Is there a new path to advancing the art and science of management?
After scanning the management literature, an interplanetary visitor to Earth might reasonably ask: how much of what is written on management has contributed positively to the sum of human knowledge? Whether it is the formal academic literature or the practitioner literature, our curious guest might read the literature with the not unreasonable hope that he or she might learn something new, insightful, or even helpful. Unfortunately, they are likely to be disappointed.
Our caller might observe that many people are engaged in management and that it is a substantial and important part of the daily lives of the planet’s inhabitants. Indeed, work and organisation might be described as one of the more important endeavours in modern society. However, there seems to be little convincing evidence the understanding or practice of management has advanced. Certainly, it has not advanced in relation to the considerable investment that is put into thinking, researching and communicating on every conceivable aspect of work, the workplace, the workforce or how it is organised. There needs to be a new path to advancing the art and science of management.
This chapter will raise more questions than it answers, maybe because it is not a piece by a management academic. It makes assertions, draws selectively from the literature, is philosophical and historical, and it asks the reader to compare and contrast what is raised here with their own experience. Most of all it asks the reader to reflect, expand and question. The intention is to set an intellectual and philosophical background for what follows in the remainder of this book. It is hoped the observations made here, and the questions that are raised, might be carried by the reader not only through the contents of this book but also back to the workplace.
This approach means the perspective of the author is important and should be stated up front. I have been raised in the scientist-practitioner model, which after years of practice means I am no longer sure I am either. Daily I am required to provide managers with evidence to support decision making but also for injecting new ways of thinking about work and organisation into a large public sector organisation. I am also a leader and manager looking to constantly improve my own practice.
I feel torn and conflicted about whether leaders and managers make any difference at all in the workplace, reflecting daily on the question: are leaders as important as we make them out to be? I am an avid reader of the academic and practitioner literature but have come to feel that both are stale and directionless. I work with managers every day, from the experienced to the new, wondering why the experienced have chosen to stop learning. I really worry about the new leaders and managers questioning whether they are learning the ‘right things’ in the ‘right ways’. When I was a management consultant I was deeply concerned about the immediacy of the environment and the provision of shallow advice on issues that were in reality deep, embedded, complicated and philosophical. So, this chapter has a cathartic quality to it. It is reflective, seeking to offer the chance to surface shared concerns.
We might take as our first issue the considerable effort that is devoted to describing how things are but which does not seem to help with the question of how to do things better. By way of example, in 2008 Wayne Casico and Herman Aguinis reviewed 45 years of literature on industrial and organisational [I-O] psychology concluding that:
On the basis of our review, if we extrapolate past emphases in published research to the next 10 years, we are confronted with one compelling conclusion, namely, that I–O psychology will not be out front in influencing the debate on issues that are (or will be) of broad organizational and societal appeal. It will not produce a substantial body of research that will inform HR practitioners, senior managers, or outside stakeholders, such as funding agencies, public policymakers (including elected officials), or university administrators who control budgets. (2008, p.1074)
More recently, in a review of the literature on employee engagement, a sceptical David Guest concludes his review with the observation that:
…it is puzzling and disappointing that this strong evidence is largely ignored by organisations. Possible explanations include the failure of the academic voice to be heard above the voices of consultants, the lack of interest in individual-issues, the absence of any attempt to link work engagement to financial outcomes and a disinterest in evidence. Whatever the reasons, a central argument of this paper has been that employee engagement lives in two very different worlds, with different discourses and these separate existences are a loss to both engagement communities but more particularly for those who would wish to promote organizational employee engagement. (2014, p.151)
In a variety of ways exasperated and distressed academics express concern to each other that only a modest portion of the intellectual and practical effort undertaken by them ever captures the imagination of practicing managers. Or maybe, the subterranean concern is that it does not get read at all. This sentiment from academics is often followed by quietly envious statements about the grip consultants seem to have over managers and is accompanied by passive disdain for the dubious research these organisations conduct.
