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Business Strategy Review, 2001, Volume 12 Issue 2, pp 50-58
Does It Matter
What Managers Do?
Colin Hales
After half a century of research, we now
have a fair idea of what managers do.
This differs both from the “heroic selfimage” idealisation and from the
sanitised “management science”
idealisation. Despite IT and all the talk
of empowerment, management as a
profession in its own right is, if anything,
becoming more, not less, widespread.
What managers do therefore matters
simply because so many people are doing
“management” as their main role. But
does what managers do matter in terms
of its effects on the people being managed,
and, if so, how? The answer is obviously
yes, but the central message of this article
is how little we know through systematic
research about this – particularly given
how much preaching there is on how to
do it well.
We now have a reasonably clear picture of what
managers do. But does it matter what they do and, if
so, why? The cynical, not to say nihilistic, tone of this
question should not detract from its importance.
Unless we believe that managers’ behaviour is
intrinsically interesting or self-evidently relevant, what
matters is its effects. Much research has been devoted
to organisational structures and to managers’ decisions
and decision-making processes, as well as relating
performance measures to outcomes that are essentially
financial. There is, however, surprisingly little research
on the effects of managerial behaviour on the people
being managed. Throughout this article, when we
refer to the effects of what managers do, it is these
effects on the people being managed that we are
concerned with.
What Do Managers Do? Some Answers
Half a century of research has given us a coherent
and illuminating body of evidence on what managers
do. The activities common to all or most managers
are:
●
Acting as figurehead, representative or point of
contact for a work unit.
●
Monitoring and disseminating information.
●
Networking.
●
Negotiating with a broad constituency.
●
Planning and scheduling work.
●
Allocating resources to different work activities.
●
Directing and monitoring the work of
subordinates.
●
Specific human resource management activities.
●
Problem-solving and handling disturbances to
work flow.
●
Innovating processes and products.
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Does It Matter What Managers Do? 51
●
Technical work relating to the manager’s
professional or functional specialisation.
These generic activities are applied across a wide range
of concerns. Managers themselves often emphasise
four in particular:
●
Day-to-day “people” management.
●
Management of routine information.
●
Day-to-day monitoring and maintenance of work
processes.
●
Non-managerial activities, like conducting or
assisting with technical work.
In short, managers share a common and probably
inescapable preoccupation with routine, day-to-day
maintenance of the work processes and people for
whom they are responsible – keeping the show on the
road. This work is characterised by:
●
Short, interrupted and fragmented activities.
●
An obligation to react to events, problems and
requirements of others.
●
A preoccupation with the urgent, ad hoc and
unforeseen, rather than the planned.
●
The embedding or nesting of activities within
others.
●
A high level of verbal interaction, often face-toface or by phone but now, increasingly, by email.
●
A degree of tension, pressure and conflict in seeking
to juggle competing demands.
●
Considerable choice and negotiation over the
nature and boundaries of the job and how it is
done.
Beyond these common characteristics, managerial
work has been shown to vary considerably in terms
of:
●
The balance between different elements of work
content.
●
Types of contact patterns.
●
Patterns or rhythms of work.
●
Where work is carried out.
●
The extent of dependency on others.
●
The amount of interaction involved.
●
The degree of choice that is available.
These variations occur across individuals, jobs,
functional specialisms, levels of management, forms
of organisation, industries/economic sectors and
national cultures. (For a more detailed review of the
above evidence, see Hales 1986, 1999, 2001.)
What Do Managers Do? Some Unanswered
Questions
However, this body of evidence is by no means the last
word. A plethora of different categories, taxonomies,
conceptual frameworks and perspectives confirms the
suspicion that what we know about managerial work
rather depends on how we go about finding out. More
important, there are also questions that this body of
research has failed to answer or, indeed, ask.
First, it is still not clear which activities are exclusively
“managerial” – as distinct from other behaviours in
which managers may engage, and activities which are
concerned with “managing” but are carried out by
non-managers or undertaken by everyone as part of
their daily lives. The question “what do managers do
and no-one else does?” remains unanswered.
