Aligning Managers with Strategies Management Development Versus Selection

The goal of this paper is to outline the crucial roles of management development and choice in strategy implementation, to check their utilization in orienting managers with methods, and to acknowledge the precise conditions contributive to the employment of every methodology within the implementation method.

Management development is a method through which the manager's worth to the organization will increase primarily based on the acquisition of recent behaviors, skills, knowledge, attitudes, and motives (Wakabayashi, 1980).

Development components that are most significant to strategy implementation.

• Succession planning which is defined as the systematic management of mobility patterns in an organization.

• Mentoring: the mentor fulfills a set of career and psychosocial functions that enhance the protégé’s progress

• Training: Technical skills, Interpersonal, and conceptual skill programs are the main focus of most management training programs (Guglielmino and Carroll, 1979).

While top management sets the overall strategic direction, specific strategies, tactics, and solutions emerge from within the organization as subunits respond to their own environments. The rational comprehensive model views managers as determining the strategy and assigning its execution (Bourgeois, 1980), the political-incremental model views managers as acknowledging and legitimating the strategy after it has gained definition and momentum (Smircich and Stubbart , 1985).

The role of management development

Management development effects three crucial components of the implementation process:

1. Flexibility. Top management should be able to benefit from unexpected events that move the organization incrementally towards its objectives (Lindblom , 1959; Quinn , 1980). Mentoring, in particularly, may result in managers that have the track record, visibility and support to quickly marshal resources with the least political opposition (Hunt and Michael, 1983). Managers who consider learning, movement and change as normal parts of their jobs are a result of training and career pathing (Wexley and Latham, 1981).

2. Communication. Top management initially senses strategic needs and opportunities through communication (Quinn, 1980). Communication flows across the organization as individuals interpret and influence the strategy process. Management development can effect communication by providing an alternate information system. Through career pathing and mentoring, managers tend to develop wide circles of professional associates that can act as personal communication and problem-solving networks (Edstrom and Galbraith, 1979)

3. Cohesion. In the incremental model the strategy-making method depends on management's ability to coalesce around a developing strategic vision (Quinn, 1980). Cohesion effects strategy implementation mainly by affecting the extent of management commitment.

Management development and manager-strategy alignment

The political-incremental model sees that a manager's ability to implement a certain strategy depends on the level to which the manager has the managerial and organizational skills to follow the strategy, the degree to which he/she understands it, and also the degree to which he/she is dedicated to it. A primary approach in which development aligns managers with strategy is by providing the manager with the organizational and political sophistication necessary to be an efficient implementer.

Some cautions regarding management development

While considered as generally useful the socializing effects of development can result in cohesion and pressure for conformity, which can also serve as a foundation for unnecessary control and influence (Janis, 1982).

Once a corporation has established a development program, promotional norms will possibly develop discouraging the recruiting of outsiders. Firms depending on fresh input from new recruits, may find an intensive development program incompatible with strategic or competitive needs.

Development programs rely on the commitment, effort, and time of senior management (Carnazza, 1982).

THE ROLE OF SELECTION IN STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION

Selection is a technique in which individual characteristics and skills are matched with the actual requirements of a certain position (Dunnette, 1966), this requires the exact measurement of two different sets of variables, those relating to the position and those relating to the person himself (Cascio, 1987)

Selection and strategy implementation

Using the selection method to match managers with strategies is consistent with the rational-comprehensive model of strategy-making (Fredrickson and Mitchell, 1984). This model, views strategy implementation as a structural problem that is handled by achieving congruity or 'fit' between the organization's strategy, managerial systems and structure (Hamermesh, 1982).

The role of selection

In this model, strategy is implemented by top managers through the manipulation of the environment in which managerial activity takes place (Galbraith and Kazanjian, 1986; Hamermesh, 1982

Valid selection methods can offer a range of strategically significant advantages:

1. Finding a nearly ideal match between a manager's capabilities and a division's strategic needs are guaranteed to be noteworthy (Gupta and Govindarajan, 1984).

2. Selection provides decision-makers with access to a much larger pool of managerial talent (Cascio, 1986; French, 1986).

3. Support for strategic innovation and change (Fombrun, Tichy and Devanna, 1984).

4. Objective data provided for making managerial tasks (Dunnette, 1971).

Some cautions regarding selection

Selection involves the precise measurement of both individual skills and tasks (Cascio, 1987). Once applied at the strategic level, however, such measurements could be substantially technically challenging (Gerstein and Reisman, 1983).

Selection models usually fail to offer adequate basis for inferring task demands or managerial characteristics (see Szilagyi and Schwieger, 1984, for a review).

The selection method is additionally restricted by the actual fact that