There is also considerable evidence for concern about the lack of theoretical rigour, openness to critic review and the relevance of the conclusions drawn from consultant driven research. David Guest makes this point clearly in relation to the widely marketed and used Gallup 12 survey:
Although the survey items may point to the antecedents of job satisfaction, there is no theoretical basis comparable to the job demand – resources model to help explain and justify the potential policy levers. However, this has not stopped organizations from enthusiastically using the Gallup 12 measure and as engagement attracted more attention several other consultancies developed their own proprietary measures of engagement and marketed them on the same basis as Gallup, namely the association between higher scores on the measure and higher organisational performance, and the need to address the “engagement deficit. (2014, pp.147-48)
There are real concerns about the quality of the ‘research’ marketed and sold by consultants, but that is not the core of the issue. The issue for academics is more profound and difficult. Most practicing managers are not even aware that the academic community is concerned and distressed. While the majority of managers would recognise the Gallup Company and the findings of the Gallup survey, far fewer managers would be able to name a prominent management academic and associate that person with an insight that has helped managers to improve their performance.
At best, a lot of what is done in academic management research contributes obscure and abstract additions to the body of management knowledge. At worst, it is all the same knowledge (ever more finely diced) reflected in an academic hall of mirrors. It is barely comprehensible to managers and as such deemed to be of no practical value.
Unfortunately, the practitioner literature is in a more parlous state. Here, those working as managers—who should be the focal point for applying the accumulated wisdom of academics, consultants and other practitioners—are treated to dumbed-down morsels of insight that are packaged for quick digestion. They are provided with a list-based, in-flight magazine approach to knowledge an imagined sample of titles might include ‘10 tips on active leadership’ or ‘5 steps to effective change management’ or ‘8 ways to motivate Gen X’. The crumb of knowledge passes undigested through the manager’s system leaving no trace of its existence. Indeed, it briefly distracts the valuable digestive attention of the manager from more productive tasks.
The management fads embodied in such ‘headlines’ are an interesting phenomenon—the way they arise, the way they are embraced, and the impact they can have on the thinking of a generation of managers (Miller, Hartwick, & Le Breton-Miller, 2004). By way of example, think on the lasting impact of management fads such as ‘excellence’ (Peters and Waterman, 1982), ‘knowledge management’ (Nonaka, 1991), ‘just-in-time’ (Ohno, 1988), ‘business process reengineering’ (Champy, 1993), ‘the learning organisation’ (Senge, 1990) or ‘management by objectives’ (Odiorne, 1965). Interestingly, at the core of these fads is good quality academic research. It is what they evolve into that makes them a fad.
Broadly, a management fad can be recognised by the way it offers a simple but comprehensive theory to explain a complex workplace experience such as strategy, change, performance or learning. However, the simplicity of the central idea is cloaked in a special language that hints at a privileged knowledge of the solution to a problem that has long plagued all managers. For example, my own experience of the trajectory of the learning organisation through my own career as a manager may illustrate the key points. The learning organisation was popularised by Peter Senge (1990). It sought to deal with the fragmentation of knowledge within modern organisations, which was (and remains) a problem for all managers.
The learning organisation concept was accompanied by its own language, including ‘personal mastery, ‘mental models’ and ‘shared vision’. The literature underpinning the core concept was sound at its core. Senge was drawing on the work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schon (1978). However, as it grew into a fad more consultants and self-proclaimed experts took on the advocacy of the central ideas. Concurrently, the supporting evidence seemed to become increasingly anecdotal. In particular, there was an increased reliance on story-based case studies to illustrate key points. Indeed, as an aside, many fads might be seen as ‘just-so’ stories or narrative explanations of manager experiences that are unverifiable or not falsifiable. Implementing learning organisation concepts that were largely intangible proved a significant barrier for day-to-day managers (Finger and Brand, 1999). Today, the learning organisation is rarely a topic of conversation among managers and but the problem of ‘organisational learning’ and its corollary ‘knowledge management’ (which followed the same evolutionary trajectory as a fad at about the same time) persists. As an area of research interest for academics, interest in the idea remains. For managers, the learning organisation has been supplanted by new fads many times over in the last 25 years.
