Management training and development

Abstract

The timing of any current reflection upon the state of management training and development is particularly appropriate as much of the West struggles to overcome the legacy of mismanagement by significant parts of its financial services sector, compounded by governments’ mismanagement of the regulatory processes. At the minimum, this raises questions about the quality of management and to the extent that practices were illegal, also about management ethics and legal competence. The financial collapse is a very high-profile case, but the evidence of mismanagement is widespread, ranging from information technology installations that do not deliver intended results and costly, failed military initiatives to the more mundane, everyday practices that mislead consumers and cause them detriment. The evidence points to poor quality management and the use of illegal, or at the very least unethical, practices, and for the purposes of this editorial, it might be pertinent to raise the following question:Has management training and development contributed in any way to encouraging or discouraging these phenomena? For example, has enough been done through management training and development to ensure that managers operate within an ethical framework and have an adequate grasp of the parameters of their legal environment? If, for example, MBA provision worldwide was to be examined, would this question be answered in the affirmative? The late Sumantra Ghoshal thought not and laid the blame for corporate scandals firmly at the door of management education (Ghoshal, 2005). We simply raise this and other issues as a prelude to introducing the papers in this special issue. We do not seek to explore these issues but feel that a backcloth of this sort might be helpful in reading the papers that follow. Further issues relating to management training and development are identified below, but prior to that, some developments are noted. The whole field has grown, particularly MBA offering and the portfolio of short courses. For the providers, mostly university business schools in the case of MBA, mostly private companies and professional institutes in the case of short courses, this work has proved very profitable. However, the suppliers have little stake in their courses being effective, with the notable exception that MBA providers are strongly interested in the salary levels of their ex-MBA students because this affects the provider’s international MBA ranking. From these salary data, it is known that the MBA is effective in helping the purchaser of an MBA to obtain a higher salary, and in a perfect market, we could assume that