摘要:

AbstractThe paper, the opening address to the Conference on Management Training for Scientists and Technologists held at Manchester in July 1986, deals with the problems which must be solved by UK industry if it is to survive in the industrial jungle of the next century. The author sees the most serious cause for concern as being the poor communication between top managements and technologists, originating in and aggravated by historically based cultural and social divisions inside UK society.The first and essential step towards a solution is for top managements to accept that technological change is inevitable and that it will affect their own operations. They must therefore accept the need to continuously review and undertake the replacement of the firm's process, product and management technologies, along with a parallel review and refurbishment of workforce skills. This implies re‐education both of the firm's technical arm, including its R&D personnel and, most importantly, of the non‐R&D functions which commission R&D and use its results. The author sees functional demarcation lines as a particular evil. He also deplores the preference of UK financial institutions for short‐term financial returns to all investment, which reduces its capability to support innovative activities with a long lead‐time. He contends that the solution to the UK's long‐standing economic problems demands at least that technology and its proper management be placed at the very top of top management's agenda.He concludes the paper by challenging the technological community to play its part in bridging the gap between top managements and technology. Achieving acceptance of this challenge is the most important current task of those engaged in developing the management capabilities of scientists and technologists.The invitation to give an opening address, with no restrictions other than a loose relationship to the subject to be discussed, to a conference of this kind is one which is very difficult to refuse. Few of us can resist the chance of a platform on which to ride a few hobby‐horses, display a few personal prejudices which can be legitimately exposed, and on which some wild generalisations can be made, which I would not make did I not think them worth further consideration. In this opening few minutes of your conference, I have no intention of examining any single aspect of the comprehensive coverage which will be the feature of the next three days, but I would like to deal personally with a few of the aspects of this most challenging of subjects of which I have had some personal experience. The subject is of crucial importance, not just in the operational sense of how we make the best of what we have, but in helping to formulate better the industrial strategies which the UK must adopt if it is to survive in the industrial jungle of the 2

ISSN:0033-6807    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9310.1987.tb01182.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1987

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractThe success of an R&D operation depends on selecting the right speciailists to occupy management positions. Errors of selection mostly arise because the choice is made on the basis of the candidate's current performance as a scientist or technologist. However, the author makes the point that persons likely to make good Rand D managers differ qualitatively from good researchers. Good scientists adopt an innovative, unconstrained, independent approach to their work, have high self‐esteem, are not much interested in people and, above all, prize technical soundness. R&D managers are interested in people, active, enterprising and want to manage.The organization's problem is therefore to find reliable ways of predicting management potential with sufficient but not exclusive regard to current performance. The author recommends the use of a Career Aspirations Programme, based on exposure to the processes operating in an Assessment Centre. This is a systematic procedure using an array of personnel evaluation techniques through which a person is made aware of the demands of a management job and managers made aware of the likelihood of that person's meeting them.At the end of the process a course of personal development is agreed upon. In concrete terms this means for the potential manager that promotion may follow. Especially important if the verdict is that he or she is to continue as a technical specialist, the job may be re‐designed to give it more scope and impact, or the person concerned may be retrained or placed under the care of a senior colleague acting as a men

ISSN:0033-6807    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9310.1987.tb01183.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1987

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractBelieving that the foundation of any performance enhancement program, productivity improvement effort, or career development program is a sound performance appraisal system, several years ago we formed a task force of line managers whose charge was to design an appraisal system which would be successful in Pfizer Central Research‐US—an organization of approximately 1300 people most of whom are involved in basic research for the pharmaceutical, agricultural, and chemical operating divisions of Pfizer Inc. The system which resulted calls for three different ‘appraisal events’ during the year: a Self‐Appraisal, a Performance Appraisal, and a midyear Progress Review. The task force felt that for the new system to function successfully, it was important that people regard it as important, understand what it is, and feel as comfortable as possible during the three supervisor‐supervisee appraisal discussions. To help insure that these stipulations be met, the new system was announced by the President of the Division, a booklet describing it was written and distributed to all employees, and two training programs (one for supervisors and one for supervisees) were designed and conducted. The full annual cycle has been in effect for two years and the feedback we receive is positive. Now that this component is in place, we see the next logical step to be to move aggressively into designing a more specific approach to career