This is not to say management fads are of no value. Within each fad is there is a body of high quality research into previously unasked questions. The learning organisation is a good example of this. Fads also alert managers to new ways of thinking about the practice of management. Again, the learning organisation drew attention to the impact on performance of fragmented knowledge and provided some useful ways of understanding the issues. However, when good ideas and good research become fads they also tend to become thin, derivative, repetitive and banal. The meaning and practical application is quickly lost.
The persistent obsession with influential management fads (or maybe more correctly ‘management fashions’) that subsequently prove to be incorrect, or in need of qualification, is difficult to kill off in the minds of managers. The ideas seem to become fossilised in the mind of managers and evolve into touchstones to be used in times of uncertainty. Yet, the speed with which fads are embraced is testament to the voracious thirst for knowledge among managers about work and organisation. And, the issues they address should be matters for wider engagement, debate and conversation. Fads do, at their core, tap into the deep concerns of managers. Importantly, they often provide managers with ‘checklists’ to guide managerial practice. It is easy to ridicule the simplicity of checklists, but in other professions, for example aviation and medicine, checklists are central to expert practice.
Recently, Atul Gawande argued that where simple checklists were introduced into the practice of eight hospitals from London and Toronto to Delhi to Tanzania the reduction in patient complications reduced on average by 35 percent and average reductions in deaths was 47 percent. While these reductions could not be attributed only to the use of checklists, it is likely that checklists are a tangible and regular expression of the important practice standards of the prevailing organisational system, and ultimately, key to a professional culture of expert practice. Management would benefit from more recognised and widely used standards and it may be that some fads satisfy the manager’s desire for a simple management checklists. So, fads may be meeting a practical demand that is not satisfied by the academic community.
Management is a deeply pragmatic activity. It is predominately learned through practice rather than education. Indeed, for many managers the specifics of management education comes well after they have been practicing. This differs from the professions where education is requirement prior to practice. Consequently, for most managers the ‘truth’ of management is that they must make do with the information that is available to practice management. Interestingly, as a philosophy, pragmatism has its roots in a reaction to the abstract, technical and absolutist philosophies of the late 19th century. This is an also adequate description of the view practicing managers have of management academics.
At its core, pragmatism is the perspective of the participant as opposed to the perspective of observer. The truth of management practice is arrived through some combination of: a. the common understanding that we arrive at collectively through practice, b. the truth that can be asserted from the available evidence (usually a combination of prior experience and what is readily to hand), and c. what works to solve the problem. It is a philosophy and approach that is heavily embedded in the moment.
However, there are also some inconvenient truths in the workplace that exist independent of pragmatic efforts of managers. Issues and problems that as they keep recurring are managed around rather than addressed and resolved. Human behaviour contains some immovable facts that cannot be solved through a pragmatic approach alone. For example, people are heterogeneous which confounds the need for stability and consistency on in organisational systems. People make mistakes (the curse of human fallibility) which introduces destabilising errors into operations. People are prone to an extraordinary range of decision biases that lead to faulty judgements. So, there remains a need to pursue the deeper truths of people, work and organisation that need to continue to explored, and managers are not best placed to lead these investigations.
Management practitioners can take the anti-intellectual streak of pragmatism to new levels. There are too many examples of extravagant managerial interpretation. An ‘I know boats’ mindset that leads managers to ignore facts in favour of ‘doing something’ occurs too frequently not to be concerned about the dangers of anti-intellectualism in the practice of management. The continuing struggle to gain traction with the idea and practice of evidence-based policy in management would seem to support this view (Rousseau, 2006).
Pervasive information technology has ensured that a broader management group has access to real-time information about the business the workforce, market, competitors and business trends. The sense of speed and the need for responsiveness has moved from upper echelons to be a feature of all management. This is accompanied by the expectation that the answer to any questions is only a mouse click and a small number of keyboard strokes away. The increase in speed, the compression of time and the volume of information all conspire to reinforce the pragmatic nature of management activity. However, questions remain as to whether an individual manager knows more or less about the detail of the organisation and its business as a consequence of these advances.