Second, the descriptions of managerial work have been
treated as largely unproblematic, as if what managers
must spend their time doing is self-evident and we do
not need to delve further into it. The question “Why
do managers do what they do?” has received scant
attention from researchers.
Third, although the many documented variations
in managerial work make a kind of intuitive sense,
they have not been systematically explained.
Research to-date has not convincingly shown any
substantive causal links, as opposed to correlations,
between what managers do and who they are and
where they work. For example, whilst it is
commonplace to assert that what managers do varies
“by organisation”, how and why organisational
structures and processes shape managerial behaviour
has not been adequately explained. Thus the question
“Why do managers do different things?” still does not
have a satisfactory answer.
Finally, and most important of all for my argument
here, almost all researchers have shied away from
judging whether the managerial behaviours they
describe represent, or contribute to, “good” or
“effective” management from the perspective of the
people managed, as opposed to “good” or “effective”
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52 Colin Hales
profitability-related outcomes of managerial (or
organisational) decisions or processes. There has been
a reluctance to answer the question “Does managerial
behaviour make a difference?” – or, more bluntly,
“Does it matter what managers do?” Rarely is the
research evidence on managerial behaviour subjected
to the brusque question: “so what?” Let us look at
these distinctions in a bit more detail.
When research on management was in its infancy,
purely descriptive accounts based on systematic
research were a welcome antidote to the assorted
reminiscences, homilies, flatteries, self-delusions, and
speculations that were the staple of writing about the
practice of management. In this context, valid,
empirical research on managerial behaviour is selfevidently interesting, pertinent and valuable.
Management researchers also seek to justify their work
in terms of its ability to improve the processes that
might themselves shape
“Managers share a
how managers work, such
common and
as management education,
probably inescapable training, recruitment and
preoccupation with
selection (by showing what
routine, day-to-day managers are to be trained and
recruited for) or managerial
maintenance of the
appraisal, remuneration and
work processes and
career planning (by showing
people for whom
they are responsible” what managers should be
rewarded and appraised on).
In other words, certain forms of managerial behaviour
are implicitly regarded as the end to which these other
activities should be directed.
Rarely, however, is better understanding of managerial
behaviour justified in terms of its consequences, where
managerial behaviour is examined as the means by
which other, desirable or undesirable, outcomes are
brought about. Nor will it do to defend this omission
by arguing that managerial behaviour can be subject
only to a kind of internal audit, confined to examining
the extent to which it matches its own internal
dynamics or rules of the game. This not only begs the
question about who defines these rules, but also
forecloses any discussion of what managers are for,
and, therefore, whether their behaviour matters to
anyone else and, if so, how.
Much of the work on managerial competencies treats
the measurable ability to perform specific types of
managerial work, rather than its effects, as the desired
end. What is missing is an examination of the
behaviours that actually connect the skills and traits
that constitute competencies with performance
outcomes – in other words, an indication of what
“competent” managers actually do. Again, it is
assumed that the behaviour that flows from the
possession of certain competencies is self-evident or a
black box that does not merit direct investigation.
Is the Role of Managers Changing?
Recently, a growing body of opinion has implied that
interest in managerial behaviour, never mind any
attempt to link it with performance outcomes, has
become redundant. Radical organisational
restructuring and changes in the language of
management are said to be eliminating or
marginalizing the manager as a distinctive or decisive
organisational role.
There is nothing new in these claims: the demise of
the manager has long been contemplated, not to say
willed, by those sceptical of what, if anything,
managers “do”. However, whereas before the claim
was that management as a practice would implode
under the weight of its own contradictions, now the
claim is that the manager will disappear as a result of
dramatic changes in organisational structures made
inevitable by competitive pressures and technology.
Most attention has been on the apparent shift from
hierarchical and rule-bound bureaucracies to
decentralised and empowered networks or postbureaucratic organisations. In these new postbureaucratic organisations, skilled knowledge
workers and smart machines combine in flexible,
task- or problem-based self-managing teams. These,
in turn, are organised in loose, federated networks,
where expertise, problem-solving and learning,
rather than precedents and procedures, shape how
work is done and performance, not conformity, is
the only criterion of effectiveness (see, for example,
Drucker 1988, Hecksher and Donnellon 1994,
Handy 1989).
