Why Managers Won't Learn.
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| Title: | Why Managers Won't Learn. |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Salaman, Graeme, Butler, Jim |
| Source: | Management Education and Development. Fall 1990 21(pt3):183-191. |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 9 |
| Publication Date: | 1990 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Opinion Papers |
| Descriptors: | Adult Education, Group Unity, Management Development, Organizational Change, Resistance to Change |
| ISSN: | 0047-5688 |
| Abstract: | Some cases of managers' resistance to learning may be explained in terms of the organizational structure in which they work and what these structures teach them. Organizational cultures may generate bonds of loyalty and group cohesion that interfere with attempts at training for change in management practice. (SK) |
| Entry Date: | 1991 |
| Accession Number: | EJ415993 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwEJaoKfi09N-tJHqFPUDx8tAAAA4jCB3wYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHRMIHOAgEAMIHIBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDGqUw7AX0ZKxB6Q2AwIBEICBmmZ8YA_2ja1_CKSgc6x7HhC1AmDqx-S5aVi0sBj8gibiaEzx1Gac_fMCgN3dypZXKRjZ_9xDHpC6-KDjav_Qv2YEdkDfMJSaMbSycs1VJUX-5ajkatYS-kWZHRjSsKEHNWrm3LG-1h-ZKwJaDIuNO14HLMIm-oWcZ7msHQRBvycuvvAa-cKMQdub1NCKzlTNXCFDxJuXaKxzOKU= Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0053113329;0st01oct.90;2010Aug28.04:22;v2.2.460</anid> <title id="AN0053113329-1">Why Managers Won'T Learn </title> <p>183 Why Managers Won'T Learn SAGE Publications, Inc.1990DOI: 10.1177/135050769002100304 Graeme Salaman The Open University Jim Butler The Open University MANAGEMENT EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT Volume 21 Part 3 1990 Times are changing. 'New Times' do not just affect social and political life; they also have a major impact on organisations and those who work for them. The certainties of the past disintegrate: 'all that is solid melts into air'. Markets are changing - diversifying and differentiating; levels and forms of competitive pressure are changing; in many industries government-induced regulation is disappearing. Information Technology increases the speed of communication and enables incredibly detailed control of work operations, thus in turn generating product differentiation. Organisations themselves are changing; and the ways they are changing are changing. For the new certainty is change, and organisations and their employees must now be prepared to change and be able to change. In order to change appropriately they must be able to analyse themselves, their processes, structures and their environments, be able to identify preferred and appropriate responses, and be able to implement them. In a word, organisations must be able to learn, and to learn from their learning. On the basis of this learning, choices will be made: choices of structure, of process, of organisation, of product, of market, relationship with staff, with subcontractors and with clients. And these choices themselves must be the subject of constant review and revision. A barrier to learning is thus a barrier to survival. I. Within organisations today form does not follow function, if it ever did; stucture does not follow strategy. For survival, both strategy and structure (in the widest sense) must be carefully analysed and chosen to ensure mutual support. Increasingly, all this is known to and accepted by managers at all levels, not least because of the sheer volume of exhortation from management gurus and consultants. But the pervasiveness of the acceptability and inevitability of change may mask a paradox: much change seems highly imitative; simply the application of the currently accepted nostrums and solutions, many of them derived in some form from the 'excellence' literature. If every organisation changes in the same direction, where is competitive advantage? Secondly, despite the current emphasis on change, and indeed the apparent evidence that change is going on around us, we also know that change is difficult and that an organisation's ability thoroughly to review, monitor, evaluate and replan (i.e. to learn) is 28184 systematically influenced by the fact of organisation itself, with its inbuilt tendency to develop or encourage sectionalism, careerism and defensive- ness. If 'New Times' place a premium on organisational learning, and on consequent change, then barriers to that learning assume even greater importance. This article is about these barriers. MANAGEMENT LEARNING Suddenly, management learning is hot news. We know that British managers are seriously undertrained and educated; only 15% of British managers have a degree or equivalent. Only about 12,000 of the 90,000 people who start managerial careers every year are receiving any form of education or training in management. The 2,500,000 managers in Britain currently receive the equivalent of one day's training per year. There is general concern about this situation. Recent reviews of management training education and development contrasted the British situation with that of the USA, Japan, West Germany and France. Their call for radical change resulted in the establishment of the Council for Management Education and Development in 1987. We also know that managers have a lot of new things to learn. There are various lists of what must be learnt. Peters talks about