Magazine Fall 2022 Issue

Saving Management From Our Obsession With Leadership

Lofty notions of leadership have captivated our collective imagination — and we’ve underappreciated and underinvested in the everyday management skills that organizations desperately need.

Jim Detert, Kevin Kniffin, and Hannes Leroy Reading Time: 21 min 

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For decades, business thinkers and the executives who look to them for insight have elevated the visionary, inspirational leader over the useful yet pedestrian good manager. But evidence all around us suggests that we devalue management practices at our peril: What we’ve come to denigrate as mere management (done by those who are merely managers) is incredibly difficult and valuable.

It becomes all the more vital during times of disruption and crisis. Take the COVID-19 pandemic: Whether we’re talking about navigating supply chain disruptions, operating safely on the front lines, or simply keeping doors open for customers, businesses have desperately needed people who know how to coordinate action, solve technical problems, and deal skillfully with the myriad human challenges that employees and other stakeholders face. The same goes for organizations involved in developing, manufacturing, distributing, or administering vaccines and treatments. To meet the moment, we’ve needed managers who can keep things running and support employees — not leaders who give stirring speeches but remain detached from day-to-day operations.

The so-called Great Resignation has been quite telling in this regard. The people quitting in droves haven’t done so because their company’s top executive is insufficiently visionary or inspirational. Rather, people have quit lousy jobs — jobs that lack autonomy, variety, or opportunities to grow; jobs that pay poorly and don’t reward performance fairly; jobs that aren’t clearly defined and structured; jobs that lack guardrails that prevent chronic overload and frustration.1 They’ve also quit their direct bosses, whose lack of everyday managerial competence, trustworthiness, inclusiveness, and care is no longer tolerable.2 And they’ve quit organizations that have breached their psychological contracts with employees by violating the unwritten rules of trust, fairness, and justice.3

While the number of workers who have left jobs has been extraordinary, particularly in certain sectors, the reasons aren’t new and shouldn’t surprise us. Organizational researchers have been studying turnover for decades. The causes cited today — including the low job satisfaction, commitment, and engagement associated with poor management — are the same ones identified in hundreds of individual studies and multiple meta-analyses. In the decade before the pandemic hit, for example, the percentage of highly engaged employees never exceeded 22% among millions surveyed, and the relationship between low engagement and high turnover was well documented.

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About the Authors

Jim Detert is the John L. Colley Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and the author of Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021). Kevin Kniffin (@kevinkniffin) is a professor of management and organizations at Cornell University in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at the SC Johnson College of Business. Hannes Leroy is a professor of management at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, where he also serves as academic director for the Erasmus Centre for Leadership.

References

1. M. Schwantes, “Why Are People Quitting? Burnout’s Just the Tip of the Iceberg,” Inc., Sept. 14, 2021, www.inc.com; A. De Smet, B. Dowling, M. Mugayar-Baldocchi, et al., “‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The Choice Is Yours,” McKinsey Quarterly, Sept. 8, 2021, www.mckinsey.com; and T. Smart, “Study: Gen Z, Millennials Driving ‘The Great Resignation,’” U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 26, 2021, www.usnews.com.

2. De Smet et al., “‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’?”; “2021 People Management Report,” PDF file (Westwood, Massachusetts: The Predictive Index, 2021), www.predictiveindex.com; and “The Great Resignation Research Report,” PlanBeyond, accessed May 31, 2022, https://planbeyond.com.

3. D. Sull, C. Sull, and B. Zweig, “Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Jan. 11, 2022, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.

4. J.K. Harter, F.L. Schmidt, S. Agrawal, et al., “The Relationship Between Engagement at Work and Organizational Outcomes: 2020 Q12 Meta-Analysis: 10th Edition,” PDF file (Washington, D.C.: Gallup, October 2020), www.gallup.com.

5. A. Zaleznik, “Leaders and Managers: Are They Different?” Harvard Business Review 15, no. 3 (May 1977): 67-84.

6. K.M. Kniffin, J.R. Detert, and H.L. Leroy, “On Leading and Managing: Synonyms or Separate (and Unequal)?” Academy of Management Discoveries 6, no. 4 (December 2020): 544-571.

7. J.R. Meindl, S.B. Ehrlich, and J.M. Dukerich, “The Romance of Leadership,” Administrative Science Quarterly 30, no. 1 (March 1985): 78-102.

8. F.E. Fiedler, “A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness” (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).

9. T.A. Judge, R.F. Piccolo, and R. Ilies, “The Forgotten Ones? The Validity of Consideration and Initiating Structure in Leadership Research,” Journal of Applied Psychology 89, no. 1 (February 2004): 36-51.

10. M. Korn, “What It’s Like Being a Middle Manager Today,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 5, 2013, www.wsj.com.

11. J.P. Kotter, “What Leaders Really Do,” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 11 (December 2001): 85-96.

12. A. Van den Broeck, D.L. Ferris, C. Chang, et al., “A Review of Self-Determination Theory’s Basic Psychological Needs at Work,” Journal of Management 42, no. 5 (July 2016): 1195-1229.

