Is high performance achieved through sympathetic management, or discipline and fear? This question was first put in the 1920s, and has made repeated appearances in managerial literature - indeed, most of those who have done a management training course will have heard of Likert’s ‘System 4’ or McGregor’s ‘Theory Y’. For a long time, however, it was a matter of personal conviction which option you went for, despite repeated attempts by the human relations and related schools of management to demonstrate that the rigid discipline approach had negative effects.

Recently, however, the CIPD has been sponsoring serious research in Britain (mainly by David Guest of KCL and John Purcell of Bath) to try and nail this evasive problem down. And results so far are promising. The direction of travel was first indicated in the DTI’s Workplace Employment Relations Survey in the late 1990s, which echoed US experience in finding a link between a package of HR practices (e.g. performance appraisal, training, job enrichment, communication) and performance. But this operated as a ‘black box’. Though the existence of a link was clear, it was not possible to infer what exactly it was. Subsequent work, published in 2003, began to isolate strategic vision, job design and first-line manager quality as key factors. Further study is now under way to support these conclusions, seeking to bottom out some of the more difficult areas of the earlier research, such as application across employment sectors, reliability of findings, and what is meant by “good performance”.

There is still some distance to go. In addition, there seems to be a bit too much bias on HR rather than line management (perhaps understandable in a CIPD programme study), and one potentially important question has not yet been addressed at all – why managers who claim to understand the importance of participative management will often in fact, despite using all the right language, behave quite differently in their managerial actions. But the work being done is definitely on the right lines, and is helping us to bring within reach the long-sought goal of the happy and productive worker. There are already indications, for example, that even very rigid, standardised rules and policies can be perceived by staff as positive when delivered and interpreted by supportive first-line managers. If findings of this sort can be fully established and generalised, and also disseminated through the managerial community, there is a chance that British management may at last move from being among the least satisfactory to among the most effective in the world.

Mark O’Sullivan writes for IMS Interim Executives, an S-Cat approved UK interim management company providing senior executives for all interim change, turnaround and project management needs.

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