development carries positive and enabling connotations,
underneath they often reported much difficulty persuading line
managers that it was a sound activity for the organisation to pursue.
Gaining cooperation with the formal procedures of the system was not
always easy. Sometimes line managers would express similar doubts and
uncertainties about the entire management development
apparatus--unsure whether they wanted themselves or their staff to be
'developed' or not, and equally ambivalent about whether to take
personal responsibility for managing their own and their staff's
careers, or to hand over the responsibility to the management
development system. Yet most felt the need to give credence to the
system, to go along with it at least on the surface, and not to
express reservations unless probed.
If management development is construed as the intersection of three
variables--individual career, organisational succession and
organisational performance--then much the ambiguity can be interpreted
as the difficulty of trying to manage some kind of accommodation
between the variables. In idealised form, manage development holds
that all three variables can be integrated through compliance with its
procedures and activities, offering the promise of a high level of
optimisation between individual expectations and organisational
demands. In practice, each procedure and activity is subject to a
range of interpretations and meanings by different parties, resulting
in a multitude of assumptions and beliefs in any organisation about
how the variables are to be integrated. This is the socio-political
domain of management--a complex dynamic of hopes and fears, ambitions
and opportunities, threats and disillusionments, conflicts and
contradictions. The gulf between this domain and the ideals and the
promises of management development is the theoretical focus of this
article. It has received scant attention to date.
Much of this gulf remains hidden from management educators and
trainers. They receive outputs from management development systems
with unusually very little awareness of how the systems have delivered
those outputs or of the multitude of expectations and meanings which
lie behind them. Educators and trainers usually approach their task
with a professional detachment, often oblivious to--or choosing to
ignore the wider significance of what they are engaged in. Yet
managers sponsored for development carry into the education or
training context much of the sociopolitical domains of their
organisations, and these domains are not difficult to access. Course
members, their management development managers, and personnel/HRM
chief are thus a potentially rich source of pickings on the multiple
and often conflicting goals of management development, about how the
contradictions and ambiguities between ideals and practice are
rationalised or masked, and especially about how companies justify
their investment in management development even when they have
reservations about its efficacy in improving on the-job performance.
Drawing from such a context, it has been possible to identify ten very
different reasons why organisations support management development.
These are presented below. They are not analysed in any depth, nor is
their relative significance assessed, yet each sheds a different light
on management development each and makes a different statement about
its activities. They reflect the perspectives of managers in various
roles--as sponsor, developed, superior and subordinate line and staff,
internal and specialist, and director or senior executive. Some of
these rationales are derived from their spoken comments. Others are
interpretations placed upon their discourses and these, of course, are
open to other interpretations. They are thus a distillation from an
amalgam of comments, observations, and interpretations, although
whenever possible the appropriate the appropriate roles are
identified. The ten faces are presented not as an explanatory model
but more as a collection of exhibits--like snapshots from a voyage of
discovery--to reveal rather than explain a largely unexplored
territory. All have recurred in several contexts--none is derived from
a sample one. Taken together, they represent a most comprehensive set
of rationales for the entire process of management development. The
first four have a functional and performance emphasis; the remainder
being political, legitimatory, symbolic and defensive.
THE TEN FACES
Functional-Performance
Agricultural
Functional-Defensive
Socialisation
Political Reinforcement
Organisational Inheritance
Environmental Legitimacy
Compensation
Psychic Defence
Ceremonial
Figure 1
THE TEN FACES
1. FUNCTIONAL-PERFORMANCE
This is by far the most popular rationale for management development;
to directly improve managerial functioning and thereby corporate
performance. Indeed, for many it is the only rationale. It is the
mainstream assumption behind the bulk of corporate rhetoric and
academic literature, and is the cornerstone of much of the current
management development debate. In terms of management education and
training, it operates at several levels of analysis and depths of
intervention. At the individual manager level, the intention may be
proactive by imparting new knowledge, skills or attitudes, or it may
be remedial by trying to eliminate identified weaknesses. At the group
level it may seek technical or social change in particular functions
or at different levels, or even large scale change across the entire
organisation, thus creating a fusion between management development
and organisation development. And at the national level, as exhorted
by a succession of reports into management education and development,
the aim is to create a supply of sufficiently trained and developed
managers to improve corporate competitiveness and aid national
economic recovery.