responsiveness, innovation, participation of all employees, leadership for change and simplified support systems (Peters, 1987); Wickens talks of the tripod of teamwork- ing, quality and flexibility (Wickens, 1987). These behaviours are seen as required by significant changes in organisational environments: 'growing "turbulence" and complexity, growing competition, increasingly international markets' (Prospect Centre, 1988). These new forms of behaviour are regarded as essential to corporate survival: 'Turning outwards to face an increasingly turbulent environment, (successful companies) have developed strategies based on quality, innovation and responsiveness to their customers' (Prospect Centre, 1988, p. 1). New situations require new responses. But all the necessary behaviours and attitudes have to be learnt. Managers must be able and willing to shift their focus from the operational to the strategic, they must learn about, and possibly modify their management styles, or their team roles; they many need to learn about a new form of corporate culture. They must learn to manage in ways which encourage innovation and participation and ensure quality. The message then is: learn, learn, learn. Hence our interest in management learning. Management learning is important because managers are underqualified and must be more exposed to relevant learning, at a time when circumstances demand that there is a great deal of new things that they have to learn - even those who are qualified. But what has to be learnt is inherently new; because of environmental 'turbulence' managers cannot learn a set formula with which 29185 to cope with rapid change, for any new approach or technique will soon be obsolete. They must learn to be adaptive. They must now learn to learn. HOW AND WHY MANAGERS LEARN Traditionally interest in how managers learn has centred on the possibility - often unspoken, but evidently implicit - that managers may resist learning, or may learn in peculiar ways. Could there be something inherent in the role of the manager that might predispose against or structure the form of management learning? This is important. Could managers, by virtue of their roles, be trained and rewarded in ways which obstruct or restrict their capacity to learn? A related argument is the suggestion that experience of managing within different sorts of organisational and discipline environments might shape managers' learning styles. This suggestion has obvious practical significance for trainers. But it also has theoretical importance in that it argues, first, that people's willingness and capacity to learn may differ in form and cannot be assumed and, second, that learning style may be affected by work and organisational experience. Trainers, consultants and Business School lecturers have for practical reasons always been concerned with how managers learn. Consciously or not, they have assumed that to be a manager has definite implications for how, indeed for if, managers learn. The conventional assumption is that managers learn best through doing, through experience, whenever possible; when the subject matter is highly theoretical or knowledge-based it must be built around worked examples, case-studies, project work. Most of all, it is assumed that managers will only learn when the subject has obvious and immediate practical application: the words 'theory', 'academic', 'model', are usually seen as negative, even pejorative. What is valued is certainty, tied to prescription. This view of managers' needs and limitations is interesting in itself, and goes largely unchallenged. It is, of course, tied to a conception of management consultants and trainers which places responsibility for the success of a course session on the trainer/performer as much, if not more than on the material itself. It defines the trainers as performers, absolutely central to the delivery and success of the material, and rewards them appropriately. Form may be as important as content in a milieu where success - and re- employment- depends on audience appraisal and a high need for certainty and technique. This view of what managers want may be correct. It may also be self- fulfilling. The interesting point, however, is that this view of learning applies solely and specifically to managers qua managers (it would not apply to managers attending a course or conference in their specialist discipline capacity, as engineer, personnel, production). It argues, implicitly, that to be a manager means one is trained and rewarded to learn only under 30186 very restricted conditions: lots of variety, short input sessions, powerful 'professional' and immediate presentation, lots of activities and exercises, obvious relevance to learners' own experience, maximum emphasis on practical technique or recommendation (certainty), with theory and conceptual elements reduced (uncertainty), etc. Paradoxically, while in some sense this could be seen as active in that it involves doing things, and practical in that it involves examples and case studies, it is also in a sense passive in that it involves little effort on the part of the learner to see for him/herself the relevance, application, practicability of general propositions to personal situations or problems. This is done for them (it is, also of interest that when related to pedagogic models used in the education of young people, this model would appear to be closer to the primary school than to the university ...). Although trainers