Two somewhat different futures for managers are
envisaged as a consequence of these changes, one more
optimistic than the other. The first, more optimistic,
view contends that whilst some managerial posts –
predominantly in middle management – disappear, the
important change is to the character of managerial
work. According to this new managerial work thesis,
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Does It Matter What Managers Do? 53
the key driver is the atrophy of hierarchy and rules. In
this world, middle managers run small, decentralised
business units in entrepreneurial ways, free from the
stifling constraints of regulatory controls and the
demands of bureaucratic reporting relationships.
Empowered employees work in self-managing teams
free from day-to-day managerial control, leaving
front-line managers to function as team leaders, coordinators and facilitators. Consequently, the
traditional role of manager disappears, to be replaced
by a particular brand of professional knowledge
worker charged with a looser entrepreneurial or
leadership role (Dopson and Stewart 1990, Kanter
1989, Mintzberg 1998). These new “managerorchestrators” must grapple with the fuzzy, complex
task of facilitating and co-ordinating the diverse efforts
of a variegated network of participants. Inspiration,
expert advice, collaboration, negotiation and
instigation of change replace the mundanities of
command, control and administration. “New”
managers lead teams, negotiate integrated effort across
boundaries, inspire and promote organisational
learning, and conceive, instigate and facilitate change.
Their new-found freedom from hierarchical scrutiny
and control both enables and obliges them to exercise
judgement, unleash creativity and take risks. In short,
they cast off the dowdy feathers of administration for
the rich plumage of leadership.
The more pessimistic prognosis claims that the distinct
job of manager will disappear. Middle management
jobs will go as functional departments co-ordinated
through a hierarchical system of line management are
replaced by business units managed by teams to whom
operational control has been decentralised and which
report directly to the centre through electronic, rather
than human, information and control systems. In this
world, the middle management functions of enforcing
operational controls and conveying control
information pass to unit management teams and IT
systems respectively. First-line management jobs
supposedly will disappear as functional work groups
under day-to-day managerial direction and control are
replaced by empowered self-managing teams. Thus,
where once stood towering, elaborate management
structures, there will be empty spaces across which
corporate leaders on the one hand and low-rise
business units and empowered teams on the other
communicate directly and electronically. Periodic
delayerings represent the progressive flattening (in
every sense) of managerial hierarchies to clear the
ground for this. Those managers who remain will
be there to facilitate their own departure by
coaching and empowering those about to start
managing themselves. The result will be the “postmanagement corporation”, liberated from the
stultifying dead hand of the “corpocracy” (Koch
and Godden 1996).
For other observers, the decisive recent change has
been not to the architecture of organisations but to
the tenor of management discourse and how
management is conceived
and
understood.
A “Rarely is the
recurring theme in this new research evidence on
language of management is managerial
the
de-coupling
of behaviour subjected
management as a practice to the brusque
from formally designated question: “so
managerial roles, such that what?””
“we are all managers
now”, even if, in practice, “we always were” (Grey
1999). The Taylorist ideology that conception must
be separated from execution has been supplanted
by an empowerment ideology that they should be
re-combined.
Managers Are Everywhere
However, the “post-bureaucratic”, network
organisation and the radical reconfiguration or demise
of the managerial role that will accompany it may be
still some way off. Radically new organisational forms
remain confined to a few recurring and celebrated
cases and extravagant claims about the adoption of
such forms are often little more than rhetoric, given
that much recent organisational change has entailed
an intensification, not a
departure from, bureaucratic “In short, they
controls. Further, the extent cast off the dowdy
of decentralisation and feathers of
empowerment associated administration for
with the transition to post- the rich plumage
bureaucratic organisation of leadership”
has also been exaggerated,
as a number of research studies have found.
Supposedly decentralised organisations often
undergo very modest organisational change and,
consequently, there is little change to managers’
roles and work practices. Fully autonomous, selfmanaging work teams are restricted to a few
specialised and exceptional instances and there is
often a stark contrast between the extravagant
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54 Colin Hales
rhetoric and the modest reality of empowerment
programmes (Hales 2000).
