Contemporary Management Practices and Challenges : The Scandinavian Perspective

Managers are faced with the challenge of an ever-changing environment, ranging from increasing globalisation, through the technologization of physical processes, to virtual ways of communicating. The response to this has been a gradual shift from rule-based to value-based management styles and practices. In order to obtain an insight into how far this development has proceeded, a structured survey of about 1500 top, middle and line managers from the private and public sectors was carried out. Among other interesting results, the study suggests that 'softer' as well as external-oriented roles in general are gaining increasing importance at the expense of rules and control. Moreover, managers from the private sector seem to be more steeped in traditional 'hard' managerial roles related to the operational level than their public-sector counterparts. Put another way, evidence supports the conclusion that 'modernization' seems to have deeper roots among managers from the public sector compared with managers from the private sector