MANAGEMENT BY PANACEA: ACCOUNTING FOR TRANSIENCE

Journal of Management Studies 30:2 March 1992 0022-2380

MANAGEMENT BY PANACEA: ACCOUNTING FOR TRANSIENCE

JOHN GILL SUE WHITTLE

ShefJield Hallam University

ABSTRACT

The cyclical nature of much consultant-led activity designed to improve managerial effectiveness is explored through three consultant-driven approaches to organizational improvement - management by objectives, organization development and total quality management. Such packaged programmes seem to proceed through phases of high enthusiasm and much activity followed by a period of disillusionment, to be replaced by the next stage panacea. An attempt is made to offer some explanation of the transitory nature of much managerial activity which is believed to lie fundamentally in cultural and psychodynamic phenomena. Such an analysis may provide some clues to the search for remedial steps which might be taken to find more enduring ways to bring about increased managerial effectiveness in organizations, although by the very nature of our diagnosis we remain pessimistic.

INTRODUCTION

T o one of the authors who has spent nearly 30 years teaching and researching in business schools, the current managerial fashion of Total Quality Manage- ment (TQM) seems depressingly familiar in its practice and revives memories of the ephemeral nature of other lucrative consultant-driven packages such as Management by Objectives (MBO) and Organization Development (OD).

CONSULTING APPROACHES TO ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS

Huge resources have been committed in the last four decades or so to managerial activities often designed by consultants, or academics with consulting aspirations, aimed at improving managerial effectiveness. Program- mes, for example, to introduce MBO, OD, the use of strategic planning models and ways of implementing new technology, such as Just in Time

Address for reprints: John Gill, Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University, Old Hall, Totley Hall Lane, Sheffield S17 4AB, UK.

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282 JOHN GILL AND SUE WHITTLE

(JIT), and improvements in the Quality of Working Life (QWL) all share much common ground with the current managerial obsession with T Q M and its forerunner in the UK, quality circles (QCs).

It should be added that these interventions are not of course trivial pursuits but are intended to address some fundamental managerial dilemmas. As Ray (1986) and Lundberg (1985) remind us, the former in a paper entitled ‘Corporate culture: the last frontier of control’, they are attempts by manage- ments to find ways of committing and controlling their workforces.

MBO is largely concerned with a combination of bureaucratic control through the manipulation of rewards and ‘humanistic control’ through a satisfying task. On the other hand OD and TQM share common ground as they are both fundamentally concerned with endeavouring to manage culture change. The expectation is that the manipulation of culture will give rise to a ‘love of the firm’ and its goals and so increase productivity. Of course attempts to exert both bureaucratic and cultural control often exist alongside each other in the same company. Such ambiguity is well portrayed, for example, in the Channel 4 documentary on the subject of Hewlett Packard, appropriately entitled ‘A Gilded Cage?’.

The purpose of this article is to examine some common features of three packaged approaches (MBO, OD and TQM) to improve managerial performance. In particular we focus on the latest fashion, TQM to try to account for the transitory nature of much managerial activity which seems to proceed from deep disillusionment with one panacea that has run its course to high enthusiasm for the next. I t is believed there is a life cycle through which packaged consulting approaches appear to proceed. This assumption is tested by briefy examining two of these programmes, MBO and OD, before considering TQM in a little greater detail. We conclude by suggesting that the search for cure-alls and their cyclic patterns is likely to continue, largely for cultural and psychodynamic reasons, despite evidence of their ineffectuality.

PACKAGED CONSULTANT APPROACHES TO ORGANIZATIONAL IMPROVEMENT

We briefly examine two programmes (OD and MBO) before considering T Q M in a little more detail. MBO, which was much in vogue in the 1960s and early 1970s, now seems to have become much less fashionable. To some it was regarded as a technique within the armoury of the OD practitioner in that ‘to be congruent with the OD effort it needs to be participative and transactional . . . but MBO programmes can also be highly autocratic and non participative’ (French and Bell, 1973, p. 168). Here French and Bell seem to be referring to the dysfunctions of approaches packaged by consultants based on minimal diagnosis; mechanistic, procedural steps and their implementation by hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations.

