Forces Which Undermine Management Development

Fleishman E. A. Harris E. F. Burtt H. E. , Leadership and Supervision in Industry, Bureau of Educational Research Monograph No. 33 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1955).

Harbison F. Myers C. A. , Management in the Industrial World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959).

In a recent work, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations (New York: The Free Press, 1961), Etzioni makes an argument somewhat similar to this one in noting that certain kinds of power available to the organization make certain kinds of involvement on the part of the participants inherently difficult. For example, a coercive organization is unlikely to get moral commitment or even a calculative involvement from its members. An organization based on remunerative power, i.e., industry, can get calculative involvement but also has difficulty obtaining moral involvement. If the desire for personal growth is assumed to rest on a certain amount of moral involvement in the organization, then a prerequisite for growth would be a power structure which makes moral involvement possible, i.e., one based on normative power.

Blake R. R. Mouton J. S. , Group Dynamics: Key to Decision Making (Houston, Texas: Gulf Publishing Company, 1961).

The term “attitudes” is meant to include beliefs, values, and motives.

Schein E. H. , “Management Development as a Process of Influence,” Industrial Management Review, II (1961), 59–77.

Lewin K. , “Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method, and Reality in Social Science,” Human Relations, I (1947), 5–42.

See note 6.

Maslow A. H. , Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954).

A useful way of thinking about the set of persons who hold such expectations has been described by Wolfe Donald M. Diedrick J. Snoek J. , “A Study of Tensions and Adjustment under Role Conflict,” Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1962), 102–121. They identify this set of persons as the “role senders” for any given person in the organization.

For example, one naval officer reports that during wartime the kind of officer who was promoted rapidly, other things being equal, was the one who volunteered for a variety of difficult and unpleasant jobs.

Hebb D. O. Thompson W. R. , “The Social Significance of Animal Studies.” In Lindzey G. (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1954), I, 532–561.

A related problem is that potential change inducers may withhold the feedback that the person needs in order to discover his areas of ineffectiveness because of cultural taboos on such feedback. Particularly, subordinates are unlikely to tell their bosses anything negative about the boss's behavior.

A recent study— Sykes A. J. M. , “The Effects of a Supervisory Training Course in Changing Supervisors' Perceptions and Expectations of the Role of Management,” Human Relations, XV (1962), 227–243—shows how a supervisory training program backfired because of the unwillingness of senior management to change some of their own attitudes in response to new attitudes developed by the supervisors.

One way of insuring that old relationships will not stand in the way of growth is for the organization to plan a person's career pattern in such a way as to provide growth opportunities just prior to major moves he will make from one situation to another. But this kind of planning may create other problems (see note 6).

Becoming effective as a “politician” is certainly growth from the point of view of getting ahead in the organization, but is not growth in the sense of developing the attitudes and perceptions necessary to fulfill higher level responsibilities effectively. The extent to which an organization can create a climate in which figuring out the system absorbs the major energies of its managers is well illustrated in the study by Dalton M. , Men Who Manage (New York: Wiley, 1959). By contrast the kind of forces which lead toward growth in the sense used here is described and exemplified in a recent study of a top management program of organization improvement: Argyris C. , Interpersonal Competence and Organizational Effectiveness (Homewood, Ill.: The Dorsey Press, 1962).

T. M. Alfred, personal communication, 1960.

Likert R. , New Patterns of Management (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), provides a good summary of studies showing the negative effects of too close supervision on productivity and morale.

See note 4.

Too frequent rotation, on the other hand, may have negative consequences in preventing a person from learning enough about a given job or developing sufficiently stable relationships with co-workers or superiors to be able to identify with them and thus learn from them. Here again the problem is one of optimizing rather than using one extreme strategy or the other.

For example, some companies using the Scanlon Plan have achieved high mutual trust. See Lesieur F. G. , The Scanlon Plan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1958).

Weschler I. R. Schein E. H. , (eds.), Issues in Training, N.T.L. Selected Reading Series No. 5 (Washington, D.C.: National Training Laboratories, 1962), gives a view of the current status of human relations training and some of its major issues. See also Blansfield Michael G. , “Depth Analysis of Organizational Life,” California Management Review, Vol. V, No. 2 (Winter, 1962), 29.

Blake R. R. , “How Team Training Can Help You,” in Weschler I. R. Schein E. H. (eds.), Issues in Training, N.T.L. Selected Reading Series No. 5 (Washington, D.C.: National Training Laboratories, 1962).

McGregor D. , The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960).