Interventions can vary in depth from the relatively straightforward
prescription-based imparting of knowledge and techniques in the
classroom, through a variety of team-building approaches to the
psychologically cathartic self-discovery of T-groups and other
experimential learning. Although there are varied and complex
approaches behind each type of intervention, building upon different
epistemological bases and theories of learning, their justification is
almost invariably in terms of functional-performance assumptions.
Indeed, they are used to legitimate the vast bulk of activities which
are generally are generally recognised as aiming to develop
managers--from performance appraisals, assignments, projects, job
rotations fast-track placements, as well as education and training
ventures. These assumptions also drive most of the theorising and
research into managerial learning and behaviour, including the elusive
search for universal managerial competencies.
When this rationale is uppermost in corporate thinking, and not simply
a piece of consensual rhetoric, a tight means-end coupling is often
assumed between the characteristics of the development activity and
changes in managerial performance. Managerial performance is usually
analyzed in considerable detail during regular appraisal sessions,
then great care is taken to match manager profiles with the content
analysis of the appropriate development activity. This then spawns
considerable evaluation research which attempts to correlate any
changes in subsequent performance ratings with the relevant content.
As regards education and training courses, mechanistic thinking often
underlies their selection and evaluation, with the analogy of the
garage workshop being a frequently articulated metaphor; remove the
manager or group of managers from the work place, repair or fit higher
performance parts as instructed, lubricate if necessary and return to
service. The essential key to improved performance is to identify
individual managers who are falling behind or who could go faster
(management development), or groups of managers whose attitudes or
behaviours need to be changed (organisation development), and match
them up with the appropriate educational or training experiences which
purport to remedy what is perceived to be deficient. The overall
belief is that the determinants of managerial and organisational
performance can largely be identified, that role performance can be
assessed with almost mechanistic precision, and that developmental
interventions can objectively be evaluated.
The necessary points to emphasise here are, firstly, that although the
above is something of a stereotype in that it is an amalgam of
observations from various companies, it nevertheless captures some
essential features of how managers approach management development
activities when the rationale is dominant. The multitude of conceptual
and theoretical issues which need to be addressed to bridge the
means-ends gulf between activity and performance are frequently
unrecognised. Secondly, that most approaches to management development
share a functional-performance rationale as a bottom-line; indeed, it
is the normative textbook definition of what management development is
all about. Finally, any approach or method which aims for alternative
outcomes must make at the very least a token espousal of a
functional-performance rationale to attract corporate funding.
2. AGRICULTURAL
Popularly phrased as 'we need to grow our own managers', this
rationale shares many similarities with the Functional-Performance,
but with two important differences. The first is that the development
of managers is assumed to take place mainly on, rather than off the
job. Courses are therefore just on of a number of vehicles for
assisting the process. The second is that responsibility for
development is placed firmly upon managers themselves, who are
expected to distill what is necessary for their own self-development
out of all possible experiences.
When this rationale is foremost in corporate thinking, a clear
distinction is made between training for specific skills and education
as a catalyst for development. In skills training, performance
appraisal data are used in the traditional manner for fitting managers
to courses and for evaluating the act of courses in terms of
subsequent changes in on-the-job behaviour. But in educational courses
the linkage between course content and job performance is assumed to
be much looser. Indeed, many companies do not believe that any
meaningful correlation can be established between course content and
future job behaviour. Educational programmes are entered into more out
of a belief that managers should experience the discipline of a
concentrated period of managerial thinking, and this experience is
viewed as being of more importance than the content of the programmes.