offering material designed to appeal to these audience requirements may not know it, may even deny it vehemently, when they design their course in this way, they are in effect in the grip of a theory. The theory asserts that some aspects of managers' roles cause them to be able to absorb new information or new technique successfully only in the way described. As University students, managers presumably learnt in the conventional academic manner. But once they become managers, they put away these methods and learn new ways to learn, and learn to reject old ways. One might wonder what it is about being a manager that has this effect, and whether the effect is as marked in other societies, or in all organisations within one society. Presumably it would be held that this orientation towards learning was a result of the location of the manager within hierarchic structures, and within cultures which explicitly rewarded forms of behaviour (and discouraged, even penalised others). And these value/reward systems had the result of structuring how, possibly if, managers learn. This is in fact highly plausible. Thus, management structures and cultures probably have serious implications for management learning. One further implication of this is that the success of training and development programmes could well be sorely limited by the impact of the value/reward structures delegates come from. Thus not only may management structures define how managers learn. They may also establish managers' resistance to learning. RESISTANCE TO LEARNING Such resistance may derive from various sources - from different levels of the organisation. It may derive from the organisation's structure and culture, from the way the organisation is differentiated into specialisms, from pathologies of team-work, and even from individuals themselves. At the organisational level, the most significant factor concerns the way in which power is exercised, and the behaviours that are rewarded and penalised. 31187 If it is necessary for organisations to change drastically to meet the challenge of today's environment and, if in one way such changes as are listed by Peters et al. (most of which require radically new behaviour on the part of managers) are to be achieved is via training courses, then an immediate paradox occurs: the course is only necessary because the required behaviours are not a normal outcome of existing practice and procedures, otherwise there would be no need to develop them in courses. Yet if they are not a normal part of organisational procedure, managers may sense a disjuncture between course content and everyday organisational life, and be cynical about course exhortation. There may for example, be conflict between a value being advocated in formal training and the structure and culture of the organisation. An example of this could be the discussion, and encouragement, in a session on human resource development, of the value of management innovation, creativity and risk-taking, on a course where delegates come from a highly hierarchic organisational structure where success is defined in terms of compliance with established procedures, where authority is highly centralised, where lower level authority is minimal, and where the dominant culture values compliance and deference. Under such circumstances managers learn that to survive they must avoid deviating from established and safe practice. The point is, of course, that managers learn all the time even when they are not on courses. Especially when they aren't on courses. If they hadn't learnt so much away from courses they would be more willing to learn on courses. They learn how to survive, how to operate within their organisational milieu. And this learning may be in tension with, even in opposition to formal learning. The problem thus is not that managers won't learn, or that they resist learning but that they have learnt too much and too well. They have learnt the ropes' and these lessons about how their organisation works may obstruct their openness to further learning. These days we are used to seeing organisations as strategic phenomena. Strategic thinking attempts to reduce uncertainty, achieve consistency, aid understanding and achieve efficiency (Mintzberg, 1987, pp. 28-9). We may be less used to the realisation that organisation employees also think strategically, not least with respect to their willingness to learn. Managers, since they exist within structures of power, reward and evaluation will probably only learn when they can see that what they are learning will be valuable and legitimate within their organisational setting; when they can see that what they are learning will help them do what they are rewarded for doing in ways which will be valued. They would be mad, and soon redundant, if they did anything else. THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE Some support for this argument comes from a study of how Japanese Electronics companies successfully encourage their engineers to manage and to implement technological development in an innovative manner which 32188 argues that the way in which elite engineers are rewarded and located within these companies is of great significance: engineers are developed to become highly placed, highly honoured, key figures in the development of the organisation. Achieving the desired behaviour in others is as much a result of how they are treated and rewarded as it is a result of how they are exhorted (Werksey, 1987). But this is not the only way in which organisational structures may have implications for managers' willingness to learn. Recent sociological research experience suggests another possibility. Some of the main organisational characteristics intended to achieve efficiency and rationality may actually serve to obstruct them, partly at least by reducing employees willingness to learn. It is not just the hierarchic structure of rewards and values which have consequences for management learning, so also has the fact that organisations are essentially and irredeemably political structures. This political element derives from the fact that organisations are differentiated into specialisms, departments, sub-groups ofvarious kinds, within a structure of hierarchy where power, resources, prestige and reward are differentially distributed. These specialisms breed differences of perspective, priority, interest. Within structures of power individuals seek to defend and advance their interests. As individual members of organisations compete for scarce rewards, so departments, sections and specialisms tend to seek to defend their share of budget, their interests, their view of the organisation's 'real' priorities (which strangely often tend to be closely related to their departmental goals and activities), their skill and discipline base. Have you known trainers who insist on the irrelevance of training, accountants who admit finance is overemphasised, marketeers who argue that marketing is largely guesswork, and irrelevant? And are these specialists often to be seen insisting that their budget is too large, their allocation of staff too generous, that other departments should receive from their share? A consequence of the inevitable sectionalism of large organisations is that information becomes a resource useful to protect or advance sectional interests; change (which is often associated with learning) becomes potentially threatening. 'Each service, each division, indeed every subunit, becomes a guardian of its own mission, standards and skills; lines of organisation become lines of loyalty and secrecy. In industry, the personnel department defends its control over selection and training; accounting, its standards of reporting; production, its schedules of output; sales, its interests in product design and customer service - each restricting information that might advance the competing interests of the others' (Wilensky, 1967, p. 48). Managers may resist certain planned innovations and their associated training for two related reasons: because they fear the change as having implications for their sectional position, and because they are suspicious of those who initiate the change whom they see as distinct from themselves - as 'them' in contrast to 'us'. Under these common conditions, learning may thus cease to be a neutral process where individual recipients have no 33189 resistance to absorbing new knowledge or skills save their individual capacity or 'learning style', and becomes a politicised process where new knowledge, systems and techniques are viewed suspiciously, even rejected because they are seen to represent the priorities of others whose priorities are distinct and possibly opposed, or to result in a reallocation of organisational resources, or a weakening of a section's traditional power-base. For example, in the bad old days of quantified psychometric appraisal schemes, when department managers were asked by Personnel to complete appraisal forms on their staff, allocating grades, ticking boxes or ranking them against each other, many managers, when undergoing training, showed a marked reluctance (to put it mildly) to learning the new procedures, or developing the skills of appraisal interviewing. Their resistance was nothing to do with capacity to learn or willingness to learn. It was based on their conviction that this sort of performance appraisal would damage their relations with their subordinates, would reduce their ability to seek the best for their people, would result in them losing control over their staff, to Personnel's advantage. Personnel were seen as having their own proprieties and values, which were to do with spreading personnel systems, formalising procedures. Managers, therefore, often rejected learning about the systems and their procedures because they saw them as carrying significant implications for the control of their staff, and thus for the distribution of power within the organisation. These managers knew that information about their staff's performance was politically significant; as a result they saw the information in the training course as representing interests - Personnel priorities over departmental management priorities. So they rejected it. And they rejected these appraisal systems too. During the course of a series of seminars, held with station officers within the London Fire Brigade, designed to identify and when necessary modify attitudes towards the introduction of non-white and non-male firefighters, a similar pattern of resistance was evident. The station officers were markedly unsympathetic to the messages of the seminars. They frequently denied the truth of the explanation of the nature and purpose of equal opportunities (EO) legislation, and refused to accept the validity of the arguments presented in the seminar. A severe case of refusal to learn. Initially, the temptation was to explain this resistance in terms of the conservatism or