Christopher Mabey

Management Development Key Differences between Small and Large Businesses in Europe

Driven by concerns over Europes competitive position in global markets, the role of leadership and management in boosting efficiency, productivity and innovation in European firms has moved up the public policy agenda. However, small firm participation in formal management development has been significantly lower than that for large organizations. The main focus of this article is on management training and development as a strategic activity. Seven partners in Britain, Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, Spain and Romania, took part in the LEONARDO programmes European Management Development project. Each surveyed structured samples of 100 firms, interviewing at least one senior manager and one line manager in each firm. This article contrasts the 191 small firms (20–100 employees) with 201 large firms (500 or more employees). The main contrasts in management development practices were partly due to size effects but also partly due to key differences in strategic approaches to management development.

Experiencing human resource management

Foreword - John Monks PART ONE:INTRODUCTION Experiencing HRM - Timothy Clark, Denise Skinner and Christopher Mabey The Importance of the Inside Story The Morality of HRM - Karen Legge PART TWO: QUALITY AND CULTURE CHANGE PROGRAMMES Empowerment through Quality Management - Chris Rees Employee Accounts from Inside a Bank, a Hotel and Two Factories Total Quality Management - Linda Glover and Deborah Fitzgerald Moore Shop Floor Perspectives Changing Corporate Culture - Graeme Martin, Phil Beaumont and Harry Staines Paradoxes and Tensions in Local Authority PART THREE: THE PERCEIVED IMPACT OF HRM ON PRODUCTIVITY AND PERFORMANCE Training and Development at an Agro Chemical Plant - Jason Heyes View from the Bridge and Life on Deck - Aisling Kelly and Kathy Monks Contrasts and Contradictions in Performance-Related Pay Culture Change within a Regional Business Network - Julia Connell and Suzanne Ryan PART FOUR: HRM PROVIDING CHOICES AND OPPORTUNITIES Strategic Integration and Industrial Relations in Greenfield Sites - Patrick Gunnigle and Michael Morley From Public Sector Employees to Portfolio Workers - Mary Mallon Pioneers of New Careers? Diversity Climates and Gendered Cultures - Paul Iles, Elisabeth Wilson and Deborah Hicks-Clarke A Cross Sector Analysis A Trail of Clues for Graduate Trainees - Diane Preston and Cathy Hart Inside or Outside HRM? Lateral Learning in Two Voluntary Sector Organizations - Rona S Beattie and Marilyn McDougall PART FIVE: CONCLUSION Getting the Story Straight - Christopher Mabey, Timothy Clark and Denise Skinner

Mapping Management Development Practice

Research on management development has been characterized by broad surveys of training activity, in–depth analyses of development methods and, more occasionally, attempts to evaluate the impact of training investment. The result is a fragmentary picture of management development practice, providing incomplete insight into why certain policies and activities succeed or fail. Drawing upon a large sample of those responsible for human resource development in their organizations, this paper proposes a theoretical framework which attempts to identify the key variables in a more coherent and comprehensive manner. The HRM context of a firm is found to be highly responsible for the management development processes it adopts; the amount of training undertaken is largely determined by priority, and, in turn, amount is the key determinant of perceived success.

‘In the name of capability’: A critical discursive evaluation of competency-based management development

This article illustrates a number of ways in which competency or capability-based management development (CBMD) can work simultaneously both for and against the interests of organizational agents. It does so by demonstrating how CBMD might usefully be understood as both ideological and quasi-religiously faith-based. These features are shown to provide opportunities for resistance and micro-emancipation alongside those for repression and subordination. The study employs a combination of ‘middle range’ discourse analytical techniques. In the first instance, critical discourse analysis is applied to company documentation to distil the ideological stance of an international organization’s CBMD programme. Critical discursive psychology is then used to assess the ways in which employees’ evaluative accounts both support and resist such stance. The analysis builds upon previous insights from Foucauldian studies of CBMD by foregrounding processes of discursive agency. It also renders more visible and discussible the assumptions and dilemmas that CBMD might imply.

The Determinants of Management Development: Choice or Circumstance?