Nevertheless, there is often a ratchet-like linkage between courses
and succession, with all managers being required to attend particular
types of courses at different stages in their careers. When
responsibility for development is perceived to reside with managers
themselves, rather than with educators or trainers, the organisations
are more likely to choose courses from the full range available on the
market. Some, however, prefer to establish strong linkages with a
small number of select establishments.
The agricultural metaphor is highly appropriate, not just in the sense
of organisations growing their own managers, but also in the sense of
treating a prize crop as green manure. Course structures and content
are perceived in a quite undifferentiated, yet organic way, not as
valued ends in themselves but rather to stimulate future thinking and
action when back on the job. Thus, the seminal research paper, the
elegantly integrated syllabus, the subtlety of academic argument,
indeed those polished years of academic wisdom, are all but grist to a
mill-crude fertiliser to stimulate the managerial mind into producing
the performance harvest in future years.
Organisations where this rationale is dominant tend to have a make,
rather than buy, approach to human resourcing because of uniqueness of
technology, or for product-market reasons, or because they believe
their internal ethos and culture gives them a competitive advantage.
Management development is usually a strategic, organisation-wide
activity, part of a proactive strategy of
'people-centredness'--although the model of HRM is usually of the
hard, 'tough love' variety.
3. FUNCTIONAL-DEFENSIVE
This rationale is found typically in organisations well-buffered from
competitive pressures, and where there is a placid belief that the
organisation is in good shape and that managers at all levels are
performing satisfactorily. In these organisations, management
development is largely decoupled from the core strategic planning and
management control processes, and its procedures and formalities are
enacted mainly in a 'just-in-case-they-are-needed' spirit. When
managers are nominated to attend educational or training courses,
there is no serious expectation that they will subsequently bring
about any organisational changes. Instead, the intention is to build
up a reservoir of knowledge and potential skills in the organisation,
just in case they should ever be required. It is captured by phrases
such as 'we need to prepare managers, just in case things should
change', or 'it is useful to have some new thinking around the place'.
The major problem companies face with this approach is that courses
often give managers ideas for changing their working environments
which are resisted by their seniors and peers. In such circumstances,
management education can become a counter-productive force giving rise
to highly dysfunctional behaviours. When managers see possibilities
for putting into practice what they have learned yet are denied the
opportunities to do so, they frequently become cynical about
management education, antagonistic towards their seniors, form
anti-organisational cliques, or become sufficiently disillusioned to
resign and seek pastures new.
4. SOCIALISATION
If a feature of what has gone before is the progressive decoupling of
management development from the task of managing performance, the
fourth aspect--socialisation--continues this shift. Under this
rationale, management development is perceived as being all about the
socialisation of managers into some corporate ethos, and the task to
management education is primarily to contribute to managerial thought.
Sometimes this justification occurs in conjunction with the
Agricultural, although it is often expressed on its own. The
assumption is made that if all managers share the same 'thought
templates'--i.e. have a similar managerial language, similar concepts,
a common world view, the same reasoning to explain why things are or
are likely to be--then this uniformity of thinking should make problem
solving easier. Here, internal management development specialists
often see themselves as engaging in an indirect enabling activity; an
invisible hand trying to create as engaging in an indirect enabling
activity; an invisible hand trying to create the most favourable
social context for managers to interact as smoothly as possible. It is
captured by the comment: 'It doesn't matter which business school we
use, as long as all our managers come out talking the same language'.
The problem with this rationale is that one is never sure whether the
ends being pursued are functional or social. It may be to help the
management team to work together better, or it may be to signal that
the team is more united than it is--an outer cloak of uniformity and
respectability to reinforce some managerial image or stereotype. From
a functional perspective, it is evident that managers must share some
concepts and values, otherwise they would never be able to
communicate, convince or decide. At the same time, there has to be
some diversity and debate among managers for innovation and change to
occur. The realistic question is how much of each is enough, and that
realism must take into account the unique circumstances of each
organisation.