MBO, as with OD and TQM, had its founding father, Peter Drucker (1955), who was concerned to replace management by ‘drives’ and crises with management by objectives. These he believed needed to be derived in a participative manner so that a manager was enabled to exert self control over his own performance.

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Drucker’s early notions were seized upon by consultants, notably Humble (1973) working for Urwick, Orr and Partners in Britain, who in consultancy brochures and marketing films emphasized the company benefits in profits and managerial control and the sequence of steps which needed to be taken to achieve them. He described MBO as ‘a dynamic system which seeks to integrate the company’s needs to clarify and achieve its profit and growth goals with the manager’s need to contribute and develop himself. The proceedural stages involved setting company purpose and objectives, then moving down the organization to have each manager in the context of overall objectives clarify the key results against which his performance would be reviewed. Finally a personal job improvement plan would be drawn up. It was suggested that this whole process of target setting and review was to provide the motivation of the subordinate group and provision of an oppor- tunity for self development through the identification of training needs.

Such a prescription was close to Drucker’s conception and was clearly attractive to personnel and training functions seeking to find ways of interven- ing to justify their roles and to help companies to maximize returns from training in the heyday of the Training Boards in the 1960s and 1970s.

However, in practice MBO seemed to fall short of the extravagant claims made for it and a period of disillusionment set in. The reasons were not too difficult to understand for MBO came to be regarded by many senior managers working in authoritarian cultures as a means of more effectively controlling their subordinates. They attempted to achieve this by dealing face-to-face with individuals, avoiding overlapping responsibilities and apportioning individual blame for failures. Paradoxically if in some way a more democratic culture had been present then MBO might have been introduced in more propitious circumstances and would have succeeded. However in that case it is doubtful if it would then have been required, at least in the mechanistic form in which consultants introduced it.

Accordingly the common description of MBO as a do-it-yourself hang- man’s kit well captures the cynicism of middle managers exposed to senior managerial pressures to achieve over-ambitious targets and anxious to appear co-operative. So MBO, which in its conception was a means of improving organizational effectiveness through collaborative and supportive relationships, instead in many cases had the opposite effect. It was correctly perceived as a technique to increase senior managerial control, so, in the event, co- operation and commitment decreased and the chief increase in productivity was the paper flow (Gill and Molander, 1970; Wickens, 1968). Even in organizations which had more democratic cultures, the bureaucratization of performance appraisal, a key problematic stage in MBO, is well documented as fraught with difficulty and often counter-productive (George, 1986; McGregor, 1957).

So MBO had its founding father or guru who provided the concepts on which consultants based their packaged consulting programmes. These were at first received with great enthusiasm and widely implemented. But there quickly followed a period of disillusionment and decline, to be succeeded by yet another panacea. Nevertheless MBO has not completely disappeared and indeed there are attempts to ‘update’ it (Mali, 1986). Elements of it also still



remain and are gaining renewed popularity as performance appraisal - said to be a key element in Human Resource Management, or HRM as it is becoming to be known (Townley, 1989).

We now turn to Organization Development, the second example of a packaged consulting approach which, as we shall see, seems to be following a similar life-cycle to MBO (figure 1).

Organization Development was probably growing most strongly in the 1960s and one of the many definitions, by Beckhard (1969 p. 9), well reflects the idealism of that period. ‘Organization Development is an effort (1) planned (2) organization-wide and (3) managed from the top to (4) increase organizational effectiveness and health through (5) planned intervention in the organization’s processes using behavioral science knowledge’. It should be noted that whilst virtually all definitions share Beckhard’s idealism OD has generally been defined according to the way the practitioner wishes to advance his particular approach to diagnosis or action, be it contingent approaches to diagnosis (e.g. Hendry, 1979; Warmington et al., 1977) or processes of intervention (e.g. Argyris et al., 1985). Clearly such definitions not only reflect both idealism and ideosyncratic approaches, they also reflect the common desire to impress potential clients with the power of the intervention to cure most organizational ills.

