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

Johnson and Winterton (1999) reported 18% of managers qualified to degree level. The
influential Handy report (1987) posed the argument that managers in the UK have not been
well educated compared with their counterparts in other countries.
• Bosworth (1999) in a very comprehensive overview of the stock of UK management
highlights the low qualification levels of UK managers relative to those of competitor
nations, and comes to rather pessimistic conclusions about the quality of UK
management. His conclusions can be taken as pessimistic on the grounds that he does
not acknowledge capability that is not formally accredited by formal qualification,
and that he may not accept that ‘lower’ level qualifications could reflect the
appropriate capability for many situations.
It seems possible that less higher education may mean UK managers are less well prepared
for their work, but the argument is not secure in terms of evidence. It is a function of the
UK's educational history and also our broad definition of the occupational group 'manager'
that many managers have not in the past had degree level qualifications. This does not
necessarily mean that they were not able people of high intelligence and inter-personal skills.
The UK now has quite high participation rates in higher education (Campbell et al., 2001), so
this situation will in any case change, albeit slowly in terms of the overall stock of managers.
Wood (1992) concludes this is likely to lead to some improvement in the quality of
managers.
Assessing whether lower qualifications also means low managerial skills relative to other
countries is tricky. We have very little reliable evidence as to whether UK managers are
'better' or 'worse' than those of other countries. For example, Bosworth quotes an Australian
survey of Asian business executives (Savery et al., 1994) and their opinions of the managers
of various other countries. It is hard to know on what direct experience of UK managers such
opinions would be based in a study conducted in Asia.
While examining the bit of the chain that may link education to management capability to
national performance, it is also worth flagging the dangers of using low levels of education to
prescribe management education in particular. Section 4.4 shows the evidence for and against
the impact of business and management higher education.
4.2 Management and leadership development capability, management and
leadership development and organisational performance
4.2.1 Management and leadership capability and organisational performance
Most of the time we take it as given that the quality of managers and leaders affects
organisational performance. However, there is little direct evidence of the extent or nature of
this impact. The work of Peters and Waterman (1982) was one highly influential example of
an attempt to link the nature of management and leadership with organisational culture, as
well as with more formal managerial processes and systems. Some of the features of
organisations that they saw as causing ‘excellence’, identified through their case study
approach, were motivation, 'bias for action', and productivity through people. By implication
they suggest that these in turn are achieved through management and leadership effort.
A different and more focused approach to linking the quality of management with business
results is shown in the analysis of the employee-customer-profit chain.
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