Management development in Ireland: the new organizational wealth?

Drawing upon survey data, we assess the current state of management development in Ireland and we identify policy, practice and structural contingencies that help to explain variations in the volume of management development activity undertaken at organizational level. The data show that the level of management development, as measured by the number of days per annum, has increased in recent years with 70 percent of managers in our sample now receiving between one and five days training per year. The mean number of days per annum in Ireland now stands at 4.5. With respect to those factors that appear to affect the level of management development activity, preliminary analysis points to the importance of policy and practice variables over structural ones. Materially, in the human resource domain, our data suggest that organizations with actual policies on personnel/human resource strategy and on management development have higher levels of management development activity and, given the recent tightening in the labor market, many were promulgating their use of developmental interventions as an aid to recruitment/retention. The existence of formal career plans and succession plans, the relative emphasis on the analysis of human resource development needs and the filling of senior and middle management posts via the internal labor market all emerged as predictors of higher levels of management development. Organizations using international experience schemes also ran a significantly higher number of days of management development interventions. In the structural characteristics domain, the data indicate that management development in indigenous companies is at similar levels to internationally owned enterprises in our sample. Here structural explanations such as total employment, sector and unionization did not emerge as being statistically significant.