According to French and Bell (1973) the term Organization Development probably originated in the United States in laboratory training in which participants learned from unstructured small group processes. Lewin, who founded the Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology in 1945 and Rogers (1942) focusing on client-centred therapy, are often regarded as the intellectual founders ofOD (Pettigrew, 1985). These were followed by such pioneers as McGregor, Sheppard, Blake and Mouton and academic consultants such as Argyris, Bennis, Beckhard, Likert and Schein who used and developed the ideas of Lewin and Rogers in organizational settings. So, like MBO, OD had both its gurus and pioneers who applied their ideas consulting to organizations.

As has been remarked by a number of critical commentators (e.g. Kahn, 1974; Stephenson, 1975) there has been much idealized literature largely written by consultants with an interest in marketing their particular packaged approach. One of the best known of these is the managerial grid (Blake and Mouton, 1968) and imitations such as Reddin’s three-dimensional grid (Reddin, 1970).

Not surprisingly, practice was well in advance of research and the field still lacked concepts and theory to give it coherance and direction. This began to be recognized as reaction to the early euphoria set in. The atheoretical nature of the early phases of OD was also part of the conclusions from research commissioned by the Chemical and Allied Products Industry Training Board in the early 1970s (Tranfield and Gill, 1972; 1973) into the introduction and progress of Organizational Development into North American companies. These organizations were described by managers we interviewed as beginning major Organization Development activities on inadequate preliminary diagnosis and understanding, as an act of faith. After a year or two of intensive activity they became disillusioned and began to reappraise their investment (Tranfield et al., 1975).

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Characterizing these early phases of organization development was the absence for the most part of conceptual understanding by managers either of the nature of organizations, or of the mechanisms which were being used in an attempt to change them - in the early stages of O D by small group methods (Bennis and Schein, 1965). Interventions were thus often based on limited, if any, diagnostic preparation, weak commitment even at the point of consultant/client contact, and inadequate understanding of the the intervention under consideration. Accordingly, a proposal such as an attempt at a major culture change, was often perceived as yet another technique which seemed to be in fashion and would symbolically promote the company and its managers as up-to-date and enlightened.

There followed a period of hectic activity, which was a period of high emotional commitment and uncritical euphoria and we labelled the ‘honeymoon’ phase (Tranfield and Gill, 1972). During this period organizational members were trained so that they became equipped with a new vocabulary and the organization was ‘seeded’ with the initiated. Further this initiation phase in early OD activities often consisted of mysterious processes in small training (‘T’) groups.

It is not too surprising that, after all this frenetic activity, reaction set in. In North America this seems to have occurred in the late 1960s as the 1969/ 70 economic recession began to bite and became characteristic of Britain in the mid-1970s for much the same reason. Disillusionment occurred as costs seemed to outweigh benefits and the emphasis on the social system was no longer fashionable in the political climate of Reagan and Thatcher. In addition, however, the slender theoretical foundations on which O D was built came increasingly under attack by academics (e.g. Hulin and Smith 1967; Pettigrew, 1985).

So OD, like MBO, had its founding fathers, its pioneers (consultants and academics often combining both roles) in an organizational growth phase characterized by euphoria and lack of critique. The similarities continue throughout the cycle as growth was followed by disillusionment and recession.

Many of these cyclic features of OD and MBO are strikingly present in the Total Quality Management movement (TQM) which, according to Hodgson (1987), seems to have its origins during the Second World War. Stewart, an expert in statistical quality control methods and two co-workers, Juran and Deming, are credited with rejuvenating the North American armament industry which had barely recovered from the inter-war depres- sion.

After the war the Japanese, their economy in ruins, were seeking ways to become a major force in international trade. Deming (1982) provided an approach to the management of quality - driving performance up whilst simultaneously driving costs down - which enabled the Japanese to realize their ambition to achieve eminence in world trade, so much so that in 1960 Deming was formally made a national hero. These trading successes have been partly attributed to T Q M and organizations in western economies are consequently endeavouring to emulate them.

Deming ( 1982) considers performance improvement or ‘delighting customers’ requires knowledge from two sources: from customers themselves specify-



ing what products/services they require and from senior management on how to provide them. To acquire this knowledge he believes management must first work on itself to provide leadership throughout the whole organization - to banish his ‘five deadly sins’ by managing in accordance with his 14 points. All this would then provide continuous, never-ending quality improvement .