ISSN:0033-6807    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9310.1987.tb01184.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1987

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractA career plateau is defined as that point in a person's career which represents a cessation of both lateral and upward movement between jobs. The present study elaborates the idea that a fuller understanding of individual reactions to the career plateau can be achieved by considering supervisory behaviours and job characteristics as variables transmitting the influence of career plateauing to behavioural and attitudinal reaction measures. It is suggested that supervisors invest less attention and resources in plateaued employees and that plateaued employees are assigned to jobs with less motivating potential. Analyses of questionnaire data from 618 R&D professionals in 11 large West German firms show that there are significant differences between plateaued R&D professionals (i. e. those subjects with at least 10 years of job tenure) and a nonplateaued comparison group (i. e. respondents with not more than 6 years of job tenure) controlling for age as a potential confounding influence. Specifically, plateaued R&D professionals indicate less working hours, to be less satisfied with their career and their work, to be less involved in their work, and they tend to produce less publications and patents per year of company tenure. Furthermore, considerable differences are found between one's immediate supervisor's behaviours (e. g. provision of job‐related performance feedback) reported by plateaued professionals and their non‐plateaued counterparts. However, even after controlling the mediating effects of supervisory behaviours and job characteristics variables plateauing still had a small, but significant detrimental effect on 3 out of 6 reaction measures. Implications are outlined for organizational career management activit

ISSN:0033-6807    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9310.1987.tb01185.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1987

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractThe author deals with the problem faced by Lever Brothers Ltd, a company within the Unilever Group, in training graduate management trainees to manage change in an era in which subordinates increasingly challenge management decisions and those decisions themselves are less confidently made.One response was to include in the first‐year management training programme a week‐long Study Group, guided but not led by a process consultant, and dedicated to exploring possible changes in the company's personnel management policies necessary to meet expected changes in the social and economic climate.Over the years the format and detailed objectives of this Study Group have changed but as a result of the flexibility of the format and the openness of the transactions much has been learned on how to manage change. Trainees have learned, for exarnple, that learning must be viewed as part of work and not something added on, that group learning is possible and desirable, that people learn in different ways, and that managing a technical operation involves managing a social group. The paper also discusses the role of the trainer in such free‐ranging group processes and the need to integrate what has been learned in training sessions with the real world of operations.The author concludes by emphasising that the most important lesson learned by trainees is that managing theprocessof the Study Group was an essential part of managing its task. From this experience they also learnt the more important lesson that process review is basic to managing in real

ISSN:0033-6807    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9310.1987.tb01186.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1987

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractA key requirement for a top manager—whether from a scientific/technical background or from a commercial/administrative background—is the ability to appreciate and integrate the contributions that can be made by all the disciplines and viewpoints around the boardroom table.It is no more difficult for a scientist to appreciate the perspectives of, say, production or marketing people than it is for them to appreciate those of the scientist. A great deal of general management development theory and practice is therefore equally applicable to the needs of those entering the domain of management from technical and scientific disciplines as it is to those arriving from the commercial, industrial and financial spheres.The purpose of this paper is to outline a set of theoretical sources which have been found to assist managers and technical personnel to address cross‐cultural issues within and between organisa

ISSN:0033-6807    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9310.1987.tb01187.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1987

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractIn today's world industrial firms strive to achieve technical closeness in a multiplicity of cross‐cultural environments. As yet, the management sciences appear not to have created concepts and procedures that have both heuristic merit and the potential to serve as a practical tool for describing and facilitating cross‐cultural communication at the personal and organizational levels. This paper, drawing on the detailed evidence of five industrial firms' interactions (buying, selling, conducting market research and technical fact‐finding) in and with France, the U. S. S. R., and Japan, will advance the concept of communication competence, an organizational capacity to interpret, and anticipate changes in, foreign sociocultural environments (Holden's Ph. D thesis, January 1986). It will be demonstrated that the concept of communication competence can be developed as a multi‐dimensional device for assessing firms' capacities to sustain technical closeness and making evaluative comparisons of their perf

ISSN:0033-6807    

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9310.1987.tb01188.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1987

数据来源: WILEY