However, when there are uncritical beliefs that 'problem-solving would
be easier if there was less conflict in the company', or 'we should
try to develop a tight culture like the Japanese do', it suggests that
it may be image rather than realism which is being chased.
Furthermore, some of that image would appear to be a consequence of
managers blandly accepting the prescriptions of much of the
'excellence' literally and the persuasive unitarism so prevalent in
the HRM movement. In these circumstances, the expectation of
management development--and especially management education--would
appear to be that it should act more as a type of social grease, a
lubricant, to help convey. the illusion that diverse organisational
functions as well specialists are integrated in an orders' manner and
are interfacing smoothly with one another. A poignant and defeatist
illustration of how image can champion over realism cable from the
management development manager of a recession hit traditional
engineering company who, caught of guard, remarked that: 'Even if the
company goes to the dogs, at least I will have achieved something if
we all go down like gentlemen'.
5. POLITICAL REINFORCEMENT
In the textbook model of management development, the criteria for
deciding on the development needs of managers are those traits and
qualities and competencies which usually appear on performance
appraisal documentation. These criteria are derived from decades of
research into management; they are supposedly neutral, and they convey
the illusion that judgments are being made in a detached, objective,
even scientific manner. In the political model, the criteria for
judging organisational health and management development needs are
defined and articulated by a chief executive or a small group of
senior personnel, and management development acts as an extension of
the organization's political order. It becomes tightly coupled to
reinforcing a partisan, internal perception of how organisational
performance is to be improved, and is used to reinforce the political
credibility of those who are shaping the organisational vision.
In recent years, there has been no shortage of, for example,
culture-change programs being articulated by chief executives as
necessary for corporate survival, with management schools falling into
line behind them--sometimes with only the haziest understanding of how
the companies operated or indeed whether the diagnoses were
accurate--or of companies asserting that their new corporate
strategies required greater eligibility and adaptability down the
line, and management schools having to second-guess the details of
these strategies in order to formulate educational programmes. Also
during the last decade there have many examples, especially in the
manufacturing sector, of corporate turn-arounds being driven by a
succession of high profile chief executives, whose sometimes rather
dubious beliefs how to attain corporate effectiveness became dogmas to
be incorporated into management education and training--only to be
replaced by a different set of dogmas after the next boardroom
reshuffle. And recently in the NHS, a sizeable amount of management
development would appear to be nothing more than a reflection of the
transient ideology of the current political paymasters.
It can, of course, be argued that all management education is
political in the sense that it reinforces commitment to employment,
hierarchy, and taken-for-granted understandings about what management
is all about. Anthony in particular comments on how management
education perpetuates a view of management as a rational order,
reduces moral responsibility into functional preoccupations, turns
achievement into a totem, denies the contradictions of capitalism, and
generally serves to reinforce the status and comfort of management as
an elite social grouping. When managers believe in this orthodoxy or
are given few opportunities to question it, the process of political
socialisation can remain undetected. They go along with it without any
sense of going against the grain. But when the aims of a course are
organisationally partisan, and especially when managers may be
sympathetic to an alternative strategy or management style, the
contradictions in the process can become increasingly evident. In
these circumstances, managers are likely to question what they are
being asked to accept, yet by doing so can find themselves in a
classic double bind. If they go along with it, they become
increasingly uncomfortable. For some, the solution lies in greater
immersion in social science literature; for others it lies in new
pastures. The paradox is that critical thought can be anathema to
corporate politics, yet corporate politics can be one of the best
stimulants of critical thoughts.
