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

Both of these are difficult to investigate, as this report shows, and it is the former that gives
us much of the confidence to say that management and leadership development can have
beneficial effects.
Education, training and development and other initiatives external to the organisation are
more difficult to ‘prove’, in terms of effects, arguable because the value chain from these to
performance is more complicated, some of the effects are longer term, and these create even
greater challenges in terms of finding viable research methodologies.
Our recommendation is that research on both these broad topics is needed, and special efforts
need to be made to stimulate more useful research on the latter.
7.4 Priorities and relative knowledge gaps.
It will be clear from this review that in general the quality and usefulness of evidence-based
research can be improved across the whole spectrum of issues that can be addressed.
In relative terms however, two areas stand out as special gaps, at least from the point of view
of the literature and reports that we have been able to access dealing with management and
leadership development. These should be given special priority in future work.
The first is the link between management and leadership capability and individual
performance, and the second our understanding of the mechanisms by which management
and leadership capability might affect organisational performance.
One conclusion from much of the general evidence is that not all that gets learnt by people in
the way of management and leadership capability gets used to contribute to performance and
create value. Understanding how to make better use of this resource could be great practical
as well as theoretical significance and potentially a very cost effective way of getting more
value out of management and leadership development.
The former is surprising given the effort that seems to be put into assessing management and
leadership capability, at the individual level, on the one hand, and the measurement of the
performance of individuals on the other. This suggests that research using existing data for a
more general purpose could be an ‘easy win’.
It is possible, on the second point, that what is needed is a review of the management and
business studies literature in general, rather than just that related to management and
leadership development.
Standing back from this literature, there appear to be a number of overarching ideas about
how capability might contribute to performance from the execution of management and
leadership work. Some of these, particularly those related to human resource management,
have been touched on in this work. They are:
• increasing operational efficiency (leanness, re-engineering)
• innovation – of services and products
• increasing employee commitment
79