13. A.L. Rubenstein, M.B. Eberly, T.W. Lee, et al., “Surveying the Forest: A Meta-Analysis, Moderator Investigation, and Future-Oriented Discussion of the Antecedents of Voluntary Employee Turnover,” Personnel Psychology 71, no. 1 (spring 2018): 23-65.

14. Judge, Piccolo, and Ilies, “The Forgotten Ones?” 36-51.

15. G.S. Adams, B.A. Converse, A.H. Hales, et al., “People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes,” Nature 592, no. 7853 (April 2021): 258-261.

16.J.R. Hackman and G.R. Oldham, “Motivation Through the Design of Work: Test of a Theory,” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16, no. 2 (August 1976): 250-279; and Rubenstein et al., “Surveying the Forest,” 23-65.

17. A.M. Grant, “Employees Without a Cause: The Motivational Effects of Prosocial Impact in Public Service,” International Public Management Journal 11, no. 1 (March 2008): 48-66.

18. L.A. Hill and K. Lineback, “Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader” (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2011).

19. M.H. Kernis, “Toward a Conceptualization of Optimal Self-Esteem,” Psychological Inquiry 14, no. 1 (2003): 1-26.

20.J.R. Detert, “The Problem With Saying ‘It’s No Big Deal,’” Harvard Business Review, Aug. 20, 2021, https://hbr.org.

21. As described in J.R. Detert and C. Black, “Defining Moments: Anxious Alastair,” Darden Business School case no. UVA-OB-1259 (Charlottesville, Virginia: Darden Business Publishing, 2018).

22. J.R. Detert and B. Taubenfeld, “(I Think) I Know Why You Did That: The Risky Business of Inferring Intentions,” Darden School of Business case no. UVA-OB-1348 (Charlottesville, Virginia: Darden Business Publishing, 2021).

23. P.M. Lencioni, “Make Your Values Mean Something,” Harvard Business Review 80, no. 7 (July 2002): 113-117.

24. For the classic statement on equity theory, see J.S. Adams, “Inequity in Social Exchange,” in “Advances in Experimental Social Psychology,” vol. 2, ed. L. Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1965), 267-299.

25. J.A. Colquitt, D.E. Conlon, M.J. Wesson, et al., “Justice at the Millennium: A Meta-Analytic Review of 25 Years of Organizational Justice Research,” Journal of Applied Psychology 86, no. 3 (June 2001): 425-445.

26. See, for example, R. Folger and M.A. Konovsky, “Effects of Procedural and Distributive Justice on Reactions to Pay Raise Decisions,” Academy of Management Journal 32, no. 1 (March 1989): 115-130.

27. S. Kerr, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B,” Academy of Management Journal 18, no. 4 (December 1975): 769-783.

28. J. Detert, “Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work” (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).

29. R.M. Kramer and R.J. Lewicki, “Repairing and Enhancing Trust: Approaches to Reducing Organizational Trust Deficits,” The Academy of Management Annals 4, no. 1 (January 2010): 245-277; and P.H. Kim, D.L. Ferrin, C.D. Cooper, et al., “Removing the Shadow of Suspicion: The Effects of Apology Versus Denial for Repairing Competence- Versus Integrity-Based Trust Violations,” Journal of Applied Psychology 89, no. 1 (March 2004): 104-118.

30. T. Simons, “Behavioral Integrity: The Perceived Alignment Between Managers’ Words and Deeds as a Research Focus,” Organization Science 13, no. 1 (January-February 2002): 18-35.

31. D. Sull, S. Turconi, and C. Sull, “When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk?” MIT Sloan Management Review, July 21, 2020, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.

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Comments (2)
Adam Jeske
Very interesting, necessary and on time article.
Like the authors, I too believe that charismatic, lofty and visionary leadership is rarely needed in an organization, especially at the middle management level. But that set of managerial skills mentioned in the article (designing a good, motivating and engaging workplace, defining roles and tasks and providing the resources to carry them out, creating psychological safety and treating all employees fairly, making demands and challenges on employees and informing them about the quality of their work, while showing sensitivity and empathy, personal concern, kind interest in the employee, not avoiding difficult conversations or difficult situations, without being disillusioned or indulgent) is nothing more than a set of competencies of a team leader. It is these competencies that distinguish a good manager (with whom people want to work), from a poor one, who supervises, controls, orders and often manipulates and disrespects people (from whom frustrated employees quit). And this set of managerial competencies, in my opinion, should be taught in all kinds of leadership training courses.
Kevin Sauter
I think the authors have totally missed the mark by continuing to make a distinction between a leader and a manager.  This kind of writing, from the perspective of a university role without current experience other than a survey is, in my opinion, not helpful.  In fact, it serves to separate out people.  One person is a visionary leader expected to have a broad, sweeping view with high level targets and not expected to "get into the details of a manager."  The other is a person who is good at managing, but can't be expected to be a good communicator and a source of inspiration and growth for the people in their span of care.  There is not one mention of courage in either perspective the authors outline and perpetuating a suggestion from 1977 that only academics would reference illustrates their need for a more holistic approach and writing from personal experience of being a leader who has to manage many facets of our changing landscape and people entrusted in our care.