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

effort and top-level commitment to it, which may affect organisational performance
more than the volume of management and leadership development activity.
• There is a large volume of evidence on the wider relationship between HRM practices
and organisation performance. This seldom looks in depth at management and
leadership development but often finds that aspects of employee development, which
would include management and leadership development, are important correlates of
organisation performance. Again the most recent work tends to emphasise that it is
the alignment of HRM with business strategy, the internal coherence of HRM, and
the quality of implementation which are probably affecting organisational
performance, not just a set of 'best practice' HRM policies.
• There may be 'low skill' business strategies that can succeed in some sectors with low
investment in employee or management development.
• The work on HRM provides clear evidence of the importance of people management
in organisational performance. In that managers and leaders are nearly always those
who deliver HRM through their ability to lead and motivate staff, this is a strong body
of evidence pointing to a link between these aspects of management and leadership
capability and organisational performance.
Management and leadership development, individual capability and individual
performance
• There is very little direct evidence of an effect link between management and
leadership development activity and individual changes in capability or performance.
This may in part be because little research activity has been directed here. It may also
be because 'unpicking' this causal chain is made very difficult by the wide range of
contextual factors that affect learning outcomes and their translation into performance
outcomes. Small-scale evaluations of management training conducted by employers
may now quite frequently measure behaviours before and after training, but these
studies are rarely published in the UK.
• Wider research on training and development as part of HRM would seem to indicate
that the link between learning and performance is likely to involve employee attitudes
(e.g. commitment, the psychological contract, morale) as well as capability. So
management and leadership development will need to influence the attitudes of
managers as well as their skills.
• Managers and employees believe that training and development of a more active type,
closer to work tasks, is more likely to improve performance. However direct
empirical evidence that this is the case is still lacking. What goes on before and after
a learning intervention is also crucial to its impact.
• In pursuing the link between management and leadership capability and performance
we may need to consider wider factors, such as how managers work with each other
and the high level HR capabilities needed to align management and leadership to the
needs and direction of the organisation.
Business and management higher education and performance
• There is considerable evidence that degree level educational qualifications in business
and management confer employment benefits on the individual, and that individuals
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