The manager’s knowledge seems to become quickly out-of-date and the manager’s dependence on the specialist knowledge of others inside and outside the organisation grows. Yet, the need to demonstrate that you are in control through your grasp of the detail remains a stubborn expectation of the position. Is it any wonder the art of management, work and organisation has been colonised by the simplistic and superficial? Why are we surprised at the speed with which evidence-free fads and half-truths take hold in the practice of management? Managers are drowning in the sea of facts, expert opinions and personal experiences until they can find through their own efforts some driftwood on which to clamber and gasp for air. Fads are driftwood.
The practice of management seems to be firmly grounded in the endless present of doing. The image of the manager is that of Sisyphus endlessly rolling the boulder up the mountain:
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. (Albert Camus, 1955, p.116)
The work of managers can appear as futile, hopeless and repetitive as that of Sisyphus. There is no time or room for imagination and reflection, and little reward for innovation. So, if our managers are trapped in the present, what risks are accruing for future organisational capability around those distinct and seemingly independent decisions that are being made in the moment by an individual under pressure?
Is it any wonder that research is distant from practice when, for managers, speed and responsiveness are paramount? There is much gnashing of teeth from academics that managers are not reading or applying their research. The main reasons are that it is not timely, it is abstract from practice, and it is communicated in a form that is indigestible.
In the management realm, decisions are taken at a macro-level on the understanding that management is not static and routine but rather a constant web of change, interaction and development. There are no comfortable formulas that can be relied upon to guide managers through a known process toward achieving a clear outcome. In discussing the way organisations learn, James March noted that:
The underlying process is one in which an organization is conditioned through trial and error to repeat behaviour that has been successful in the past and to avoid behaviour that has been unsuccessful. (March, 1981: 565)
The same is true for individual managers. So, maybe, what distinguishes the manager from the academic is the need to generalise. The daily concern of managers is the relationship between the unique and the general. A manager cannot separate the unique from the general, or give precedence to one over the other. They cannot separate fact from interpretation from action. Managers work with the dynamic whole, not the parts. They are interested in the unique observation only insofar as it can tell them about the general condition. They are principally reasoning through induction. For managers, the sun has always risen in the East and so it will rise in the East tomorrow morning. There is no need (or time) to fuss the detail on passage of the sun. If the sun doesn’t show up tomorrow, well, that’s a new problem that can be tackled when it happens.
This causes at least two problems for the academic community. First, management is always operating in the moment and academic inquiry seeks to place itself outside the moment. The objectivity of the observer that is central to scientific inquiry puts distance between the researcher, the manager and the subject. This is a distance that the consulting community does not share. It seeks to work with the manager to solve practical problems. The outcome of this distance is that managers talk to consultants and other managers, and academics talk to academics. This is not a healthy outcome for either group. Finding new ways to bridging this gap from both sides is central to improving the practice of management.
Second, research looks to isolate, deconstruct and narrow in order to understand. Consequently, the subject is made frozen and static—it is pinned and placed under glass. Atomising the management subject matter through ever finer academic studies distances managers from researchers. The findings of studies where the focus is on whether ‘factor x’ is a mediating or moderating variable for ‘factor y’ do not lend themselves to generalisation or practical application in the dynamic world of the manager. Indeed, in most cases the investment of effort does not seem warranted given the modicum of knowledge discovered. So, does the study of management require greater methodological creativity and innovation from the academic community? Should it be a methodology that has pragmatism at its core but one that is accompanied by the disciple and differentiation that comes with science? The closest managers have to this approach at the moment seems to be in the practice of evaluation. Evaluation has a tested set of methodologies and tools that can be applied to provide managers with valid and reliable information about a practical activity. At its best, evaluation is a practice couples a pragmatic focus and scientific method. The issue, therefore, is what other areas might this pragmatic and creative method be applied to and how would it advance theory and/or practice?
