Published on: April 23, 2025 at 5:34 pm
Managers may be excellent performers in their particular profession, but few have had formal training inleading teams, boosting performance, or dealing with a range of other human-resources issues they often face. That can be a problem given that line managers are a key link between rank-and-file employees and senior management and leadership.
Academy of Management Scholar Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia notes the irony of the fact that management roles are crucial for organizations, but it’s a job that most people don’t aspire to.
“I often ask my students or audiences, ‘What did you dream about your future job being when you were growing up?’ and as kids, when an adult would say, ‘What do you want to be when you’re an adult,’ nobody says, ‘A manager;’ nobody aspires to that role,” Kulik said. “If you become a manager, it’s because you’re really good at something else.
“We sometimes use the term ‘accidental manager,’ because it’s a role that people fall into, as opposed to aspiring to, and if you don’t aspire to it, then you don’t get trained in it, and you don’t even have that identity,” she said. “So a lot of people step into the manager role but didn’t anticipate it, so they haven’t sought out the opportunities to develop management skills.
“And as a result, they don’t even know what they don’t know about being a good, effective manager.”
A sample of Kulik’s AOM research findings:
- Keeping Older Workers Engaged
- Engage Me: The Mature-Age Worker and Stereotype Threat
- Aging Populations and Management
- Physical Environments and Employee Reactions: Effects of Stimulus-Screening Skills and Job Complexity
- Relations Between Situational Factors and the Comparative Referents Used by Employees
