face and body from which he predicted occupational success.
The most famous Australian in the history of management, (George) Elton Mayo, emphasised the social and emotional factors which influence workplace behaviour. In 1929, he was appointed professor of industrial research at the Harvard School of Business Administration and through the Department of Industrial Research there, participated in the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric’s Chicago plant. He enjoyed an academic career of almost thirty years and was widely honoured in his native land at the time of his death.
In 1927 the NSW Chamber of Manufactures established the Australian Institute of Industrial Psychology, which actively promoted psychological research. H. Tasman Lovell published papers on the ‘psychology of salesmanship’ and at the University of Sydney, A.H. Martin, arguably the father of Australian personnel management, taught courses in industrial psychology to managers. In 1931 the Australian Institute of Industrial Psychology published his Three Lectures in Industrial Psychology. After wittily dismissing such pseudosciences as astrology, palmistry, physiognomy, phrenology and graphology, he enthusiastically supported the development of vocational tests in industry. In discussing the desirable qualities for successful salesmen, he emphasised dress and deportment, voice, general aptitude and intelligence, personality qualities – extraversion, humour, resilience, diplomacy and self-confidence.
After the Second World War psychologists promoted themselves vigorously. In 1949 the director of the Australian Institute of Industrial Psychology published an article in Rydges called ‘Psychology – Management’s Ally’, which focused on selection and vocational guidance. R.J. Chambers described the first Australian management diploma course offered by the Industrial Management Department of the Sydney Technical College. To the surprise of many, the course included subjects in general and social psychology.3
Also in 1949 Tom Pauling co-authored an influential article for Public Administration about personnel management in the NSW Public Service which argued for the increasing importance of the personnel manager.4 A one-time Australian rugby international, Pauling became one of Sydney’s best-known personnel managers at Bradmill and Philips where he pioneered, with psychologist Evan Davies, the use of personality tests in industry. I had the good fortune to study industrial psychology with Evan Davies at the University of NSW and worked with Tom Pauling at Philips in the late 1960s. On presenting me with a copy of Herzberg’s best-seller, Pauling noted that ‘he got it half-right’. Typically, he did not tell me which half was right.
By the 1940s, surveys revealed that fifty-five percent of firms had personnel departments. Personnel developed a more professional character with the development of tertiary training in personnel administration and the establishment of professional associations, such as the Institute of Industrial Management (later the Australian Institute of Management) and the Institute of Personnel Management (Australia).
After 1950 a trend in industrial psychology made significant inroads into Australian management through personnel departments. Crusaders of this trend were the ‘human relations’ experts who built their case for psychology on the American Hawthorne experiments. They argued for social motivators and against economic motivators. Although the majority of managers had assumed that money was the greatest incentive for employees, American psychologists insisted that employees needed other, less tangible rewards. Because of the confusion generated by the debate about motivation and the role of money as an incentive, researchers increased their efforts to understand the relationship between job satisfaction and performance. They concluded that satisfaction with one’s job is not necessarily related to performance and job performance may be only peripherally related to personal goals. We don’t know what the majority of managers thought about this debate since there are no major studies of Australian business managers before the 1960s.
Sociologist Sol Encel, in Equality and Authority, reported a survey from 1960 of 100 senior managers which portrayed them as lacking in community leadership, political knowledge, aspirations and achievements. He acknowledged politician and author Michael Baume, who described business (in 1964) as the most poorly serviced vocation in Australia, made up from the leftovers of other professions. Australia’s prosperity, he argued, depends on good luck rather than on any inspired managerial activity. Business directors are created out of the remnants after medicine, law, science and engineering have taken the better intellects. A worrying feature of Australian managers was their anti-intellectualism and hostility towards tertiary education. Even today one hears echoes of Henry Ford’s boorish attitude towards education (history is bunk), as managers rationalise their intellectual inferiority complexes with displays of bravado when confronted by articulate and erudite colleagues. Many Australian managers simply lack confidence in their ability to converse intelligently with others; retreating behind a facile pragmatism which sneers at education and promotes dubious forms of training based on the learning of routine skills or jejune models of ‘managerial style’.
In the early years of Australian management, neither training nor education was required. Unlike members of the traditional professions, managers could scarcely believe their good fortunes when they secured well-paid jobs without formal education. Prior to the 1970s when management schools opened their doors, Australian managers were notoriously practical folk who were wary of, if not antagonistic towards, intellectual pursuits. They defended practice against theory, experience against intellect and training against education. This anti-intellectualism, which is characteristic of Australian life generally, is unsurprising given the difficulty in agreeing on a curriculum for management studies. People who have justified their occupational existence (and high salaries) on their ability to survive a succession of bureaucratic jobs are unlikely to agree on a management curriculum. Indeed, one of the more tedious assertions of Australian managers over the years has been their insistence that they achieved success without formal education.
The days of uneducated managers were numbered, however. Late in 1969 the Commonwealth Government commissioned an ‘Inquiry into Postgraduate Education for Management’. The report of that inquiry, known as the Cyert Report, was completed in four weeks and tabled in March 1970. The members of the Committee of Inquiry were American academics who recommended the creation of a ‘school of excellence’ in postgraduate management education at the University of NSW, thus upsetting the Melbourne business establishment. A second (Ralph) Committee of Inquiry into management education was commissioned in 1980 and Melbourne got its ‘school of excellence’.
By 1970, five Australian universities offered MBA-type programs – Adelaide, Macquarie, Melbourne, Monash and New South Wales. After a slow start, the programs eventually numbered among the economic success stories of tertiary education. Some academics, however, expressed grave doubts and considerable disquiet about the existence of management schools in universities. They were concerned that management schools would be unable to maintain academic standards since new courses had to be invented and old ones modified for business consumption. This was forced upon management teachers by the demands of pragmatic, ill-educated managers, increasingly illiterate students and the urgent need to establish lines of professional demarcation. The fact that academics could not agree on the status of management added to the confusion: is it a science, an art, or a practice?
As management is an interdisciplinary subject its academic founders took the liberal position that its study should include ‘hard’ subjects, like statistics and ‘soft’ subjects, like psychology. These were supplemented with functional courses in finance, marketing and logistics. Of special importance were ‘people’ courses, which have travelled under many names – organisational behaviour, industrial/organisational/ managerial psychology – and since the 1980s, human resource management. The ‘people’ courses directed attention to the personalities, motives and values of managers.
In the late 1960s Geert Hofstede, in Culture’s Consequences, studied the values of 116,000 IBM employees in forty countries. He found Australians to be strongly individualistic, masculine, with low levels of anxiety (uncertainty avoidance). Strong individualism means that: the involvement of individuals with