6. ORGANISATIONAL INHERITANCE
Moving even further from a performance emphasis towards the other
strands in management development, this rationale justifies management
development activity in terms of holding out the key to an
organisational inheritance--that it is a neutral and dispassionate
gatekeeper to organisational succession and career fulfilment. This
rationale is illuminated particularly by performance appraisal
activities when managers recommend or decide on who among their staff
is to be chosen for promotion and who is not. Central to this argument
are the twin concepts of sponsored and contest mobility. Sponsored
mobility holds that social progress depends on prior nomination or
mentoring by a superior authority, and once this has happened, the
person is deemed to have passed some entry requirement into an elite
grouping. This depiction captures the reality of succession in many
organisations, in that promotion decisions may depend less on the
performance record of candidates and more upon who is backing them,
upon their internal political leanings, and upon 'whether their face
fits'. The rules of promotion are political and contingent, opening
the process to accusations of favouritism, nepotism, unfair
discrimination and crude bootlicking.
Contest mobility on the other hand is non-elitist. It holds that
social progression is like a race, with entry open to all, with fair
rules and impartial judges, and rewards distributed strictly according
to merit. All who enter have an equal opportunity to demonstrate their
abilities, and the entire process is open to independent scrutiny.
This is the alternative image which management development tries to
give to the management of career and succession. It tries to set
objective criteria for each stage of the process from performance
appraisal through to post-course evaluation, and by doing so tries to
signal that the process is open, fair and democratic. The illusion
which it tries to foster is that there is equality of opportunity in
the organisation, although often the best that it can achieve is to be
a civilising influence, smoothing the movement of people through a
political order.
Thus, when management development managers are asked to what extent
they can achieve the ideals of management development--i.e. that its
system of activities will get the right person in the right place at
the right time and managing in the right way--they usually shy away
and say, well, they cannot really achieve this. It is more of an
aspiration than an attainable reality. They will concede that
succession (and termination) decisions at any level have always been
the prerogative of a more senior management, who assess performance in
some way known only to themselves and who make their decisions
accordingly. When probed how far they can influence such decisions,
the answer is usually an ambivalent 'maybe'--possibly up to certain
levels, but not beyond. If probed further and asked if the countless
hundreds of performance appraisal forms completed every year are
systematically analysed to pro-actively set the managerial succession
agenda, a surprising number will start to look uncomfortable and
quietly admit no. Often the information collected does no more than
support and legitimate decisions which have already been made. Indeed,
it is not uncommon for performance appraisal documents to simply
gather dust in filing cabinets or be used to augment personnel
records. And when recession and redundancy hit a company--as happened
to many during the 1980s--how prominent is the wealth of performance
and appraisal information collected by management development in
deciding, objectively and systematically, which managers stay and
which are asked to leave? In some companies, the information does
contribute significantly. In others, if management development has not
itself been contracted, the company may find that its entire collected
records are overlooked and a crude last-in-first-out policy is brought
into operation.
This explains some of the ambiguity which managers have towards
management development, going along with it only half-heartedly, and
unsure whether they want to be developed through its activities.
Managers recognise that the political domain determines succession,
yet they continue to give some credence to the system. When they
believe that their stars are on the rise, they may judge that their
careers can progress without any assistance from management
development. But when they feel they are trapped or being by-passed,
management development can hold out considerable promise and hope. The
existence of the function and the enactment of its procedures offers
the promise of development and eligibility for promotion. There is a
sense that the individual is not lost to the organisation. Somewhere
there is a record of his or her achievements and capabilities.
This ambiguity can also be witnessed on many management development
programmes. Some managers approach the task on the assumption that
they need to 'prove' themselves to the relevant authorities. Others,
and especially those sponsored by their employers, sometimes manifest
the 'crown prince' complex. The act of sponsoring is perceived as
already holding out the promise of a greater share of the
organisational inheritance, and as a result they may not feel any need
to stretch themselves on the courses. When in this frame of mind, any
course material which does not have a sufficiently high level of
functional relevance is often dismissed, and learning experiences
which do not reinforce the image managers may have of their future
importance may well be discredited.
