Encyclopedia of Development Methods

Andrzej Huczynski

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351775625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This title was first published in 2001. This title was first published in 2001. The core of this thoroughly revised book is a directory of more than 700 methods. Each entry typically comprises an explanation, a bibliography, and cross-references. Other features include a review of different approaches to classifying the methods, and two valuable appendices; the first is to help practitioners analyse their methods; the second providing details of relevant books, journals and other information sources.

1
Defining the field

Identifying the boundaries between the different stakeholders interested in the general field covered by this encyclopedia is both difficult and not very fruitful. A few years ago, a conference took place on the topic of emergent fields in management. The flyer advertising it was interesting in that it demonstrated the breadth of the field. It contained a diagram with the labels ‘Management Learning’, ‘Human Resource Development’, ‘Training and Development’, ‘Management Education’ and ‘Management Development’. Below the diagram, it read:

Learning has emerged in recent years as a central concept in relation to management and organizations. It is seen as crucial to both organization success (the ‘learning organization idea’) and individual employment changes in globalizing, knowledge-based economies. Learning, knowledge, information, training and development, education and people are now more actively managed than ever before and numerous masters programmes have sprung up to ‘educate’, ‘develop’ and credentialize the professionals concerned with managing them. (Fox and Grey, 1997)

In practice, when thinking about change in organizations, most managers approach the topic in a narrower way. Management development methods have been used by company trainers and training consultants to help organizations to adapt to change, and to become more effective and efficient. Where management development ends and the development of organizations begins is difficult to establish. Indeed, the distinction may be an artificial one. That is why my previous two works, the Encyclopedia of Management Development Methods and Encyclopedia of Organizational Change Methods, have been integrated into a single volume and updated and expanded.

Jones and Woodcock (1985) offered a general model which relates the various methods of management development, management education, management training and of organizational development (see Figure 1.1). The core of their model is based on their belief that effectiveness is based on a manager’s ability to ‘take care of him or herself (self-development). Beyond that, depicted by ever widening concentric circles, is their need to manage subordinates, to manage the relations between their department and others in the company; and then manage the relationships with those outside their organization. Jones and Woodcock argue that these four levels of a manager’s responsibility demand different types of knowledge and skill. One might also add that there are different ways to acquire such knowledge and skill, and different methods with which to manage the aforementioned relationships. Later in the same book, Jones and Woodcock (1985, pp. 62–3) make a useful distinction between management development (MD) provided through training, and organizational development (OD), highlighting the main similarities and differences. They feel it is the differences which have implications for guiding the assessment of managerial training needs.

The similarities between management development and organizational development include the following:

1. The two activities have the same meta-goal – improved organizational functioning.
2. Both activities focus on balancing concerns between individual needs and organizational demands.
3. They are both subsumed under the umbrella of ‘human resource development’.

Figure 1.1 Definition of management development methods

Source: Jones and Woodcock (1985, p.55)

• 4. Both training and OD feature applications of behavioural science to human and systems problems.
• 5. The two types of effort have a common value base.
• 6. They are very often carried out by the same people.

There are a number of differences between the two, including:

1. The ‘target’ for MD is the individual manager; in OD it is groups of people and systems.
2. MD requires that its practitioners have skills in presenting and facilitating learning; OD calls for skills in system assessment, problem identification, problem-solving and intervention.
3. The role of the professional in MD is that of a ‘shaper’ of learning, but the primary role of the OD practitioner is process consultation.
4. MD specialists engage in training needs assessment, designing and conducting courses; OD practitioners involve themselves in action research and consulting with groups and individuals about problems.
5. The content of MD courses centres on simulated problems, but OD focuses exclusively on real ones.