Currently T Q M programmes based more or less loosely on the works of Deming, Juran, Crosby and others are marketed worldwide by a substantial and growing number of consultancies. One marketing document (Smith, 1986) entitled ‘How to Take Part in the Quality Revolution: A Management Guide’ illustrates the consulting approach. It starts by listing well-known companies who have undergone the transformation to a ‘quality organization’ and then details the dismal future (increasing costs, falling margins, dimin- ishing markets) awaiting those who do not join the ‘revolution’. I t then adds to the implied threat by referring to the strength of the Japanese in world markets and the growing menace of developing economies.

Having provided the motivation, a way forward is suggested by implementing TQM. This consists of four stages, each supported by ‘tools and techniques’. The first stage is diagnostic; the second concerns management focus and commitment; the third involves a cascading approach down through the organization; and the last stage is one of evaluation and ‘relaunch’. Techni- ques specified as ‘back up’ include steering groups, facilitators/quality co-ordinators, education and training including total quality seminars or ‘colleges’; quality circleshmprovement teams and many others.

These features were also found by Whittle (1988) in a recent study of TQM. Her first impressions were of an absence of critique and a high degree of consensus reminiscent of the ‘honeymoon’ phase of OD. The literature was found to comprise a mass of best practice statements and lists of requirements ‘essential’ to the successful implementation of TQM. Case studies reported the particular developments and revelations that had resulted in ‘breakthrough’ Uuran, 1964) and made prescriptive pronouncements on the way forward. Such studies generally had either a hard systems orientation derived from operations management and statistics or fundamentally regarded TQM as culture change using a soft systems/sociotechnical perspective - the two usually being mutually exclusive. Other studies by managers and consultants reported success stories and offered lessons to those following on. Many eulogistic offerings made reference to the works of the quality gurus such as Deming, Juran and Peters and emphasized the charismatic style of managers in bringing about culture change.

The parallels with the early development of OD and MBO are therefore striking. I t is of course debatable what stage in its life cycle TQM has presently reached. But at a guess we suggest that it is probably drawing to the end of its honeymoon period and will soon move into maturity and decline. In the next section we try to account for the apparently transitory nature of consultant-led, packaged, managerial panaceas and quackery in the belief that there are probably some fundamental forces driving these phenomena.



ACCOUNTING FOR MANAGERIAL FADS AND FASHIONS

Hodgson (1987, p. 40) in an advocacy of Deming’s ‘road to quality’ asks:

Is the quality revolution really starting here, or are we just witnessing yet another star rising in the British management firmament - shortly to join its predecessors out of sight and out of fashion? Taking the British picture as a whole, the odds seem to be on the latter. Not because people won’t work hard for quality but because we will end up trying to install the techniques of quality management and not understanding it.

I t is our judgement, based on the history of previous fashions such as those mentioned earlier, that Hodgson’s forecast is probably accurate but only partially, and perhaps superficially so, for the reasons he suggests. Undoubtedly technique-driven TQM and the pressure on consultancies for sales will result in failed attempts to improve quality and will account in part for the transience to which we have drawn attention. However we have come to the conclusion that the pervasiveness of management by panacea has deeper underlying causes, probably rooted in the psychodynamics of organizational life.

First we consider in a little more detail Hodgson’s explanation based upon the shallowness of purely technique-driven change; then explanations rooted in the culture of the consultant and managerial world; and finally possible psychodynamic causes of the phenomenon. We go on to consider each of these in turn for ease of analysis, though of course they are interactive.

In consulting attempts to make TQM more attractive and easily grasped, the subtleties lying behind what is being proposed are obscured, partly in case such complications queer the sales pitch. Thus the TQM intervention not surprisingly appears to managers to boil down to the installation of techniques in a mechanistic, step-by-step way much as was also advocated for MBO and OD.

Of course it should be emphasized at this point that lying at the heart of soft systems approaches to OD and TQM is the emphasis on culture change. Some refer to this as the management of meaning (Smith and Peterson, 1988) or as the management of symbolic action (Pfeffer, 1981) and both emphasize the subtleties entailed, requiring at the very least a deep appreciation of how culture is formed. Indeed the extent to which culture can be managed at all as a form of control is questionable and is addressed comprehensively by Smircich (1983). I t is not therefore surprising, given the need that consultancies have to sell their wares, that such subtleties even if understood are glossed over and interventions portrayed as a series of steps and techniques.