7. ENVIRONMENTAL LEGITIMACY
The argument of the environmental determinists holds that a sizeable
amount of organisational structure exists, not to control performance
at the technical core of organisations, as much of organisation
management theory holds, but instead to signal conformity with
environmental myths and to confer legitimacy on the organisation from
external constituencies. This is especially relevant to management
development. As management development has evolved during recent
decades, it has progressively become equated with the realisation of
the ideals of advanced industrial societies. Drucker as one of the
earliest to capture this when he described management development as
having a three-fold responsibility--to the enterprise, to society and
to the individual--and that a feature of this responsibility was to
make work and industry more than just a way of making a living. Both
should become a way of life. It follows that when there is such a
strong environmental myth concerning the possibilities of management
development, any organisation which does not have a department
labelled 'management development', or which does not enact those
procedures and activities which are regarded as being representative
of management development, then it runs the risk of losing legitimacy
in the wider environment, irrespective of the efficacy of the
management development department in realising its espoused goals.
When such considerations are significant in corporate thinking, there
are preoccupations with ensuring that managers are kept up to date
with the latest trends in organisational thought and practice, that
there are visible fast-tracks for rapid promotion, and much public
demonstration of career and succession planning. When there is a
strong environmental myth of managers as an elite social grouping,
then management development will act to reinforce the progressive
elitism of the organisational hierarchy. When the myth of
professionalism is strong, again management and development may want
to cultivate a professional stereotype of managerial activity. And
when unfavourable comparisons are made concerning the provision of
management education and training in competitor countries--or even
within a country--environmental legitimacy requires at the very least
a signal of intent from management development that it will emulate
the competition. Indeed, when viewed from this perspective, the recent
Handy and Constable/McCormick reports appear to be no more than a very
public celebration of some of the more popular environmental myths
surrounding management education and development, offering very little
of substance for improving corporate performance and industrial
competitiveness.
8. COMPENSATION
The idea of management development activity offering some form of
compensation for the deprivations of employment has received little
attention to date, although it is consistent with recent developments
in the role of the corporate training function. In some companies the
function has redefined its responsibility from the traditional task of
providing training aimed directly at improving job performances,
towards a broader remit of training as a type of welfare substitute.
The evidence for this shift comes particularly from those
manufacturing companies that offer relatively indiscriminate support
for recreational and non-vocational courses which have little to do
with the core business--handicrafts, gardening, languages, cookery,
even sheep farming. These actions are open to differing
interpretations. The companies will justify them on two grounds. The
first is that they help create a 'learning organisation'--that in
times of change employees need to acquire the habit of learning and to
keep it in practice. The second is that it is a non-threatening first
step towards self-development for employees unaccustomed to learning.
These are solid Functional-Performance justifications. By
incorporating two of the more recent trends in management development,
the 'learning organisation' and self-development, Environmental
Legitimacy is also satisfied.
However, managers from these companies often reveal other agendas and
justifications which open their actions to interpretations of
patronage and paternalism. One common articulation is that the
companies are trying to make work and the workplace more bearable by
providing an alternative focus of interest for employees. This
suggests that they may be trying to reach those parts of the workforce
which employment has failed to satisfy by providing a palliative for
alienation rather than a remedy. There is thus a dynamic operating on
two different levels in the personnel/HRM area. At one level, there is
the managerial acceptance of responsibility by encouraging the habit
of learning. At another level there is the managerial retreat from
responsibility. (Anthony, 1986). Rather than trying to remedy the
corporate causes of worker alienation, the retreat would appear to be
towards paternalism and substitute gratifications aimed more at
reducing employee turnover.
There is also evidence of patronage of a different kind in the
management education and development spheres. The drive towards
internal accreditation of managers through in-company management
education programmes can be seen in this light, neatly illustrated by
the personnel director of one such company, who, sceptical about the
efficacy of management education, observed that 'it is good that these
chaps who have spent so long with the firm have at last got something
to show for it'. In another, civil service context, the management
development manager conceded that much of what his sponsored managers
had learned would be difficult to apply on the job. 'They can't change
much, but it is good for them to have the mental stimulation of
courses now and again. It keeps them on their toes'. Similar
justifications can be found behind the support for alternative forms
of development such as outward bound courses or meditation weekends.
