International Journal of Training and Development 15:3
ISSN 1360-3736
doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2419.2011.00381.x
Management training and
development
Alan M. Saks, Penny Tamkin and Paul Lewis
The timing of any current reflection upon the state of management training and development is particularly appropriate as much of the West struggles to overcome the
legacy of mismanagement by significant parts of its financial services sector, compounded by governments’ mismanagement of the regulatory processes. At the
minimum, this raises questions about the quality of management and to the extent that
practices were illegal, also about management ethics and legal competence. The financial collapse is a very high-profile case, but the evidence of mismanagement is widespread, ranging from information technology installations that do not deliver intended
results and costly, failed military initiatives to the more mundane, everyday practices
that mislead consumers and cause them detriment.
The evidence points to poor quality management and the use of illegal, or at the very
least unethical, practices, and for the purposes of this editorial, it might be pertinent to
raise the following question: Has management training and development contributed in any
way to encouraging or discouraging these phenomena? For example, has enough been done
through management training and development to ensure that managers operate
within an ethical framework and have an adequate grasp of the parameters of their
legal environment? If, for example, MBA provision worldwide was to be examined,
would this question be answered in the affirmative? The late Sumantra Ghoshal
thought not and laid the blame for corporate scandals firmly at the door of management education (Ghoshal, 2005).
We simply raise this and other issues as a prelude to introducing the papers in this
special issue. We do not seek to explore these issues but feel that a backcloth of this sort
might be helpful in reading the papers that follow.
Further issues relating to management training and development are identified
below, but prior to that, some developments are noted. The whole field has grown,
particularly MBA offering and the portfolio of short courses. For the providers, mostly
university business schools in the case of MBA, mostly private companies and professional institutes in the case of short courses, this work has proved very profitable.
However, the suppliers have little stake in their courses being effective, with the
notable exception that MBA providers are strongly interested in the salary levels of
their ex-MBA students because this affects the provider’s international MBA ranking.
From these salary data, it is known that the MBA is effective in helping the purchaser
of an MBA to obtain a higher salary, and in a perfect market, we could assume that
❒ Alan M. Saks, Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management, University
of Toronto, Canada. Email: saks@utsc.utoronto.ca. Penny Tamkin, Associate Director of Institute for
Employment Studies, UK. Email: penny.tamkin@employment-studies.co.uk. Paul Lewis, Editor-inChief, IJTD. Email: IJTDpl@btinternet.com.
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Editorial 179
ijtd_381
179..183
higher salaries are indicative of greater value to the employer, but empirically, we do
not know whether or not the MBA contributes significantly to the management performance of the individual MBA-qualified manager. The question of the effectiveness
or otherwise of management training and development is discussed in broader terms
below.
Alongside growth in business school education has been an increasing emphasis on
more personal and individual forms of development – executive coaching and mentoring, for example. Another important development has been the increased focus on
the training and development of entrepreneurs. The support for entrepreneurs, including mentoring and access to established business leaders for advice, works not only to
refine their business plans but also to enable them to gain access to resources to enable
them to develop their businesses.
E-learning and blended learning have certainly increased and may increase further
as public expenditure cuts are implemented. One of the effects of these cuts will be
to increase the public sector’s dependence on cheaper forms of learning, such as
e-learning, in-house delivery, shorter courses and an increased emphasis on the line
manager as employee developer.,
The importance of global leadership has become more evident over the last decade
along with the continuing rise of international business. Thus, it is no longer enough to
be an effective manager in one country; a good manager has to able to manage in
different countries and cultures (Morrison, 2000). And yet, many organizations today
do not have sufficient numbers of global leaders nor do they have programmes in place
to develop them. How can research on managerial training and development help
organizations develop global managers and leaders for the future?
The above issues raise conceptual considerations. The editors have adopted the
description ‘management training and development’ for this special issue of the
International Journal of Training and Development (IJTD). The rationale is that education
and personal development are broader-based concepts mostly occurring outside the
work context, whereas training and professional development are more vocational
and arise in a work context. This is a difficult and not entirely desirable line to draw
as, for example, much personal development can occur through the medium of
work activities. The MBA provides a case study. It occurs mostly in universities, with
the MBA qualification approved as representing academically rigorous study, but is
intended to equip existing managers with what they need to succeed at work. It
strives, therefore, to balance education and training. Does it generally succeed in this
or is it often too academic as some critics argue? Is this the same issue as balancing
theory and practice?
