Management Development in Europe

Explaining the way organizations go about identifying and developing their managers will require some understanding of internal priorities and decision processes, as well as more macro factors like the national institutional context. We might also expect cultural factors to play an important part, but applying a cross-cultural analysis to management development policies and practices is relatively rare. One exception is an enduring framework which identifies the cultural characteristics of Germanic, Anglo-Dutch and Latin models [ European Management Journal 5(2) (1987) 72; The Global Challenge Frameworks for International Human Resource Management , McGraw-Hill/Irwin, Chicago]. Drawing upon a sample of 300 European firms, this paper tests the empirical validity of these three models and finds that some, but not all, of the features originally identified continue to hold true for firms in the countries concerned.