Diagnostic Assessment of Management Processes: A Study on Iranian Industries

Management as Gary Hamel (2007) argued is the capacity to achieve desired results in any social system. Despite the long history of the practice of management, it was almost a century ago when a root-and-branch package of management was invented by a few scientists and also by certain pioneering companies. This invention which can be called modern management has since become a global phenomenon and is suspected to form an ideology that despite all the improvements it offered to human beings, it may now constrains the performance of organizations in the 21st century. To go beyond modern management and to establish a new version of management, modern management needs to be treated as a paradigm. To uncover this management paradigm, it is essential to study the practice of management. These studies should be conducted to unearth the central principles and questions of the prevailing model of management and evaluate it diagnostically. Then only we might have hoped to build management models that do not entail the limitations and inadequacies of the so called modern management.
This study intends to analyze managerial processes in organizations to understand the principles upon which the way the work of management is being carried out is based. Management as Hamel proposed is realized through certain processes which are called management processes. Three management processes were selected to attain what this research is conducted to obtain, namely strategic planning, employee assessment and project management. In order to achieve the objective of the study, sequential steps of data collection
and analysis (processing and interpretation) were used and analytical tools were employed in the procedure. In addition to descriptive statistics, cross tabulation have been applied to the gathered and classified data in order to understand the possible correlations between different aspects of the practice of management.
The results of this study revealed that the modern paradigm of management seems to dominate the industries and the central issues, which in this study are called management principles are control, prediction, planning, order, analysis, formalization, standardization, and centralization. It has also been demonstrated that certain managerial questions which are considered to be management challenges, correspond to each and every one of the mentioned principles and other managerial challenges such as learning, resilience and innovation might not be addressed on the basis of dominant management principles. Certain mental associations of the managers were disclosed and a gap between management theory and practice was also discovered and discussed.
Conducting this research in public sectors is highly recommended as replicating it through in-depth qualitative studies and a discourse analysis while trying to understand different perceptions of the practice of management and to establish a relationship between different interpretations would be conducted.