Entrepreneurs and, to some extent, company directors as a whole are sometimes
excluded from the definition of management because they are senior, strategic players.
One of the papers in this issue of the IJTD specifically excludes this group from the
model it develops in its study. However, with the exception of non-executive directors,
the directors of a company – and entrepreneurs, once their business has been set up –
are likely to be employed by their company and involved in its day-to-day management
as well as being directors. They can therefore be embraced by the concept of management training and development, although their needs may require separate analysis,
and the form and content of their training and development may be different from
those of other managers.
The need for an appropriate balance between theory and practice has been noted as
one of the issues within the field. It is now proposed to highlight other issues. One is
the extent to which management training and development is based upon a Western
business model and delivered by Western institutions in a way that takes insufficient
account of cultural differences. This is very evident when Western universities provide
management training and development in other countries, particularly those with
non-Western cultures. Thus, teaching of MBA courses delivered in parts of Asia by
Western teachers from Western countries may promote a Western business model not
suited to local circumstances using teaching methods which require students to adopt
learning styles not suited to their culture (Pimpa, 2009).
180 International Journal of Training and Development
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
There has been relatively little debate about different styles of management and
leadership which are culture-specific, and how we develop managers for such different
styles. The growth of international MBAs might imply that style is not important, but
some of the research, such as the Globe Studies, suggests that it might be (House et al.,
2004).
Another issue that has been raised is whether the form and ethos of management
training and development is an obstacle to the progress of women within management.
The argument here is that the intensely competitive, macho context within which
training may take place puts women off the idea of making progress within management or reduces their chances of succeeding (Vinnicombe & Singh, 2003). Similar
arguments have been put in the UK recently with regard to women’s participation in
national politics. However, this argument, even if justifiable in relation to some of the
MBA programmes, is more difficult to sustain in the context of management development where it is e-based or highly individualized.
This reminds us that management development varies from intensive long-term
development such as the MBA to short courses and from face-to-face off-the-job training to ongoing coaching and mentoring from a line manager on the job. The authors of
our first article have grappled with this diversity in producing an instrument for
measuring executive learning and development.
The issue that stands out above all others is that of the effectiveness or otherwise of
management training and development. Has evaluation of management training been
any more successful than in the rest of the training field? Is anything more known
about the transfer problem in relation to management training than is known more
generally?
Organizations spend billions of dollars each year on management training and
development. According to the 2010 Industry Report (Anon., 2010), most training
expenditures go towards executives, and managers and management/supervisory
training is expected to receive the largest increase in funding in the coming year.
This is not surprising given that managers have a major effect on an organization’s
performance and very survival, not to mention the need for organizations to develop
‘bench strength’ and a pool of management talent. Thus, organizations expect
that their investment in management training and development will provide
them with skilled and effective managers who will in turn make their organizations
more competitive and successful. But is management training and development
effective?
Twenty-five years ago, Burke and Day (1986) conducted the first meta-analysis on
the effectiveness of managerial training. They investigated different content areas,
training methods and criteria. Their conclusion: Managerial training is, on the average,
moderately effective. Unfortunately, the findings of three more recent meta-analyses are
not much more encouraging. For example, Collins and Holton (2004) conducted a
meta-analysis of studies from 1982 to 2001 and found that ‘the effectiveness of managerial leadership development programmes varied widely: some programmes were
tremendously effective, and others failed miserably’ (p. 232). Management training
interventions that focused on knowledge outcomes were most effective and show
some improvement compared to Burke and Day’s results. Collins and Holton concluded that managerial leadership developmental programmes can produce substantial results provided that organizations provide the right programmes for the right
people at the right time.
