Psychomanagement. Robert Spillane
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tertiary training in personnel administration and the establishment of professional associations, such as the Institute of Industrial Management (later the Australian Institute of Management) and the Institute of Personnel Management (Australia).
After 1950 a trend in industrial psychology made significant inroads into Australian management through personnel departments. Crusaders of this trend were the ‘human relations’ experts who built their case for psychology on the American Hawthorne experiments. They argued for social motivators and against economic motivators. Although the majority of managers had assumed that money was the greatest incentive for employees, American psychologists insisted that employees needed other, less tangible rewards. Because of the confusion generated by the debate about motivation and the role of money as an incentive, researchers increased their efforts to understand the relationship between job satisfaction and performance. They concluded that satisfaction with one’s job is not necessarily related to performance and job performance may be only peripherally related to personal goals. We don’t know what the majority of managers thought about this debate since there are no major studies of Australian business managers before the 1960s.
Sociologist Sol Encel, in Equality and Authority, reported a survey from 1960 of 100 senior managers which portrayed them as lacking in community leadership, political knowledge, aspirations and achievements. He acknowledged politician and author Michael Baume, who described business (in 1964) as the most poorly serviced vocation in Australia, made up from the leftovers of other professions. Australia’s prosperity, he argued, depends on good luck rather than on any inspired managerial activity. Business directors are created out of the remnants after medicine, law, science and engineering have taken the better intellects. A worrying feature of Australian managers was their anti-intellectualism and hostility towards tertiary education. Even today one hears echoes of Henry Ford’s boorish attitude towards education (history is bunk), as managers rationalise their intellectual inferiority complexes with displays of bravado when confronted by articulate and erudite colleagues. Many Australian managers simply lack confidence in their ability to converse intelligently with others; retreating behind a facile pragmatism which sneers at education and promotes dubious forms of training based on the learning of routine skills or jejune models of ‘managerial style’.
In the early years of Australian management, neither training nor education was required. Unlike members of the traditional professions, managers could scarcely believe their good fortunes when they secured well-paid jobs without formal education. Prior to the 1970s when management schools opened their doors, Australian managers were notoriously practical folk who were wary of, if not antagonistic towards, intellectual pursuits. They defended practice against theory, experience against intellect and training against education. This anti-intellectualism, which is characteristic of Australian life generally, is unsurprising given the difficulty in agreeing on a curriculum for management studies. People who have justified their occupational existence (and high salaries) on their ability to survive a succession of bureaucratic jobs are unlikely to agree on a management curriculum. Indeed, one of the more tedious assertions of Australian managers over the years has been their insistence that they achieved success without formal education.
The days of uneducated managers were numbered, however. Late in 1969 the Commonwealth Government commissioned an ‘Inquiry into Postgraduate Education for Management’. The report of that inquiry, known as the Cyert Report, was completed in four weeks and tabled in March 1970. The members of the Committee of Inquiry were American academics who recommended the creation of a ‘school of excellence’ in postgraduate management education at the University of NSW, thus upsetting the Melbourne business establishment. A second (Ralph) Committee of Inquiry into management education was commissioned in 1980 and Melbourne got its ‘school of excellence’.
By 1970, five Australian universities offered MBA-type programs – Adelaide, Macquarie, Melbourne, Monash and New South Wales. After a slow start, the programs eventually numbered among the economic success stories of tertiary education. Some academics, however, expressed grave doubts and considerable disquiet about the existence of management schools in universities. They were concerned that management schools would be unable to maintain academic standards since new courses had to be invented and old ones modified for business consumption. This was forced upon management teachers by the demands of pragmatic, ill-educated managers, increasingly illiterate students and the urgent need to establish lines of professional demarcation. The fact that academics could not agree on the status of management added to the confusion: is it a science, an art, or a practice?
As management is an interdisciplinary subject its academic founders took the liberal position that its study should include ‘hard’ subjects, like statistics and ‘soft’ subjects, like psychology. These were supplemented with functional courses in finance, marketing and logistics. Of special importance were ‘people’ courses, which have travelled under many names – organisational behaviour, industrial/organisational/ managerial psychology – and since the 1980s, human resource management. The ‘people’ courses directed attention to the personalities, motives and values of managers.
In the late 1960s Geert Hofstede, in Culture’s Consequences, studied the values of 116,000 IBM employees in forty countries. He found Australians to be strongly individualistic, masculine, with low levels of anxiety (uncertainty avoidance). Strong individualism means that: the involvement of individuals with their organisations is calculative rather than moralistic; organisations are not expected to look after their employees for life; organisations have only a moderate influence on members’ well-being; employees are expected to defend their own interests rather than allow management to represent them; and policies and practices allow for individual initiative rather than emphasising loyalty to employers. Strong masculinity means that: organisational interests are a legitimate reason for interfering with people’s private lives; fewer females are in the more qualified jobs; females in the more qualified jobs are very assertive; higher job stress; and more industrial conflict.
Hofstede’s results indicated that Australians adopt a self-interested attitude about work, are easy-going in their attitudes towards work rules, but give little support to reforms that would require more involvement by employees in decision-making. In short, Australians are generally willing to allow managers to exercise authority in return for economic security.
In their 1974 book, The Australian Manager, Byrt and Masters describe the ideal manager as a person who formulates and implements strategy, makes decisions, organises people and carries out professional, technical or operative work. They insist that management is not a profession, in the way in which the law and medicine are professions and argue that Australian managers do not form a political class. They describe Australian (middle) managers as:
Dependent on government; insular; lacking in boldness and initiative; dependent on overseas sources for capital, ideas and techniques; reasonably but not highly educated; masculine in fact and outlook; city-dwellers, in particular of either Sydney or Melbourne; conservative; fearful of radicalism in economics and politics; egalitarian both socially and at the work place; practical and pragmatic; opportunists rather than planners; non-intellectual and some are anti-intellectual; interested in leisure, social activity and family; critical of politicians and the holders of formal authority; versatile; materialist; non-aggressive; manipulative in managerial style; and low in Machiavellian characteristics.5
In the second (1982) edition of their book, these descriptions do not appear and no explanation is offered. Clearly, their descriptions of local managers in the first edition were not flattering and did not correspond to the ‘ideal’ manager found in American management books.
In 1996 I asked more than 1000 managers to rate themselves as a group according to Byrt’s and Masters’ descriptions. They agreed with them on all counts: the impressionistic ratings of managers by two academics from the University of Melbourne in the early 1970s were almost identical to managers’ ratings more than twenty years later.
In the mid-1970s, an American named G.W. England compared Australian managers with their counterparts in the U.S., India, South Korea and Japan. In The Manager and His Values, England argues that personal value systems of managers do not change rapidly, even during periods of significant social change. The Australian managers in his study were humanistic