The ultimate test of management is performance - the
achievement of actual results. Why, then, do Australian managers
concern themselves with their colleagues’ personalities and
motives? Why have they become infatuated with emotional
intelligence and, in bizarre cases, with spiritual intelligence?
Traditionally, managers who performed earned the right to argue
with their colleagues. Nowadays, individuals who argue are said to
lack ‘soft skills’ while a sad few are thought to be suffering from
a personality disorder.
The popularity of soft-skill management has created
psychomanagers: managers who have entered into a
Faustian bargain with psychologists. Some managers work
with psychologists to master themselves; others work with
psychologists to master other people. As psychomanagement
requires specialised knowledge, many Australian managers have
yielded their authority to counsellors, coaches and consultants,
many of whom believe that human behaviour is determined by
internal and external forces over which individuals have little or
no control. Accordingly, psychologists have laboured to absorb
the idea of the free and responsible individual into a pseudoscientific
framework that denies moral agency. The result is that
ideas of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have been replaced with ‘healthy’ and
‘sick’. In their pursuit of a ‘therapeutic state’, psychologists have
medicalised morality and managers have embraced powerful
myths about minds, motive-forces, personality traits, social
conditioning, leadership, occupational stress and mental illness.
Consequently, the twin ideas of personal freedom and responsibility
have been sabotaged.
This book is about Australian managers and their long-standing
love affair with psychologists. For fifty years the author has
studied, taught and consulted with managers and waltzed with
several famous psychologists.
Robert Spillane (B.Com. NSW, PhD, Macq) is a Professor and past
Dean of the Macquarie University Graduate School of
Management, Sydney Australia. He majored in clinical and
industrial psychology and worked as a psychotherapist for more
than 25 years.
Robert has taught at the London Business School, the ABIN
Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, in Singapore and Hong Kong and
several Australian universities and he was a visiting scholar at the
Center for Working Life in Stockholm, Sweden.
He has written numerous journal articles and several books on
philosophy, psychology and management. His recent books
include: ‘An Eye for An I: Philosophies of Personal Power’,
‘Questionable Behaviour: Psychology’s Undermining of Personal
Responsibility’, ‘The Rise of Psychomanagement in Australia’
and ‘Personality & Performance’ (with John Martin) and a play
‘Entertaining Executives’ (2015).
Poses the problems inherent in being a ‘psychomanager’
that requires specialized knowledge so that many Australian
managers have yielded their authority to counsellors, coaches
and consultants.
- Challenges the myth that human behaviour is determined by
internal and external forces over which individuals have little or
no control.
- Many influential psychologists have denied, or minimized the
importance of, personal responsibility. And insofar as managers
have entered into an unholy alliance with them, they too
have minimized personal responsibility at the workplace.
Using his 50 years of study and teaching, the author has
represented both sides of the debate about personal
responsibility and human freedom.
- A personal and selective account of a professional life spent studying the
problematic relationship between managers and psychologists.