Powell and Yalcin (2010) conducted a meta-analysis of studies from 1952 to 2002 and
also found that the largest effect sizes were for learning outcomes. Their results suggest
that there has not been a great deal of improvement in the effectiveness of managerial
training. They concluded that managerial training programmes ‘have not been as
effective as we would hope’ (p. 233). Finally, in a meta-analysis on the transfer of
management training, Taylor et al. (2009) found some support for the effectiveness of
management training for positive transfer, however, the effect sizes were found to vary
as a function of rating sources (e.g. self-ratings) and study and training-related characteristics (e.g. interpersonal skills training).
Editorial 181
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
The results of these studies clearly indicate that management training and development programmes are not as effective as they should be. In fact, the range of effect sizes
reported by Collins and Holton varied from very large positive outcomes to no outcomes at all. Thus, there is still much to learn about management training and development programmes and how to make them more effective.
In this special issue on management training and development, you will find three
papers that address important issues about management training and development.
The first paper, by Akrofi, Clarke and Vernon, highlights the need for a broad
measure of executive learning and development that includes both formal and
informal activities. The authors are concerned with senior management and find
no evidence of any existing instrument for measuring the training and development of such managers. They develop and validate an executive learning and development measure using a sample of senior executives from different industries and
countries. Their measure can provide a useful means of diagnosing, monitoring,
benchmarking and evaluating an organization’s executive learning and development
programmes.
The second paper, by Lysø, Mjøen and Levin, examines the conditions that are
necessary for action learning projects to have an impact on organizations. Their study
of managers who participated in a Norwegian management development programme
that included action learning projects shows that three conditions must be present to
deliver impact from management development programmes beyond individual learning. These are in addition to the need to balance action and learning. Their findings
have important practical implications for making action learning programmes effective
and suggest that it is not enough to just balance action and learning. The ‘action’
component in action learning projects can be seen as analogous to the transfer of
training, and the investigation into why this component may not be implemented in
practice has generated explanatory factors that are consistent with those that the transfer literature tends to label ‘working environment’ and ‘support’.
The third paper, by Clochard and Davoine, tackles the difficult topic of determining the return on investment in management training programmes. They evaluate the
rate of return of 10 Swiss management training programmes and demonstrate how
utility analysis can provide an alternative approach to measuring the rate of return,
something that many organizations still do not do today. In addition, they identify
and test three variables that can influence the rate of return on management training
programmes.
Together, the papers in this special issue tackle important issues of concern for
management training and development programmes including diagnosing and identifying the state of managerial learning and development in organizations, the conditions that are necessary to make management training and development programmes
effective, and how to determine the rate of return on investment in management
training and development programmes. Our hope is that this special issue will at least
in part help to answer some of the many pressing questions about how to make
management development and training programmes more effective. At the same time,
we hope it will provide some practical guidance for organizations and stimulate
research on this very important topic, which has implications for people, organizations
and societies throughout the world.
References
Anon. (2010), ‘2010 industry report’, Training, 47, 6, 18–31.
Burke, M. J. and Day, R. R. (1986), ‘A cumulative study of the effectiveness of managerial
training’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 71, 232–45.
Collins, D. B. and Holton, E. F. III (2004), ‘The effectiveness of managerial leadership development
programs: a meta-analysis of studies from 1982 to 2001’, Human Resource Development Quarterly,
15, 217–48.
Ghoshal, S. (2005), ‘Bad management theories are destroying good management practices’,
Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4, 1, 75–81.
182 International Journal of Training and Development
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W. and Gupta, V. (2004), Culture Leadership and
Organizations; the Globe Study of 62 Societies (Newbury Park, CA: Sage).
Morrison, A. J. (2000), ‘Developing a global leadership model’, Human Resource Management, 39,
117–31.
Pimpa, N. (2009), ‘Learning problems in transnational business education and training: the case
of the MBA in Thailand’, International Journal of Training and Development, 13, 4, 262–79.
Powell, K. S. and Yalcin, S. (2010), ‘Managerial training effectiveness: a meta-analysis 1952–2002’,
Personnel Review, 39, 227–41.
Taylor, P. J., Russ-Eft, D. F. and Taylor, H. (2009), ‘Transfer of management training from alternative perspectives’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 104–21.
Vinnicombe, S. and Singh, V. (2003), ‘Women-only management training: an essential part of
women’s leadership development’, Journal of Change Management, 3, 4, 294–306.
Editorial 183
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.