What is it about?
The immorality of such managers results from their lack of local tacit and specialized know-how and their avoidance of vulnerable involvement in subordinates' deliberations in order to defend authority by concealing own ignorance as a dark secret, i.e. concealing the concealment. Concealing ignorance causes mistaken decisions and failures which boost managers' lies and scapegoating in order to maintain authority. This furthers employees' distrust, lack of admitting own mistakes and bluffing which further managerial mistakes and failures without managers' knowing the reasons for these troubles. However, such managers may make successful careers as explain my book "Mismanagement, 'Jumpers,' and Morality (Routledge, 2017).
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Why is it important?
It is of crucial importance because such managers can't create a mutual trust with subordinates to get essential, timely, and detailed information and know-how for successful decision-making and innovating; they fail to function in jobs and survive by tricks and subterfuges that create the mistaken image of successful functioning while in fact mismanaging. As their mismanagement is concealed they often climb corporate hierarchies and cause worse mistakes and major failures and suffering for most employees up to bankruptcy, massive firing, and waste of human resources.
Perspectives
Industrial sociology and anthropology missed this phenomenon because in order to assess managerial effectiveness the researcher needs to "enter" the managers' "shoes" by longitudinal study of the technology, its problems, the know-how used to solve them and the failure to do so, better having previously long experience of management as I have prior to my study. Making a participant observation and interviewing managers equipped with social science as do almost all students can't overcome managers' incompetence concealment efforts.
Dr Reuven Shapira
Western Galilee Academic College
Managers' ability to gain employees' trust is crucial whenever employees' tacit know-how, phronesis, sincerity, and truthfulness are crucial for successful managing, decision-making and innovating. Outsider managers who advance career by 'jumping' between firms often miss these basic facts of organizational life and remain largely ignorant of subordinates' local tacit know-how and phronesis. Then employees use various bluffs and subterfuges to defend themselves from superiors' efforts to blame subordinates for own mistakes and failures, while higher-ups who tries understanding the reasons for mismanagement often blame the wrong culprits and further organizational dysfunction.
Doctor Reuven Shapira
Western Galilee College
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Covertly Concealed 'Jumper' Managerss Ignorance, Distrust, and Amoral Careerist Mismanagement, SSRN Electronic Journal, January 2017, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2907581.
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