the possible racism/sexism of the officers. It looked like that. But reflection suggested that an explanation solely in terms of the existence of a strong white male organisational culture was inadequate, not least because of its circularity: station officers' refusal to accept the messages of the EO seminar was a result of their organisational culture. The racism of the organisational culture was seen to be revealed in officers' resistance to the EO programme. A more plausible explanation for station officers' refusal to learn was developed which tried to locate their attitudes towards the EO programme 34190 within the context of officers' conviction that the programme represented a significant reduction in the traditional authority of firestation personnel to intervene in recruitment/selection, and to allocate advantage in these processes to applicants from among their own family and friends. The application of EO procedures immediately eliminated this informal labour market and replaced it with a formalised, open system. It was this aspect of the change as much as the openness towards previously barred categories of applicant which accounted for much of the resistance. Also relevant was the fracturing of the management structure: station officers were based with the watch at the firestation. They worked shifts, and spent their days and nights with the firefighters. When a call came, the station officers went with the crew of the engine. Inevitably they developed close relations with members of the watch, and shared a world composed of danger and boredom, a world of jokes, memories and myths. The next layer of management was spatially and temporally separated: they worked office hours, were based in regional offices, and were seen to inhabit a different and more bureaucratic world far from the realities of actual firefighting. A marked 'them' and 'us' perspective developed and it was in this context of insiders and outsiders that resistance flourished. For it was 'their' policies which were seen to be represented in the EO policy, and to conflict with the traditional 'rights' of the ordinary fireman. Thus organisational structures and cultures, and the common internal differentiation (formal or informal) into specialisms and subgroups, may generate conceptions of interest and in-group loyalty, out-group resistance, which seriously gets in the way of managers' willingness to learn. Actually this has. been remarked on before, although the full implications may have been missed. Janis in his important work Victims of Groupthink (1972) argues that when a small group of people develop strong bonds of loyalty and cohesion, and develop an interest in a particular policy or point of view (deriving usually from the group leader), they become victims of what he calls 'groupthink'. The elements of the condition are fully described and illustrated by Janis. They refer to a condition where loyalty to the group and to the emerging group decision blinds the group to evidence which would reveal the inadequacies of the favoured line, leads members to overlook the deficiencies in their analysis, and the likely implications of their preferred solution. In short, Janis argues that excessive group solidarity can lead to a condition where the group becomes entirely unable to learn : where all its energies go into finding grounds for supporting its preferred solution rather than into thorough and open analysis of all possibilities and their implications. The group becomes so convinced that it is right, that when finally the unexpected happens members frequently refuse to believe it - it 'couldn't happen'. 35191 SUMMARY This article argues that some cases of management resistance to learning should be explained not in terms of the individual attitudes or learning style or 'openness' of managers but in terms of the nature of the organisational structures within which they live and work, and what these structures may teach managers. It has been argued that when training involves an attempt to change management practice significantly (as is apparently required for organisations to be able to cope with today's environments) resistance to learning may derive from what managers have already learnt from their organisational experience. This has obvious implications for management training for it suggests some organisational limits to training, and implies that managers can only learn successfully when there exists a complementarity between training messages and organisational experience, or when they are entirely convinced that the training content represents a genuine intention to implement change on the part of the senior executives. REFERENCES _ Janis, I. (1972), Victims of Groupthmk, Houghton Mifflin, Boston Mintzberg, H. (1987), Harvard Busmess Review, July/Aug. Peters, T. (1987), Thriving on Chaos Handbook for a Management Revolution , Macmillan, London Prospect Centre (1988), Strategies and People, Prospect Centre, Kingston Werksey, G. (1987), Training for Innovation. How Japanese Electronics Companies Develop their Elite Managers, General Electric Co, London Wickens, P. (1987), The Road to Nissan, Flexibihty, Quality, Teamwork , Macmillan, London Wilensky, H. (1967), Organisational Intelligence, Basic Books, New York ADDRESS FOR REPRINTS Graeme Solomon, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA</p> <aug> <p>By Graeme Salaman and Jim Butler</p> </aug> |
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