The 'Executive Jumper' and Career Immorality (original) (raw)

Mismanagement, “Jumpers,” and Morality Covertly Concealed Managerial Ignorance and Immoral Careerism in Industrial Organizations Reuven Shapira Routledge, New York and London, 2017 Abstract Managers who advance by “jumps” among firms suffer large gaps of local know-how and phronesis (Greek for practical wisdom), known to subordinates due to specialized education, practicing jobs, and learning in communities of practitioners. Sharing their knowledge requires the “jumper” to jeopardize his/her authority by exposing ignorance until learning, but many reasons deter exposure, while managerial powers tempt “jumpers” to defend their authority by covertly concealing managerial ignorance (hereafter: CCMI). CCMI causes incompetence, mismanagement, failures, and vicious distrust and ignorance cycles that bar performance-based career advancement and encourage covert immoral careerism (Im-C), defending jobs and advancing careers by various immoral subterfuges. Im-C is a known organizational malady, but its explanation missed the CCMI practiced by “jumpers”, probably due to secrecy and conspiracies of silence as well as managers’ ignorance of their own ignorance. Anthropologists untangled managers’ immorality, but without becoming executives themselves they missed its furthering of vicious distrust and ignorance cycles. Anthropologists usually lacked managerial education and experience, while Dr. Shapira’s early managerial socialization resembled that of the managers he studied. He held various executive positions at his kibbutz, Gan Shmuel, and in its food processing factory, while acquiring a social science education. He knew some of the managers personally prior to his research, and was familiar with their context, the kibbutz system. Due to this unique background he was able to perform semi-native anthropological research, approaching managers and executives as their peer and turning interviews into open discussions of common managerial problems. Combining this advantageous openness with extensive interviewing of executives, their subordinates, and many freely speaking ex-employees, as well as participant observations and studying organizational histories with free access to their documents, enabled penetration of managers’ dark secrets. The book summarizes a 5-year semi-native study of five “jumper”-managed automatic processing cotton gin plants and their parent inter-kibbutz cooperatives. It finds that CCMI-induced Im-C was practiced by some 75% of executives, versus only some 25% of mid-levelers. Mid-level “jumpers” mostly prevented plants’ total failure by authority-jeopardizing vulnerable involvement that engendered virtuous trust and learning cycles, enabling executives’ career advancement versus mid-levelers’ stalled careers. This negative gradation of managerial morality suggests that organizational cultures which encourage “jumping” careers tend to nurture immoral executives. This helps explain the emergence of scandalous executives such as those recently exposed at Enron, Worldcom, Parmalat, and similar cases. This book gets to the root causes behind the immorality and incompetence of corporate executives, traits now regularly exposed in financial crises, bankruptcies, fraud investigations, and books on the evils of “casino capitalism.” Ideas for remedying this corporate malady are suggested, and further study of how “jumpers” cope with ignorance is called for.