Original title: Management by Accident (MGA): An Integrative Framework of Unintentional Managerial Emergence
The paper names a pattern: people become managers without being assessed for the role or trained for it beforehand. It calls this Management by Accident, or MGA. The authors connect it to causes such as weak succession plans and promotions based on technical skill, then describe possible signs, including unclear roles and reactive decisions. They propose ways to identify and address MGA, but say these ideas still need testing.
Imagine a busy kitchen where the best cook is suddenly put in charge of the whole shift. The cook may know the recipes but not how to assign jobs, handle problems, or plan the work, especially without any preparation. In this paper, the promotion without checking management skills matches the missing assessment, and the lack of training matches the missing preparation.
When someone becomes a manager because they excel at a different job, they may face unclear responsibilities and struggle to lead a team. This framework gives organizations a way to describe that pattern and consider how to improve selection and preparation.
The framework is theoretical, and its proposed boundaries and diagnostic criteria have not yet been empirically validated. The abstract does not report tests of the framework or show whether its proposed causes, signs, and interventions hold across different organizations.
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Management by Accident (MGA): An Integrative Framework of Unintentional Managerial Emergence — Muthanna G. Abdul Razzaq — Administrative Sciences — doi:10.3390/admsci16100490
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.