The myth of the generic manager: new personal competencies for new management roles

Article Abstract:

Today, the most urgent challenge for most companies is to develop the managers who must operate in the new delayered, horizontal, networked organizations to deliver on their complex, multidimensional strategic priorities. It is here that most companies are facing the greatest difficulties. The reason lies in the historic "Russian doll model of management" in which managers at each level are expected to play similar roles and have similar responsibilities, only for a different size and scope of activities. The underlying premise that there is a generic management role is being further reinforced by many companies currently engaged in the new fad of identifying a set of desired personal competencies as the anchor for their management development initiatives. This article challenges this Russian doll model of management to argue that managers at different levels of the organization play distinctly different roles and add value in fundamentally different ways. Based on field research in twenty major corporations, the authors identify the roles of front-line, senior, and top-level managers in the new organizational form, and they describe how companies can develop these new managerial competencies. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Models, Executives, Organizational effectiveness, Executive ability

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Organizing for worldwide effectiveness: the transitional solution

Article Abstract:

To be competitive in an increasingly complex international environment, companies with worldwide operations must achieve global coordination and national flexibility simultaneously. Traditional organizational forms, however, have tended to provide one or the other attribute. The authors illustrate this point through the experience of two major competitors in consumer electronics: Philips, a classic 'multinational' company whose decentralized federation structure is well suited to facilitating national flexibility, and Matsushita, a 'global' company with a centralized hub configuration that provides it with great efficiency. The authors then describe an emerging model-- the 'transnational' organization whose structure is based on an integrated network of worldwide operations. The transnational firm requires both effective corporate management that does not impede national flexibility and efficient country management that does not prevent global coordination. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

International competition (Commerce), International competition (Economics)

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The multinational corporation as an interorganizational network

Article Abstract:

A multinational corporation consists of a group of geographically dispersed and goal-disparate organizations that include its headquarters and the different national subsidiaries. Such an entity can be conceptualized as an interorganizational network that is embedded in an external network consisting of all other organizations such as customers, suppliers, regulators, and so on, with which the different units of the multinational must interact. Based on such a conceptualization, the present authors draw on interorganization theory to develop a model of the multinational corporation as an internally differentiated interorganizational network. They propose hypotheses that relate certain attributes of the multinational, such as resource configuration and internal distribution of power, to certain structural properties of its external network. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Research, Organizational behavior, Interorganizational relations

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