For the past seventy years, managers have been viewed as a dynamic and important element of business organizations. Given the turbulence in today’s environment, an organization must have a high-quality, flexible, and adaptive management team if it is to survive and succeed. This is true even for organizations that have chosen to restructure (e.g., with flatter hierarchies, and fewer permanent employees) and empower employees to be more a part of organizational decision making.

Management development is a very popular HRD activity and has been defined in many ways. An organization’s conscious effort to provide its managers (and potential managers) with opportunities to learn and grow, in hopes of producing a deep bench of managers with the skills necessary to function effectively. Management development can be described as having three main components: management education, management training, and on-the-job experiences.

Management education is the acquisition of a broad range of conceptual knowledge and skills in formal classroom situations in degree-granting institutions. Management training focuses more on providing specific skills or knowledge that can be immediately applied within an organization and/or to a specific position or set of positions within an organization. On-the-job experiences allow managers to gain self-knowledge, enhance existing abilities, or obtain new skills.