Stakeholders views of management development as a cultural change process in the Health Service

Illustrates the failure of a competence‐based management development programme in a hospital trust to achieve organisational objectives. The approach and content of the management development programme is resisted by participants despite the facilitators drawing upon management theory to legitimate it. The question posed in this paper, building upon an earlier study by Holman and Hall (1996), is whether the generic approach of competence‐based management development is appropriate in the UK NHS. The theoretical inspiration for the research is what may be termed a “processual” or “contextualist” approach which is clearly influenced by “negotiated order” literature.