The Development of Management and Leadership Capability and its ...

Although there has been a significant amount of research and evidence collection to allow for
the conclusions summarised here to be drawn, it is, with the benefit of hindsight, and with an
eye to what should be done in the future, not as good as it could or should be.
Key general points for useful research to improve the evidence base for both policy and
practice are:
• Research needs to be more coordinated, conceptually, operationally and in terms of
shared databases to allow for conclusions and knowledge generated to be cumulative.
• There needs to be more longitudinal and longer term research to improve
understanding of how effects unfold over time. There is a special opportunity to
follow up companies about which data has been collected a number of years ago and
sometimes over a number of years.
• Research needs to be more comparative across situations, organisations and
nation/state cultures to address the challenge of understanding what works, in what
way, and how in different situations. For example, at the level of organisations,
effective leadership approaches, and ways of developing these, may vary with sector,
size and life-stage of organisations, and at the national level UK practices and their
effects on productivity and other performance indicators could be better understood
by benchmarking against other nation states.
• More evaluation research needs to be built into management and leadership
development initiatives themselves, so that evidence is used to steer and improve, on
the base of evidence, their effectiveness, and so that they generate knowledge that can
be transferred to other situations.
• More research is needed to understand how management and leadership capability
contributes to performance, and how the different channels through which this
operates are activated in different contexts. This will help to target management and
leadership development effort.
• More research is needed to understand the education, training and development
processes that are effective in developing management and leadership capability, not
in terms of finding universally effective methods, but in terms of finding out what
works for what purpose in what situations, and how to fine tune the precise design of
management and leadership development in particular situations.
• Useful research for the future needs to be more concerned with understanding the
effects of initiatives as well as describing the situation in relation to management and
leadership capability. The most up to date and theoretically well informed research
methods need to be used, and policy makers and practitioners concerned with
management and leadership development need to know how to make the best use of
research to optimise the use of the evidence base for their decisions.
• Investments in the development of management and leadership capability are made in
a complex combination of ways by individuals, employing organisations and the
state. The state is involved directly through education, through its policy setting for
the public sector as employers, through indirect measures such as taxation and
financial policies that encourage or discourage forms of development investment, and
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