Consequently, much recent organisational change has
created not post-bureaucratic, network organisations
but merely slimmed-down versions of bureaucracy –
“bureaucracy-lite”, so to speak. The principle of
hierarchy, where there is co-ordination through
individual vertical responsibility and accountability,
has not been abandoned, but retained in an attenuated
and more efficient form. Centrally-imposed rules,
designed to give a heavy steer to managerial conduct,
have not been torn up
“Many business
but have been rewritten
organisations in the US to focus on results
and UK – supposedly
rather than processes.
the super-thin models
These changes to
that promoted the
different varieties of
outbreak of copycat
bureaucratic control,
rather than radically
corporate anorexia –
new forms of organbecame, during the
isation, mean that there
1990s, not lean and
mean but fat and mean, remains some-thing
with a growing number very familiar about the
manager’s role. It
of managers, if a
continues to be defined
dwindling number of
in terms of individual
workers”
responsibility for the
performance of an identifiable, bounded
organisational sub-unit and vertical accountability to
a boss for that performance. Little fundamental change
to the definition of the managerial role means little
change to the substance of managers’ work activities.
Managers continue to be preoccupied with routine, dayto-day monitoring and maintenance of work processes,
managing staff and processing information – often to
the exclusion of instigating change, developing staff or
acting more entrepreneurially. For all the fashionable
hype about leadership, it is unfashionable management
that is being practised and its fundamental
characteristics have not changed (Hilmer and
Donaldson 1996). Reports of the death of the
“manager” are a trifle premature.
In fact, other evidence suggests quite the reverse – a
burgeoning of managerial positions in some sectors
and the spread of “managerialism” to a growing
number of social institutions. Even many business
organisations in the US and UK – supposedly the superthin models that prompted the outbreak of copycat
corporate anorexia – became, during the 1990s, not
lean and mean but fat and mean, with a growing
numbers of managers, if a dwindling number of
workers (Gordon 1996). Additionally, many public
sector and voluntary organisations (eg health,
education, charities, the police, the BBC), in which
professionals or members had previously managed
themselves, became subject to tighter and more
elaborate managerial controls executed by a growing
body of administrators. Greater accountability for
and, hence, tighter control over, public expenditure
and the creation of forms of internal market
apparently required an army of expensive
administrators to police. Equally ironically, these
changes were pushed through under the ideological
banner of the enterprise culture. The widespread
disempowerment of professionals in favour of
managerial control has meant that the recent
accusation that the BBC has become over-managed
and under-led chimes funereally elsewhere.
The Growth of Managerialism
“Managerialism” – the application of a particular
utilitarian and supposedly value-neutral means-ends
logic – increasingly pervades spheres of life outside
the workplace. Consumers are “managed” through
the ever more elaborate paraphernalia of marketing,
citizens are increasingly managed in their dealings with
the state and its agencies or in their use of public space,
and political parties offer not alternative visions of
society but alternative management teams, aspiring
to do what works and asking to be judged on delivery.
Likewise, consumers must increasingly “manage” their
purchasing behaviour, by attempting to make
informed choices and negotiate their way around a
bewildering array of offerings; families feel
compelled to “manage” their domestic life (how F.W.
Taylor would have approved of the notion of quality
time spent with one’s children) and people “manage”
their relationships, substituting friends for an
instrumentally constructed network of contacts. The
manager, whether called that or not, has become
the quintessential contemporary character
embodying the triumph, at least for now, of
manipulative social relations in the utilitarian
pursuit of amoral efficiency.
The locus of social decision-making has, in many
instances, shifted from democratic processes
between individual and state to negotiation and
transaction amongst organisations. Further, the
basis of that decision-making has shifted from the
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Does It Matter What Managers Do? 55
pursuit of the public good, where considerations of
content and effectiveness predominate, to the
reconciliation of private interests in which
considerations of form and efficiency prevail. In
these corporatist processes, managers have become
the key protagonists and managerialism is the
guiding principle (Entenman 1993).