Indeed, there is often an uneasy combination of thinking in respect of
such activities; that the expected stimulation is to be partly a
reward, an end in itself, and partly a hoped-for means of improving
functional performance. Finally, there are those managers who are
judged unlikely to move further in their careers, yet their seniors
continue to sponsor them onto courses to maintain their motivation and
commitment to the organisation. Anthony in particular questions the
mortality of such deception, as well as the use of education for such
purposes.
9. PSYCHIC DEFENCE
When managers argue that hands-on experience and learning by doing,
rather than formal education or training, are the best forms of
development, it invites the question of how far they are prepared to
allow their own staff to develop by trial-and-error on the job.
Typical responses include the risk to organisational order; the fear
of the possible consequences when their own appraisals happen; that it
is dangerous to encourage staff to question things too much; and that
staff could 'take over' if they were not stopped. Yet the message of
management development is to encourage managers to seek and compete
for upward mobility, to take greater risks and to critically question
all that is around them. In any manager, therefore, there is the fear
that those below might usurp his or her position or withdraw support
entirely. Simultaneously, in the same manager there is the urge to
topple the authority figures above and assume their position for the
self.
In these circumstances, management development can act as a defence
against those anxieties which can arise from the competitive career
drives among managers. Although not articulated in these terms, at the
unconscious or dimly-conscious levels there often lurks a fear that if
open competition were to break out and the latent emotions of envy,
greed and hatred were to manifest themselves, disorder and chaos would
ensue. At these levels, the need is for social systems to defend the
psyche against persecutory anxiety. Management development can act in
this capacity, containing and dissipating the persecutory anxiety
which energises such latent behaviours and the thoughts about their
potential consequences. The periodical enactment of appraisal
procedures with their superficially objective rating scales, target
setting, and illusions of democracy and participation, all serve to
reduce the fear of disorder and chaos by giving the appearance of an
ordered system of managerial succession. IN McLuhan's terminology,
management development acts as a cool medium to smooth and render
invisible those emotions and drives which could be socially
destructive.
The role of management education from this perspective is interesting.
Essentially, it acts as a psychological safety valve for managers in
their relationship with both superiors and subordinates. In
relationships with managers below, the fear of being overthrown by
them or the fear of allowing them to develop by experimentation
on-the-job, are all displaced into an external location and onto an
external authority to manage. Similarly displaced are the upward
competitive drives to challenge authority, to overthrow superiors and
to possess a higher level of job content. In other words, management
education allows managers a safe situation to discharge such impulses
and emotions by giving them access to a more strategic level of
organisational thinking and a sense of greater participation in
strategic matters. Whatever fantasies they might have about their own
power and possibilities, these can all be acted out and indulged
without disturbing the organisational order. For those with few
promotion prospects they can nevertheless feel they have got half-way
there. For others destined for promotion, it can reduce their fears
about coping when their time comes. Both can feel that they have
gained out of it, because both have produced thoughts about themselves
in higher positions to carry away and preserve for reinforcing their
self-images. It is a classic example of how thought, rather than
action, can contain and discharge persecutory anxiety and the impulses
deriving from it, for the maintenance of social order.
10. CEREMONIAL
Finally, management development can be viewed as solemn ceremony to
legitimise and confirm the social progress of managers through the
organisation. If organisational succession is seen as the planned and
ordered movement of managers through a series of status passages, the
activities of management development can be viewed as ritual which
serves to confirm such passages and enhance the social standing of the
manager. The rituals certify the manager and his or her potential
capabilities in advance of these being demonstrated in the new
position. They also serve a broader social function of binding the
manager further into the organisation by publicly celebrating those
critical dimensions of the culture which the manager is deemed to
represent. The 'excellence' literature in particular has copious
examples of conferences, conventions and award-giving ceremonies all
serving to reinforce totems in corporate cultures as well as
celebrating the achievements of selected individuals.