The culture of management consultancy also encourages these tendencies. The pressure on consultancies to come up with ‘turnkey’ products is described by Darwent (1988, pp. 71-2) when considering the management consultancy market:

. . . . margins are slipping and the cost of gaining business is going up. Client loyalty is a shrinking asset. Differentiation is becoming more impor-



tant . . . the onus would seem to be on finding a product which is - or which can be marketed as being - as concrete as possible. The real politik of a falling market demands tangible results and quantifiability. . . . Consulting in general is becoming market- drawn, less academic, ivory tower. Today’s nominalist consultancy catch-phrase is implementation.

What is more, consultancies are generally resistant to independent evaluation or systematic monitoring of their work and there is predictably little published, critical examination of their efforts which would enable improved understanding of what works, what does not and why (Brandon, 1988). Consultancies may resist evaluation because they have oversold their packages as a certain solution to impress a client and obtain a contract; they exaggerate positive outcomes and so court failure. They also fear the competi- tion in an increasingly cut-throat business where critical evaluation may present competitors with advantage.

The cure-all consultancy product becomes more and more attractive to managers as they also come under increasing pressure from their superiors to find new ways of dealing with organizational problems with minimal risk and investment. The career pay-off may simply be in being seen as innovative rather than in achieving long-term results through hard endeavorc. Given the short time focus of the managerial world, managers are encouraged to move away from the last ‘assignment’ and on to the next without risking systematic evaluation and the attendant possibility of criticism.

Tichy (1983) believes other cultural forces also work against the systematic evaluation and monitoring of the impact on management and organizational activities of the consultancy packages. The prevailing belief system of Amer- ican managers seems, he contends, to be dominated by the grand strategy or bold vision which is high on masculinity and status and perhaps low on reflection and learning. Zaleznik, (1989, p. 276) echoes these sentiments when deploring the absence of loyalty and camaraderie between a chief executive and hidher subordinates and goes on to suggest that ‘unlike Europeans . . . we still yearn for boldness and the open use of power and prefer not to think about the craftiness and cunning of the leader as manipulator’. We believe this may be true not only of American but also many British managers. By contrast, Japanese management are said to have a ‘dynamic approach to solving problems rather than a set of fixed social principles’ (Thurley, 1984, p. 14). Such a culture might be expected to support a more thoughtful approach to the systematic evaluaton and monitoring of incremental strategic change.

Another and perhaps even more alarming cultural trend is towards anti- intellectualism and lack of rigour which has become a feature of the 1980s, perhaps as a reaction to some earlier positivistic research. As Heller (1 986) warns, a form of Gresham’s law may be operating, whereby there may be a regression to check lists and eight-point plans typified by Peters and Water- man’s (1982) In Search of Excellence and its British imitator, Goldsmith and Clutterbuck’s (1984) The Winning Streak.

However the pervasiveness of the cyclical nature of managerial cure-alls has led us to believe that basically they may be due to psychodynamic factors,



although of course, as we have seen, cultural and other variables play their part. Before turning to a psychodynamic explanation of the transient nature of managerial panaceas we briefly recall the sequence through which they apparently proceed by reference to life cycle theory (figure 1).

The concept of the organizational life cycle, on the analogy of the human life cycle, is much employed in the management literature (e.g. Greiner, 1972; Kimberly et d., 1980; Thomas, 1991). I t is also pertinent that De Greene (1988, p. 16), in a discussion of the application of long wave cycles to organizational design and management, suggests that short waves with a period ‘of about forty-eight years can be related to the Kondratieff cycle’. This accords closely with our very tentative suggestion of about 40 years for the panacea cycle (figure 1).

In the case of OD, each phase from birth to decline seems to have lasted about 10 years. Features of the birth phase include the founder or guru who first thinks of the idea, conceptualizes it, and publishes a seminal book.