The survey of management development used as the basis of this analysis was designed to build on the outcomes of three reports published just over a decade ago.1 The Constable-McCormick report, The Making of British Managers, and the Handy report, The Making of Managers , were both published in April 1987, following shortly after the Mangham and Silver report (1986). Together, the three reports provided by far the most comprehensive framework of research and recommendations up to that point into the development, training, and education of managers. The reports were complementary in content and conclusions, with the Mangham and Silver and Constable-McCormick reports based on the detailed analysis of aspects of the situation in Britain, and the Handy report a comparative survey of management development in five countries the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Each of the reports found substantial weaknesses in Britains system of management development, both in its own context and especially in comparison to their main competitors. All also noted the implications of ineffective management development for British economic efficiency and competitiveness and saw it as a potential, if partial, cause of

Knowledge leadership in global scientific research

Despite burgeoning literature on knowledge transfer, relatively little is known about how strategic knowledge is created and exchanged and, specifically, the influence of leadership in stimulating and marshalling successful innovation. We frame this process as a dynamic capability that is primarily inter-organisational; it is also highly complex, hard to grasp and hard to imitate and calls for knowledge leadership, a qualitatively different kind of leadership from that which characterises more traditional industrial economies. This poses particular challenges for human resource (HR) specialists seeking to promote knowledge leadership across institutional and cultural boundaries. We report on preliminary findings from interviews with scientists working in a global particle physics experiment being conducted in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (an abbreviation of the French version of European Organisation for Nuclear Research), Switzerland. Given that this collaboration (a global set of loosely coupled, non-hierarchical networks) is prototypical of many international knowledge-based enterprises, the findings will help to inform the HR requirements for successful knowledge leadership.

Leadership in crisis: ‘Events, my dear boy, events’

In this paper we discuss the theme for the 2009 8th International Conference on Studying Leadership (ICSL): Leadership in Crisis, which was hosted by the Centre for Leadership at the University of Birmingham (CLUB). We introduce five papers chosen from the conference which make up this special issue and that engage with different facets or manifestations of crisis — in context, method and theory. Prior to introducing the papers we offer our own reflections on the theme of crisis and its implications for new theorizing in leadership. In our necessarily brief review of the topic we suggest there is cause for optimism and opportunity to move forward — as is exemplified in the contributions we chose for this issue. We suggest crisis is inevitable, as summed up by the phrase ‘events, my dear boy’ — Harold MacMillan’s tongue-in-cheek answer when asked what was the biggest challenge facing him as a leader. At the same time, we identify three challenges in relation to current leadership studies. First, how to elevate the collective and the contextual dimensions of leadership without losing sight of the individual. Second, how to conduct ontologically diverse research which nevertheless promotes dialogue with less favoured and familiar discourses. Third, given the local and time-bound prism through which we access social phenomena, how to make the most of glimpses at crisis through occasional slivers of light.

A Six Year Longitudinal Study of Graduate Expectations: The Implications for Company Recruitment and Selection Strategies

All job extrants formulate a set of expectations about what a new job will be like. A least in part, these expectations are shaped by their experience of the organizations selection process. What impact do these early impressions have upon subsequent job attitudes and behaviour? This article reports the findings of a longitudinal study of UK graduates from a few weeks prior to organizational entry to five or six years after commencing employment. Both the level of pre‐entry expectations and the congruency of these expectations with work experience are found to correlate with subsequent job satisfaction and organizational commitment. More support is found for the congruent expectations hypotheses, and the implications of this for company selection and socialization strategies are discussed.

Reflections on leadership and place

Drawing upon the preceding articles in this issue, we propose a multiple discourses approach to the study of contemporary leadership and place-shaping literatures with the intention of encouraging researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to engage more self-consciously with the discursive frames within which they work. We argue that this is no mere intellectual exercise, but is crucial for garnering and combining the fruits of work in the (hitherto) parallel fields of leadership and place-making, where theorising has been fragmented and underemphasised, respectively. The approach seeks to reveal the different ways that ‘place’ is constructed, surfacing the tacit assumptions and aspects of leadership of place invoked. In the second section, we identify schools of leadership theory that directly speak to the notion of place, and use these discursive assumptions to re-interrogate the case studies featured in the previous articles. Third, armed with this discursive framework and illuminated by episodes from these contemporary stories of leading in a variety of places, we offer some research pointers to take this immature and exciting field forward.

A labour market perspective on management training and development in Europe

This paper uses recent survey data to undertake a comparative analysis of management development across six Western European countries. Unlike most studies that compare management development practices, we rely on an institutional labour market perspective to compare managerial skills development and training. We suggest that, while there are few differences in terms of the priority firms from different countries give to developing managers, the methods that are used and skill profiles can differ considerably. Furthermore, institutional change may also challenge some conventional views of how managers are being developed. We conclude by distinguishing four country systems that reflect a series of common characteristic strengths and weaknesses of national managerial training systems.