Editorial: Too many cooks….

There is an old English expression that ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ meaning that if there are too many people trying to manage the making of a simple outcome then quality and productivity will suffer. Unfortunately it appears that it is the British who least heed their own maxim.

Latest figures from the European Union (EU)’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) date from Q2 2015. These reveal that the proportion of people claiming to be ‘managers’ in the EU as a whole was 5.8%. Across the major EU member states this proportion differs from 3.7% in Italy to 4.4% in Germany and 6.9% in France. But in the UK it stands at 11.2% — almost twice the EU average.

Some of this classification could be due to ‘slippage’ — people who are in professional white-collar jobs defining their role through supervision rather than expertise. But here the evidence also puts that in doubt. The proportion of ‘professionals’ to total employees across the EU as a whole is 19.1% — ranging from 14.5% in Italy to 25% in the UK.

Of course, these are claims made during a face-to-face survey and are not based on actual job titles — although the figures are remarkably consistent between successive LFS surveys. Thus we either have a cultural pre-occupation in the UK with status, or a genuine difference in the structure of UK companies. The low number of managers in Italy is surprising because of the high number of small companies in the economy. Even so, economic structure may be a factor in the balance of managerial/professional staff to other employees. For instance, just 12% of UK employees work in manufacturing compared to 27% of German employees. However, manufacturing organisations tend to be more hierarchical than service organisations, which further supports the view that there is probably an over-designation of employees into managerial positions in UK businesses as well as a status concern making people perceive their jobs to be managerial — both of which will be serving to undermine the effectiveness of organisations through the ‘too many cooks’ phenomenon.

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