Some writers see ‘method’ as referring to a series of teacher-directed activities that result in learning. Since method is a process, it consists of several steps. Many of the elements or steps used in a particular method may also be used in other methods – hence the overlap between educational programme designs, structured programme designs and organizational development activities. Educational psychologists have also argued that methods are tutor-initiated, and are based on an educational philosophy which states the values to be achieved, and on a theory of how people learn. They are said to list a set of learning principles which have relevant applications in the classroom, and indicate the behaviour that the teacher should maintain in order to make effective use of these principles. While a method consists of several steps or elements, it is the tutor who combines or synthesizes the elements into an effective process. Wallen and Travers (1963) have written that research into teaching methods is the study of the consistencies in the behaviour of teachers and the effect of these consistencies on the learning process. Teacher behaviour which might be considered could include the amount of information provided by a teacher, the emphasis placed on assessment, and so on. These writers use the terms ‘teaching method’ and ‘pattern of teacher behaviour’ interchangeably. Burgoyne and Stuart (1978), who investigated the relationship of learning theories to teaching methods, reported that:

the idea that one teaching method always embodied the same learning theory was wrong. We found, rather, that different learning theories illuminated different aspects of the same teaching methods, and that different applications of teaching methods ‘implemented’ assumptions from different learning theories, depending on the manner or style of application of the method by the person applying it.

To date, attempts to classify different teaching and learning methods have met with little success. Those offered by Wesley and Wronski (1965) and Joyce and Weil (1980) either tend to omit many of the entries described in this encyclopedia altogether, or else place them into categories where experience and common sense suggest they do not belong. Simplistic categorization systems are likely to fail for at least two reasons. First, a method label carries no agreed indication of the interactions it is likely to describe, and second, in order to produce any classification system one needs criteria with which to establish the categories. Numerous such criteria are possible, but after one’s interest is stated, it is then impossible to apply a single-criterion classification system universally. Given these difficulties, one needs to ask: what is the purpose of classifying these methods in the first place? At one level, the answer may be to indicate to readers which methods are operationally similar to each other so they can choose from several that are likely to achieve similar objectives, or else those which are similar in their mechanics but which can be used to achieve a variety of objectives. At another level, the purpose may be to indicate that the entries in the encyclopedia differ qualitatively from each other. Some are learning principles, while others might be described as recipes, interaction rules, feedback systems, and so on. This would allow the tutor to reflect on the suitability of any particular method in relation to the objectives and participants being worked with. For this reason, an analytical framework is offered in preference to a classification system (see Chapter 3).

About half the methods described in this encyclopedia seek to develop managers as individuals. Morris (1971), for example, saw it as ‘the systematic improvement of managerial effectiveness within the organization assessed by its contribution to organizational effectiveness’. Ashton and Easter by-Smith (1979) identified a number of perspectives within management development which they viewed as an organizational function within which ‘activities such as training, coaching, career planning, appraisal, job rotation might all have some part to play’. These writers saw management development as involving the continuing education of the individual manager at all stages of their career. Thus management development was considered as being concerned not only with education and training, but also ‘with a broader concept of development which implies improvement’. The breadth of this definition allows one to use it to refer to a wide range of different activities. It can be used to apply to both in-company and extra-company development programmes, to short as well as to long courses, to periods of training and education, to those which lead to formal qualifications as well as those which do not. It is an all-embracing concept of management development which is being used in this book. A more detailed examination follows of what is included under the label ‘management development’.

Burgoyne and Cooper (1976) conducted a study on the research that had been carried out into management teaching methods and identified journal references concerned with teaching methods. In doing this, they produced a hierarchy of decisions concerning management education which was what they used as a basis for classifying the research studies they found. Their five-level hierarchy is summarized in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 Hierarchy of management decision-making

Source: Burgoyne and Cooper (1976)

While the authors did not explicitly define their term ‘teaching method’, they nevertheless presented a useful framework with which to begin to sort out some of the confusion which surrounds the use of terms such as ‘management development’, ‘education’ and ‘organizational development’. They achieved this by raising the terms ‘management education’ and ‘development’ to an abstract level, and in their place referred to different types of programme designs. Their description of a branching hierarchy of decisions is shown in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3 Branching hierarchy of management education decisions

