Becoming a Master Manager: A Competing Values Approach, Fifth Edition

Preface

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIFTH EDITION

It is with great pleasure that we celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the first edition of Becoming a Master Manager by publishing this enhanced fifth edition. Before the publication of Becoming a Master Manager, few texts emphasized the importance of developing management skills or admitted that learning about management concepts was not the same as learning how to apply those concepts in practice. In the intervening years, more attention has been paid to the knowing-doing gap (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2000) and today, the plethora of skill-focused texts available (e.g., Aldag & Kuzuhara, 2005; Baldwin, Bommer & Rubin, 2008; Caproni, 2004; de Janasz, Dowd & Schneider, 2009; Hunsaker, 2004; Whetton & Cameron, 2010) attests to the value of our original emphasis on developing management skills.

Although we are pleased to see so much more attention being paid to management skills, we remain concerned about the lack of attention that has been paid to the theory behind the identification of critical managerial and leadership competencies. Many skills texts rely on a laundry-list approach and offer little in the way of explanation of why particular competencies are important or how different competencies fit together.

In contrast, Becoming a Master Manager has always been built on a solid foundation of both theory and empirical evidence that provide a compelling case for why specific competencies are important. The framework offers managers an enduring foundation ...