Nonsense in management theories

This from an interview by Mike Levy with Prof. John Antonakis on the lack of science in some management theories. It's from Training Zone and registration (free) is needed to access. I place some selected quotations, the interviewer's comments in double quotes, Antonakis's in single quotes and italics:

"A man who criticises the basis of Myers Briggs, 'emotional intelligence', NLP and 'good to great' had better be sure of his facts. Professor John Antonakis is sure that he is. Catapulted into the media last year by his paper published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals, 'Science' - where he showed that little children could predict election outcomes merely on looking at the faces of politicians, the author of ‘The Nature of Leadership’ is able to defend his corner as a passionate advocate of evidence-based work on leadership. ... Antonakis, who is professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, is not afraid to take on what he sees as the vested interests in supplying what techniques with dubious provenance."

According to Prof. Antonakis: 'There are too many snake-oil merchants in the guise of consultants, trainers and management gurus, ... Very little of what they claim is supported by hard evidence; most of which has been totally ignored by those making a lot of money by selling models and techniques that simply don’t work.'

"The absence of evidence (or evidence which proves otherwise) also leads Antonakis to cast grave doubts on cherished models and systems including Myers Briggs and NLP. A recent paper by Antonakis states: 'There are hundreds of methods or approaches like neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), whose proponents claim to be useful for predicting leadership or for developing leadership skills. Alas, NLP continues to persist in the world of practice even though [research] psychologists stopped taking this construct seriously a while back.' He is equally critical of work produced by Goleman and others on 'emotional intelligence' and methods to test it. 'The evidence simply isn’t there.' "

"Antonakis' critical gaze also falls on the whole area of leadership traits – what personality types can be predicted to make effective leaders? He gives two examples of popular models that have little or no validity: the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), and the DISC personality model. Says Antonakis, 'I could not identify any research on this (DISC) model, though plenty of claims about its validity are on the internet. As with the HBDI, this model does not have the requisite research behind it to be used in industrial settings.' "

The comments (mainly on NLP) are also very illuminating and well worth the read. Prof. Antonakis's views are absolutely in line with many of my views, as expressed in this blog. For what it's worth, he's an ex-South African.