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

al., 2000), the more a capacity to deal with personal relationships is necessary to
enable progress towards achieving the strategic business vision.
• Mabey and Thomson (2000) highlighted some management skills in high demand:
managing people, leadership, team working and customer focus. Within leadership
they picked out motivation and teamwork followed by strategic vision and delivering
results.
We see all these ideas, and more besides, in the current discussion of managerial skills. It is
fairly unclear which of all these skills have been shown to link with performance, and which
just seem sensible ideas.
• A recent telephone survey of Business Schools conducted by the Institute for
Employment Studies asked about the people management and leadership skills which
individual managers attending Business Schools were highlighting as their own
learning needs. The list included: giving negative feedback; dealing with the tension
between 'hard' and 'soft' management styles, delegating well when under pressure;
and dealing with conflict and politics (Tamkin, Hirsh and Tyers, 2003). It is
interesting to note that Business Schools were unsure as to whether they followed
genuine changes in the demands on managers, or whether they themselves 'led' shifts
in thinking by finding new angles for training programmes.
Some older empirical work by psychologists has attempted to discover which features
differentiate managers who perform well, so as to identify capabilities which link with
performance. These studies have looked for features of different kinds and used different
methods.
Meta-analyses of high performance leadership competencies
• Schippman and his colleagues (1991) identified 21 main task dimensions of
management work, informed by an analysis of 21 research studies between 1949 and
1986. They used an activity-based approach.
• Fleishman and his colleagues (1991) specified 13 leader behaviour dimensions
evaluated in relation to 65 classifications of leadership behaviour between 1944 and
1986. This approach is based on describing behaviour in relation to four
superordinate operational functions involved in all human work activities:
information acquisition; information processing and decision; information storage;
physical and communicative action. This cognitive perspective on human functioning
tends to downplay the role of emotion.
• Yukl and colleagues (1990) defined 13 specific leadership behaviours or managerial
practices. This work was based on factor analysis of the behavioural skills required
for effective performance.
• Tett and his colleagues (2000) identified 53 management competencies that reflect a
combination of personal attributes and behavioural skills. This study builds on work
in 12 earlier studies of managerial performance between 1951 and 1993.
So the definition of what managers and leaders need can be expressed in terms of
management tasks; management or leadership skills or behaviours; or in terms of personal
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