Ultimately, management about applying method and practice such that the combination of people, processes, systems and culture are all brought together to deliver collective performance. The difficult part, the bit where uncertainty arises, comes from the interaction between these components but also the poorly understood, and yet surprisingly resilient, human at the centre of the system. Organisations and workplaces, even with the introduction of automation, remain heavily under the influence of humans, and consequently, subject to strengths and frailties of human behaviour. Peter Drucker captured the essence of the manager’s world:
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organised in such a way as to be able to get along under the leadership composed of average human beings (Drucker, 1946, p.35.).
Managers deal daily with the complicated and complex problems that arise from the interaction people, processes, systems and culture. Alone, any one of these is difficult enough. But they also work with average people doing their best. It is the effort of these people that need to be coordinated to achieve an outcome. It is these people that need to cooperate to share the knowledge and experience that enables good collective performance.
So, the vital questions for managers and researchers alike, in the past and in the future, is how much, or how little, this human element has changed in response to what seems to be a more complicated and complex workplace? How can our explorations of people and systems improve management practice, and thereby organisational performance?
What might we do together to improve the situation?
Idealistically, we need an age where academics and practitioners challenge, test and advance their understanding of work and organisation with a focus on the core questions of human and the organisation, and the way they interact to impact on performance.
We need a time where we are concerned with the facts not fads. A time where the lessons of the classics of management and history are widely read and understood in relation to the modern practice of management. Where the subjects of people, work and organisation are topics for wide ranging conversation.
It would be a time where consultant research would be opened up for critical reflection and testing and academic outputs would be similarly tested for practical relevance. There is a need for managers to free their imaginations from the chains of the endless present in order to think progressively about the future. There is a need for academics to acknowledge and work with the pragmatism of managers.
This is an unashamedly idealistic position. However, early management researchers were often managers with ‘academic tendencies’. The research was conducted on the factory floor and firmly embedded in understanding the nature and character of work. There were real attempts to understand and solve real world management problems. This practice was evident immediately after World War I and World War II. Luther Gulick in his Administrative Reflections from World War II outlined the importance of this practical approach:
Things happen fast in war. Men act along new lines boldly, decision jostling decision. Mistakes are many, and new approaches are sudden and frequent. This environment creates a situation which is extraordinarily fertile in institutional experimentation. If it is equally productive in demonstrating what will and will not work in peace time administration, careful attention to our war experience may prove extremely rewarding for those whose prime consideration is found in challenging the problems of peace.
In becoming more distant from the topic of management academics seem to have moved away from the evaluation that necessarily informs practice and closer to recording the innumerable facts of management. Managers in eschewing academic research and insight in favour of the immediate and practical have become lost in the immediate and are increasingly vulnerable to management ‘fashionistas’.
The manager and the academic are necessary to one another. The academic is distant and irrelevant without the manager. The manager without the academic is rootless and ineffective. The way forward is to understand that management knowledge is best built through the process of interaction between the manager and the academic. This is a continuous dialogue between the endless present (manager) and the unknowable future (academic).
This chapter has not told an original story. Indeed, it is a story that is recycled repeatedly by both academics and managers. Nor has it provided new insights or new ideas. Much of what has been said here has been said by many others many times over. However, if collectively managers and academics point to the chasm between their respective worlds and express a genuine desire to cross it, then there is a need to stop admiring the problem and do something more productive toward achieving it. Alternatively, turn your back on the chasm and get on with your lives.
Management, in its attempts to establish itself as a coherent body of doctrine, has attempted to differentiate itself from other disciplines but it does not seem to have got very far. The remaining chapters in this book provide examples of the ways that this might be achieved. However, as managers and academic move to cross the gap between them each must also work to maintain the distinctiveness of their identity and contribution. An overly pragmatic academic is as useless to crossing the divide as an overly academic manager. Progress will be made not through merger but rather through collaboration.
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About this article
This article was written as a chapter in Human capital management research : influencing practice and process / edited by Deborah Blackman, The University of New South Wales, Michael O'Donnell, The University of New South Wales and Stephen T. T. Teo, New Zealand Work Research Institute, Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Pub., Inc., 2016.
The following text may differ slightly from the final publication.
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