The attractiveness of the Burgoyne-Cooper hierarchy is that it sidesteps the arid debate over nomenclature referred to earlier. It is based on decisions to be taken by different people at different levels. In terms of methods or ‘what people actually do’, there is likely to be a high degree of overlap between what happens in educational programmes and in structural programmes. This encyclopedia focuses on two educational and structural programme designs on levels 3, 4 and 5. Burgoyne and Cooper see organizational development activities as deriving from both these strategies. However, the encyclopedia does not attempt to deal explicitly with organizational development methods, although some of these OD techniques are included if they are capable of being extracted and used outside their usual OD context. Similarly, psychotherapies are excluded, other than those which have already established themselves in management development (such as Transactional Analysis). Such therapies have been dealt with in great detail in other books (Winn, 1980; Clare and Thompson, 1981).

What exactly does the term ‘method’ refer to in the context of teaching and learning? Wesley and Wronski (1965) commented on the lack of specificity in the use of the word. They quoted a study in which students were asked to list the methods they knew. In addition to listing traditional, well-known ones such as the lecture and seminar, other methods listed included curricular materials, organization schemes, activities and devices. All these were equated with the term ‘method’. A brief survey of the literature on teaching and learning methods in management development can show whether the connotations of the word ‘method’ are equally broad in this field. In Burgoyne and Cooper’s (1976) article, the authors produced a ‘list of teaching methods’ which consisted of the following: lecture, texts, programmed instruction, role-playing, case studies, games and simulations, projects, packages, T-group/social skills training and ‘specials’. In a second paper on teaching and learning methods in management development, Burgoyne and Stuart (1978) discussed lecture, seminar, business game, encounter group, T-group, joint development activities, action learning, autonomy lab, learning community, guided reading and programmed instruction. The final example is taken from some work by Pedler (1978) on negotiating, which will be referred to in greater detail later. In discussing the teaching of information or situational knowledge, he argued that ‘the more traditional methods of teaching or training would seem to apply best’. He went on to list these as being lectures, talks, seminars, films, books, handouts and discussions. From these few examples, it is clear that the term ‘method’ is used in the same broad way in management development as elsewhere. Being such a difficult concept to pin down, it is not surprising that there has been little success in producing a meaningful method classification system. According to Wesley and Wronski (1965), such a task is impossible:

the complex and inclusive nature of method defies epigrammatic condensation. It is composed of diverse elements and is scarcely susceptible to logical analysis.

Nevertheless, the attempt to classify or group different methods in some way is useful in that, as the same authors state:

it clearly demonstrates the futility of devoting oneself wholly to one method. It appears desirable not only to use different methods, but to take care that those grounded in different bases are employed. And the analysis also furnishes an inclusive viewpoint that will prevent one from assigning undue merit or inclusive qualities to any one method.

Definition of organizational change methods

Jones and Woodcock (1985) do not explicitly define their use of the term ‘organizational development’. They appear to use the label to refer to activities that are focused on the organization as a system, rather than on individual managers. However, for over fifty years the term ‘organizational development’ (or OD), has had a specific meaning, which includes what Jones and Woodcock refer to, but goes beyond it. Organizational development originated in the USA after 1945. Richard Beckhard (1969, p. 9) defined it as: ‘an effort, planned, organization-wide, and managed from the top, to increase organization development and health through planned interventions in the organization’s “process”, using behavioural science knowledge’. This definition does not differ greatly from Jones and Woodcock’s. However, Buchanan and Huczynski (1997, p. 489) note that in pursuing these objectives, OD has a clear and prescripti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Index of methods
• 1 Defining the field
• 2 Management development method classification frameworks
• 3 Organizational change method classification frameworks
• Directory of methods
• Appendix: Resources for management development and organizational change