These early ideas are at first slow to be taken up, but if they are, the next phase is a period of rapid growth as consultants start to develop material which will be attractive to managers. This may include an abbreviation ( e g . MBO), brand names (e.g. Blake’s Grid), user manuals and instructional films. In this context Gowler and Legge (1983) argue that management is essentially an oral tradition in which the meaning of management is arrived at by managers talking about managing and in which ‘. . . an assumption is made that the secrets of a mystery can be revealed if only the right verbal

BIRTH ADOLESCENCE

Inventorfcharismatic Consultants/senior leader writes managers promote the seminal hooks packaged (e.g. Drucker, intervention Lewin, Deming) (e.g. Blake’s Grid)

Abbreviations appear (e.g. MBO,OD,TQM)

Business Ethics’

/

MATURITY

Routinized/ bureaucratized by consultants and internal staff; user ‘how to’ manuals a characteristic

DECLINE

Costs exceed apparent benefits; substitutes/the next panacea appears

The cycle recommences

10 20 30 40 Time (years)

Figure 1 . A speculative panacea life-cycle *See Smith K. (1990)



formulas can be found’. Terms such as ‘growth’ and ‘effectiveness’ have mythical qualities. They are condensation symbols collapsing a managerial world view into a single word. So, too, each of the consultancy packages here described (MBO, OD and TQM) makes use of condensation symbols thereby creating affective bonds to the symbol’s object, tying managers into the package at an emotional level and creating a shared managerial language. Further, the marketing of consultancy packages and the process by which commitment is engendered, make use of parables and stories about what magic the package has performed for other managers. ‘Tales of heroes conquering dragons and capturing treasure are, in tropological terms, not too far removed from tales of success in management’ (Hannabuss, 1987, p. 3 5 ) .

The following period of maturity is characterized by the routinization of material and its mechanistic reproduction. Decline then slowly sets in as the package becomes rigidified, costs exceed benefits, the novelty wears off, and substitutes appear on the scene which themselves in turn go through the same cycle (figure 1).

Deeper explanations for these tendencies and the similarities between the cyclic nature of the consulting packages we have noted probably fundamentally lie in psychoanalytic variables addressed by writers such as Kets de Vries (1980, 1984) Kets de Vries and Miller (1984, 1988) and Morgan ( 1986, ch. 7). Organizations are not only shaped by their environments and the rational objectives of managers but also by the unconscious concerns of their members and the unconscious forces influencing the societies in which they find themselves.

Kets de Vries and Miller (1984), along with many others (e.g. Schein (1985)’ believe that the organization’s leaders and small groups within the organization are both very powerful in shaping its culture. However Kets de Vries and Miller are also members of a much smaller group of academics who examine the effect of covert psychoanalytic processes on organizational behaviour generally ignored by management theorists. Kets de Vries and Miller (1984, p. 4) concentrate on what they describe as ‘dysfunctional psychological states and neurotic behaviour rather than on normal behaviour or relationships’, although they make clear that that ‘the difference between normal and neurotic is one of degree’. Indeed it is our view that the processes we go on to describe, especially their effect on the waxing and waning of packaged consulting approaches, are much more widespread than Kets de Vries and Miller apparently suggest.

Kets de Vries and Miller draw on the work of Bion (1961) and other workers in the Tavistock clinic during the last 30 years to understand how the phantasies that groups develop affect the culture of their organizations. Whilst these phantasies, or basic assumptions, in Bion’s terms, serve some of the needs of group members, they can adversely affect the organization’s functioning. Bion called these basic assumptions flightkght, dependency and pairing. The basic assumption of the flighthght group is that the group’s survival depends on it destroying or evading an enemy which threatens it. In contrast, the dependent group searches for a all-powerful, all-knowing leader (which may be a person or on the other hand an idea) on which it can rely. The third of Bion’s assumptions is that the group’s survival depends upon


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producing a new leader who again may be a person or an idea who will deliver the group from its present difficulties. Groups frequently produce pairs of members who are regarded as though they are the potential parents of this new Messiah. Bion called this the pairing group.

The influence of such group processes, particularly, we suggest, those found in dependent and pairing groups, would clearly seem to offer a partial explanation at least for the cyclic nature of managerial panaceas we described earlier.

