Some organizations invest a great deal of time and effort in elaborate training programmes designed to improve the so‐called “soft” skills of managing. Yet assessing the effectiveness of such initiatives has been rare. Indeed, some trainers have argued that such assessments are misleading....

As a result of the many changes which have taken place in the field of management development since the 1960s, a scenario presenting the probable appearance of the discipline in the year 2000 is presented, with evidence from the past and present to support it.

The central concern of this paper is managers in the middle who are hierarchically suppressed by new systems from above and squeezed by new technologies from below. They represent one of the most disillusioned groups in work organisations. Mid‐career crises, redundancies and exhortations to...

More people are preferring advisory to executive roles, and organisations are beginning to suffer from a lack of candidates for what is increasingly seen as the thankless task of management. This trend is being encouraged by mistaken management development practices and views of the managerial...

There has been a long and wide‐ranging literature on the problems of the individual's adjustment to the demands of work organisations. In the 1950s, Argyris and Merton argued that the needs of mature individuals and the properties of modern bureaucracies were incongruent. In a later work,...

There is a vast literature on managers' values and beliefs. However, there have been very few attemps to identify British managers' values or beliefs and relate them to employee relations practice. Marsh's survey of practice included questions on managerial values but this researcher did not...

“Crisis”, “suicide” and “burnout” – the disorders of the 1980s – but are they new or are they the same things with new labels? If there is an epidemic of such psychological disorders what can be done by the personnel function?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the conditional effect of team composition on team performance; specifically, how collective team orientation, group consensus, faultline configurations and trust among team members explain the objective performance of project teams in...

This study explores some important aspects of organisational career management (OCM) in Israel. Overall, our data, obtained from 136 large firms, represented by their human resource managers (HRMs), reflect a fairly paternalistic approach to career management; careers are mostly managed by the...

Within the dynamic nature of labour markets, career systems have witnessed major changes in recent decades. This paper presents several career perspectives, to manifest a trend in career systems and their meaning and implications for individuals, organizations and society. This trend may be...