Thus, whilst managers may have waned here and
waxed there, management as a practice (whoever
carries it out) and managerialism as an ideology
(whoever subscribes to it) have flourished. Managers
continue to matter because there is still a large and
growing number of them, either in the conventional
sense of those taking responsibility for the work of
others or in the sense of de facto managers
disciplining themselves in their work and their lives
according to a particular instrumental logic.
How Managers Matter: The Problem of
Managerial and Leader Effectiveness
Even if managers continue to matter, whether it
matters what they do, in the sense of there being clear
links between their behaviour and particular kinds of
outcome, is less clear-cut. Of course, much depends
upon which outcomes are considered relevant or
important. Until now, a top-down organisational
perspective has predominated with managerial
impacts assessed in terms of the performance of the
organisation, sub-unit or work group for which the
manager is re-sponsible. There is a general
conviction that certain kinds of managerial
behaviour are more effective because they are more
likely to bring about desirable organisational
outcomes – employees work “better”, resources are
used more efficiently, goods and services are more
effectively delivered, stakeholder needs are more
accurately met, and so on.
Anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in support of this
view needs to be treated with some caution.
Autobiographies depicting the CEO as hero singlehandedly building up a successful enterprise or
turning around an ailing one are, inevitably,
selective and partial.
The research evidence is equivocal. Whether research
purports to study “leader effectiveness” or
“managerial effectiveness” is of little consequence
since the labels are more a reflection of academic
tribalism than real differences in focus. But, whatever
the preferred terminology, the research evidence is
an imperfect guide to whether it matters what
managers do. Survey evidence sometimes confirms
the conventional wisdom that top managers
influence business performance whilst at other times
it does not. Either way, there is the danger of a
circular logic which says that managers of highly
performing organisations must, perforce, be
“effective” and vice versa.
More experimental, or quasi-experimental, research
on manager/leader effectiveness is hampered by
recurring and seemingly intractable problems of
measurement and validity and, for all its volume, remains
inconclusive. However managerial effectiveness is
measured, there are
difficulties. If it is judged “often the focus is on
in terms of organisational managers’ traits,
or group performance personality or attitudes
outcomes, much depends rather than their actual
on the choice of behaviour – in effect,
performance criteria. looking at who
Given the susceptibility of managers are rather
financial measures to than what they do”
other influences, there
have been recent attempts to evolve broader measures
of long-term performance, such as economic value
added, performance pyramids and the balanced
scorecard. In all of these, however, the problem of
tracing collective performance to individual
behaviour still has to be resolved. Studies that rely
on reputational measures
“Tighter control over
of effectiveness, based on
others’ judgements of public expenditure
managers’ proficiency or and the creation of
promotability, run the forms of internal
risks of simply capturing market apparently
self-fulfilling prophecies. required an army of
In any case, often the expensive
focus is on managers’ traits, administrators to
personality or attitudes police”
rather than their actual
behaviour – in effect, looking at who managers are
rather than what they do. Whilst this approach may
identify associations between personal
characteristics and measures of group performance
it fails to identify the causal connections between
them. The overall result is a suggestion that certain
traits, attitudes or behaviours may promote certain
favourable organisational outcomes but little sense
of how they do so.
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56 Colin Hales
As well as the problem of measurement there is also the
wider question of whether it is sensible to regard the
actions of individual managers as capable of changing
the organisational milieu in which they operate. It may
be more appropriate to regard managers as social actors
whose actions and identities are shaped and
constrained by, as well as
“Individual
serving to reproduce, the
managers may not
social and institutional
make a difference
systems in which they are
because no-one does: located. This may be so
even in the exceptional case
organisational
of highly charismatic
outcomes emerge,
founders of organisations
without evident
who are more able than
authorship, from
most to stamp their
complex negotiated
personal imprint upon
interactions”
them and whose personal
values become embodied in organisational processes.
Once established, organisations take on a life of their
own as past actions and events become
institutionalised into norms and practices and ideas
that entrap their creators. How much more so is this
the case for middle managers who are recruited to,
and in the image of, a pre-existing institution – or for
senior managers who have assiduously scaled the
organisational ladder. For example, it is interesting
how The Economist’s weekly “Face Value” column
on individual Chief Executives often tells a story more
of incumbency and battles against organisational
baggage than of consequential leadership.