In the flight/fight culture there is a predominent fear of competitors expressed, for example, in the belief that they may be stealing a march on the company. One reaction may be to introduce a panacea as a short-term, panic measure based on minimal diagnosis. The seeds of eventual disillusionment are accordingly sown at this stage when decisions are taken on inadequate data.

Although the dependency culture is very different from that of flighthght, dependency on a leader may have similar consequences. Especially this may be the case if the neurotic style of the leader is categorized in Kets de Vries and Miller’s terms as ‘dramatic’; we consider this point in a little more detail later.

The dependency culture may follow similar phases to the ones we described earlier in the cases of MBO, OD and TQM. The first phase may be associated with a charismatic leader, or the inventor or guru (figure 1) who conceptualizes early ideas, examples being Rogers, Drucker or Deming. Worship of leaders has been a feature of all the early phases mentioned. Such dependency tends to have a short time horizon, to be preoccupied with the current ideology, and to place too much faith in the leader to foster a critical reflective culture.

The charismatic figure induces much goal-directednes and cohesiveness, strengths derived from the feeling that there is someone to depend on. These beliefs are counterbalanced, however, by the passivity and lack of critical judgement of the subordinates (Kets de Vries and Miller, 1984, p. 62).

Uncritical dependence on a patriarchical leader may also be reinforced by regression brought about by managerial anxieties in rapidly changing and increasingly competitive times. Features of this wider, macro-culture are of course being felt in the business world through the phenomena of short attention spans and a search for novelty. These features are similar in some respects to those that occur in the ‘dramatic’ organization in Kets de Vries and Miller’s (1984, 1988) typology based on the pathological behaviour of leaders or in Maccoby’s ( 1 976) corporate climber or gamesman. Both are characterized by boldness, risk-taking and a fascination for techniques and new methods. As Lasch (1979) observes, studies of personality disorders occupying the borderline between neurosis and psychosis (Kernberg, 1975) depict a readily identifiable personality type in contemporary cultures. The uncertainty, constant frenetic activity and unrelenting pace, fear of losing ground to competitors, the inability to reflect for more than a few minutes

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(Mintzberg, 1973) are the costs of a role interpretation which is becoming to be increasingly valued in western, middle-class, managerial cultures. Such behaviour may help to explain partly the quick fix and the ephemeral nature of some consultant interventions we have described earlier in the cases of OD, MBO and TQM.

During later phases, particularly of maturity, as we have seen, the charismatic leader is replaced by his legacy of rigid rules and policies, reflected, for example, in proceedural manuals and the intervention becomes routinized and decline follows.

Finally the pairing group, which Kets de Vries and Miller (1984) label ‘utopian’, hopes that sometime in the future a person or idea will emerge which will provide salvation.

The feelings thus associated in the pairing group are at the opposite pole to feelings of hatred, destructiveness, and despair. For the feelings of hope to be sustained it is essential that the emphasis on packaged, ready-to-use techniques will find a bountiful market among firms that seek out utopian structures . . . in such circumstances we see companies drifting from one panacea to the next, paving the way to floundering and failure (Kets de Vries and Miller, 1984, p. 68).

Kets de Vries and Miller believe this to be especially true of future-oriented, high-technology companies with their strivings for ‘grandiosity’. It is our perception that such characteristics are much more widespread than this.

CONCLUSION

By focusing on the form rather than the content of a selection of managerial obsessions we have demonstrated the cyclical and non-cumulative nature of much of what passes for consulting approaches to organizational change and effectiveness. We have suggested that explanations may be rooted in cultural and psychoanalytic phenomena.

Perhaps some ways managers may be helped to understand what is really happening, and so become more aware of the pitfalls, is by a form of process consultancy which may enable managers, through feedback of interpreta- tions, to be given insights into what is actually occurring. For example Kets de Vries (1990) suggests that the ‘truthsayer’ or ‘organizational fool’ may be one way of providing a functional countervailing influence to the drift from reality induced by many consulting packages. Such awareness, combined with the articulation of motives and premises, feedback and evaluation may enable managers to begin to tackle some of the underlying difficulties described earlier.

Finally we await a change in fashion with interest and speculate that a culture change intervention in business ethics may well be the next consulting package to be offered as a panacea for organizational ills.


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