Ritual, regrettably, has been marginalised in contemporary social
thought and devalued by technological and managerial elites. To the
extent that it is recognised, it is mainly as ritualism--the cold,
sterile enactment of procedures without belief or conviction about
their content and purpose. Much of management development activity can
fall into this category; indeed, a classic analysis of ritualism in
performance appraisal is given by Pym. Management education, however,
is much closer to real or authentic ritual and is approached as such
by many managers, almost as a form of religion. The rituals of
management education serve to incorporate managers more closely into a
priesthood of organisational thinkers whose knowledge is believed to
hold the key to personal and organisational success, and thereby to
sanctify them (in a corporate sense) for their journey through the
hierarchy. The symbolism of the ritual, therefore, lies both in the
outer form and the inner content. The outer form confirms the status
passage and celebrates corporate values and beliefs. The inner content
has to do with the meanings managers attach to the rituals, and is
often more in terms of their significance for enriching the inner
psyche--the recognition and enhanced prestige, the sense of
fulfilment, and the confirmation of the imaged potency of the self.
Functional-performance considerations are the least of their thoughts.
SOME IMPLICATIONS
These ten thumb-nail sketches of the rationales surrounding management
development, it must be repeated, have all been found to exist in the
internal justificatory rhetoric for sanctioning investment in
management development in a wide variety of organisations. They occur
in so many combinations (indeed, different rationales can be
articulated by different people in the same organisation) as to point
to management development being a massively overdetermined set of
activities. Behind the normative function-performance justification
lies a whole spectrum of alternative agendas--social, political,
legitimatory, mythical, symbolic and defensive. One can never be sure
which one, or which combination, is driving the activities at any
time. All this points to management development being a classic
example of a loosely-coupled world. It can mean different things to
different managers at different levels. Managers can commit themselves
to it, and then pull out, whenever they choose. They can claim 'that's
my goal' whenever they want, as many times as they want, for as many
goals they want. The referees are often unable to enforce the rules.
All involved require to construct and negotiate some kind of social
reality they can live with. And the entire process is conducted as if
it all made sense.
These considerations pose massive problems if evaluation of any
management development activity is attempted, not least because one
can never be sure which rationale, or combination of rationales, might
be contributing to detected changes in job performance. Educators and
trainers proceeding on functional-performance assumptions and tight
means-ends couplings are likely to believe that any changes in
managerial performance levels are as a direct result of their inputs
and efforts. This is perfectly possible. But it is equally possible
that one or more other factors may also be required to catalyse the
changes, or that one of these others may be the primary stimulant and
not the educational input. Indeed, different managers on the same
programme and from the same organisation may require a different set
of stimuli for improving their on-the-job performance. All this must
seriously question the validity of any evaluation which attempts to
directly correlate course content with subsequent job performance.
However, if the faces appear to become less legitimate and defensible
as they move further away from the functional, that is to misread
their significance. Managerial effectiveness, and by extension
corporate effectiveness, hinges on the development of all facets of
the managerial personality; not just the rational and the functional
but also the social, mythical, legitimatory, emotional and spiritual
dimensions. These are often given insufficient attention in management
development, being either ignored or dismissed as insignificant. Yet
their importance in making managers feel whole, rather than simply
corporate functionaries with enhanced competencies, is immense.
Finally, and perhaps of most significance, is the awareness of how few
of these alternative rationales have appeared in the mainstream
literature on management development. Storey's introductory quotation
is taken form a near-comprehensive review of some 250 recent articles
and monographs on management development intended, inter alia, 'to
provide researchers with a platform from which future departures can
be made'. Yet the content of this review is so predominantly in the
functional-performance tradition that it is difficult to envisage how
alternative departures might be made form it. Of the countless
thousands of educators, trainers and consultants in the field of
management development, many of whom have contributed so fully to the
volumes on management and organisation, it is curious that so few have
chosen to analyse their own field of practice. For those keen to do
so, this article might help them to begin.
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