Individual managers may not make a difference
because no-one does: organisational outcomes
emerge, without evident
“Studies that do
authorship, from complex
incorporate this
negotiated interactions –
view from below
even if, after the event,
have tended to focus participants and observers
on subordinates’
may try to make sense of
these
outcomes
by
perceptions of the
attributing
them
to
the
managers
actions
of
specific
themselves, rather
individuals. Consider, for
than of particular
forms of managerial example, how a number
of recent UK enquiries
behaviour”
into organisational failure
(eg the Redfern report on Alderhey hospital, the
Phillips report on BSE and the Cullen enquiry into
the Paddington train crash) have all concluded that
a “failure of management” meant not the failure of
particular individual managers but of management
systems and processes – not a particular manager’s
culpability but rather “institutional paralysis”.
How Managers Matter: An Alternative
Perspective
An alternative way of approaching the issue of whether
it matters what managers do, which has until now
been largely neglected by management research, is to
consider the problem from the point of view of those
being managed. Specifically, does managers’ behaviour
impact significantly upon the experience of those
whom they are managing? In other words, does it
matter to others what managers do?
Certainly, there is implicit recognition in a number of
places that it does. How employees are “managed”,
in the broad sense of the kinds of work regimes to
which they are subject, has long been seen as having a
decisive effect on their experience of work and, hence,
their satisfaction with and commitment to it. For
example, most criticisms of both bureaucracy and
scientific management are couched in terms of their
dehumanising or de-motivating effects on those who
are managed in this way. More specifically, it has long
been argued that particular human resource
management strategies and policies are more likely to
enhance employee experience of work and thus
improve their performance at work (for example,
Pfeffer 1995). There is a popular perception too that
not only management systems but also individual
managers can make a difference in this respect. Most
employees, for example, would be able to give
instances of managers for whom, in their experience,
it was a pleasure to work and others about whom the
opposite could be said.
However, reliable evidence on the relationship between
managers’ behaviour and employees’ experience is
hard to come by. Studies of manager (or leader)
effectiveness attempt to link managerial attributes or
behaviour to work group performance without
examining the meanings that those being managed place
upon that behaviour. Ethnographic studies offer rich
accounts of the meanings that managers themselves
place upon their own actions but say little about how
their actions are interpreted by others. Studies that
do incorporate this view from below have tended to
focus on subordinates’ perceptions of the managers
themselves, rather than of particular forms of
managerial behaviour, often more as part of a wider
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Does It Matter What Managers Do? 57
When Managers Did Make a Difference?
One graphic demonstration of the disastrous effect
that managerial (or “leader”) behaviour can have
upon those being managed, or led, is offered in
Alan Clark’s book, The Donkeys. In it, Clark
adduces systematic, compelling and corroborated
evidence, drawn from War Office records, eyewitness accounts, diaries and letters, that
demonstrates how a series of increasingly
catastrophic military blunders in the first year of
the Great War were directly attributable to the
actions, or, at times, inactions, of the British High
Command. These were fivefold. First was the
failure to exploit the German retreat and disarray
with the use of cavalry after the Battle of the Marne
in September 1914, under conditions that the High
Command spent the rest of the war attempting, at
huge human cost, to recreate. Second was the
refusal, during the winter of 1914-15, to
consolidate, through prudent withdrawal, the
subsequent trench-line around Ypres to one that
could be defended without heavy casualties. Third
was the failure to exploit the breakthrough at
Neuve Chapelle in March 1915 until it was too
late, followed by a persistence with attacks when
there was no longer any chance of success – an
action that resulted in total casualties of about
60,000. Fourth was the disastrous Aubers Ridge
offensive of May 1915 in which over 11,000 were
killed in a single day and which more or less
completed the destruction of the regular army.
concern with workplace conflict. Yet, occasionally
powerful evidence emerges to suggest that
managers’ or leaders’ behaviour can have a decisive,
not to say catastrophic, effect (see box).
