Management Succession in Large Australian Corporations

Abstract

Despite considerable investigation in other countries, particularly the United States (Allen and Panian, 1982;Dalton and Kesner, 1985;Frederickson et al., 1988; Gordon and Rosen, 1981;Vancil, 1987) and the apparent importance of the issue, management succession remains largely unexplored in the Australian context, with some exceptions (Pecotich and Crockett, 1987;Pecotich and Crockett, 1988). The replacement of one manager by another, particularly at senior organizational levels, is an event with potentially considerable organizational implications. Moreover, given a climate in which organizations are increasingly endeavouring to focus their attention on attracting, retaining and developing management resources, it is a topic of some interest to human resource specialists.The research described in this paper has taken a broad perspective in addressing the question of how Australian organizations handle matters of management succession. This broad-based approach allows us to, firstly, identify the types of succession, selection criteria and management development, performance appraisal and incentive programs currently used in Australian organizations. Levels of decision-making involvement in, the objectives of, and attitudes to these practices can also be gauged. A final research objective was to examine any relationships found amongst these variables and between these and organizational characteristics.It must be emphasized that at this stage, the initial stage of a more comprehensive research undertaking, our mandate has been one of exploration, the goal being simply to better understand the broad issues of management succession. Accordingly, we have not expressed our exploratory objectives within the confines of hypotheses. Such structured conjectured statements of relationship would remain unconfirmed at the completion of this early stage. The methodology has instead remained appropriate to a fact-finding mission; that is, to compile a portrait of Australian managerial succession through a survey and report of current promotion, recruitment and developmental practices. ' RESEARCH METHOD SampleThe sample consisted of 76 executives in large Australian corporations. The respondents were predominantly male (93 percent), within the 40-49 age bracket and held upper management positions, mainly at the corporate level of their organization.