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Managing Complexity and Uncertainty in the African Environment

• The way the operating environment is seen in terms of constraints and opportunities is important to successful and appropriate organizational managements.

• Understanding how perceptions of uncertainty and ambiguity are culturally formulated is important to how managers act towards the operating environment.

• An ability to ‘capture’ the wider societal collectivism, humanism and entrepreneurial flair in Africa may all be key to organizational success.

• The capability to develop cultural synergies, and include different and wider stakeholders is a prerequisite to making appropriate decisions, through a more thorough understanding of the operating environment: helping to reduce uncertainty, and including multiple stakeholders.

  Managing Decision-making

• Understanding the influences of cultural differences on decision-making and managing different value systems is important in developing decision processes, and in transferring knowledge and decision systems from other cultures.

• As above, effective and appropriate decision-making should be based on the inclusion of a wider stakeholder base, and some organizations are beginning to recognize this in part.

• However, current participatory and empowerment management, transferred from Western systems, is gaining in importance in Africa, but is mostly ‘tactical’ at the implementation level, and based on contingency principles, leaving strategic decisions to top management, and often by foreign boards, with little or no wider stakeholder involvement.

  Using Appropriate Leadership and Management Styles

• There are a variety of hybrid management systems operating in Africa, some highly adaptive to the operating environment, and successful, some maladaptive.

• These can be described by reference to three ‘ideal type’ management systems: post-colonial (based on coercive leadership and alienative involvement); post-instrumental (based on remunerative reward and contractual involvement); and African renaissance (based on normative leadership and moral involvement)

• African management systems appear currently to be predominantly results and control oriented (post-instrumental and post-colonial), with some country differences: DRC is more control oriented; - Mozambique and Rwanda are more people (normative) oriented.

• There is a general desire among managers to be more people and results oriented (particularly Burkina Faso and Botswana); but people orientation is not reflected in managers’ projections of the future of their organizations, yet a higher emphasis on results is.

  Motivating and Rewarding Managers

• Locus of control, or the extent to which managers perceive that events can be controlled by them (internal locus) or are outside their control (external locus) has implications for motivational systems such as results driven reward systems. This was found to be generally moderately ‘internal’ (contrary to general assumptions), with managers in Botswana, Ghana, RSA, and Zambia more internal than other countries; and also differences within RSA among cultural groups.

• Security needs, which affect the ‘hygiene’ nature in motivational systems of a steady and secure job appear to be higher in Kenya, Ghana, and Zambia; and lower in RSA, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

• Managers generally report a preference to work as part of team, but see this tendency as being lower in others.

• Work centrality is generally low: family and outside work life is more important.

Gaining Employee Commitment: Work Attitudes and Organizational Climate

• Humanistic and communalistic attitudes are prominent.

• There is a need for stability, and employees have expectations of loyalty from their employer.

• Employees report a moderately high loyalty to the organization, yet a moderately low work centrality.

• There is a separation between home/community life and work life.

• Reported levels of coercive control (post-colonial management systems) seem to be too high.

• Employees appear to be team workers.

Managing Multiculturalism: Developing Managers

• Different in learning styles may suggest that Anglo-Saxon teaching methods with a focus on process may be inappropriate.

• Also questioned is the appropriateness of the ‘Organizational Learning’ concept that is being introduced into organizations in Africa, with very littler thought.

• From the points above, management development, and organizational capacity building, should include the following areas: understanding constraints and uncertainty; accommodating interests of multiple stakeholders; developing decision processes that give voice to those interests; motivating and gaining commitment by reconciling home/community and work life; assessing appropriateness of management principles and practices; managing multiculturalism and cross-cultural development.