Conclusion
Despite claims that they are about to be included in
the roll-call of quaint trades and defunct occupations,
managers continue to matter. Headline-grabbing
instances of delayering have been more than offset by
the less dramatic burgeoning of managerial positions
in private sector and – even more – public sector
organisations and by the spread of the cult of
managerialism within and beyond the workplace.
But if managers still matter, whether it matters what
they do and, if so, how has not been satisfactorily
Finally came the ill-conceived attack at Loos in
September 1915 in which failure to exploit a
breakthrough on the first day (a breakthrough that
had been achieved entirely through the courage of
the attacking men) was followed by a series of
suicidal frontal assaults against machine-gun fire
in which, in the space of three and a half hours, 12
battalions numbering 10,000 conscripts suffered
8,246 casualties.
In short, Clark paints a picture of hesitancy and
procrastination when rapid, decisive action was
called for and of profligate recklessness when
caution and circumspection were required. Clark
shows how this resulted directly from the decisions
and, at times, indecision, of particular generals in
the British High Command. These, in turn, sprang
from a disastrous admixture of: personal vanity and
an overwhelming desire not to damage a spuriouslygained “reputation”; a preoccupation with
individual careerism and intrigue disguised by
claims of dedication to a common cause; petty
jealousies and rivalries prosecuted behind
superficial displays of loyalty and comradeship; an
arrogance and indifference towards those who had
to carry out their orders; and, above all, an
individual and collective incompetence coupled
with resentment of those possessed of greater talent
or nerve and a proclivity to blame anyone but
themselves for the consequences of their mistakes.
investigated, never mind resolved, by research. Many
studies of managers at work avoid the issue altogether
whilst studies of managerial (or leader) effectiveness
often treat the behaviours that mediate between certain
managerial attributes and group performance as selfevident. Even if there remains a popular suspicion,
based on personal experience, that individual
managers can, by their actions (or inactions), make a
difference, how they do so and the extent to which
they do so are far from clear.
Indeed, a lot of research on managerial work and
effectiveness is not only inconclusive but myopic in
that it disregards the effect of managerial behaviour
on the experience of those being managed. By doing
so, it not only fails to recognise the consequences of
this for group performance but also fails to give voice
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58 Colin Hales
to those who are as central to the management process
as managers themselves. Furthermore, those whose
voice is not being heard are those for whom managers
are still, generally, held responsible, given that, in
practice, few organisations have abandoned the
principle of hierarchy by which individual managers
are held responsible and accountable, even if they have
marginally reduced the number of hierarchical levels.
Until research begins to listen to this voice, the
suspicion that managers’ behaviour colours the
experience of those whom they manage, for the worse
as much as for the better, will remain only a suspicion.
References
Clark, A. (1961) The Donkeys, London: Pimlico.
Dopson, S. and Stewart, R. (1990) What is Happening
to Middle Management? British Journal of
Management 1(1): 3-16.
Drucker, P. (1988) The Coming of the New
Organization, Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb: 4553.
Entenman, W.F. (1993) Managerialism: The
Emergence of a New Ideology, University of Wisconsin
Press.
Gordon, D. (1996) Fat and Mean: The Corporate
Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of
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Grey, C. (1999) “We Are All Managers Now”; “We
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Management, Journal of Management Studies 36(5):
561-586.
Hales, C.P. (1986) What Do Managers Do? A Critical
Review of the Evidence, Journal of Management
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Hales, C.P. (1999) Why Do Managers Do What They
Do? Reconciling Evidence and Theory in Accounts of
Managerial Work, British Journal of Management 10:
335-350.
Consequently, our understanding of managerial
practices and, more broadly, our conception of what
managerial responsibility means will remain
unbalanced and incomplete. And so will our efforts
to educate and train managers.
Colin Hales is Professor of Management and
Director of the Centre for Research on
Managerial Behaviour at Westminster Business
School, London.
Hales, C.P. (2000) Management and Empowerment
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Hilmer, F.G. and Donaldson, L. (1996) Management
Redeemed: Debunking the Fads that Undermine
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Kanter, R. M. (1989) The New Managerial Work.
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Management: A Post-management Manifesto for
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Business Strategy Review
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