Managerial Grid

What the Managerial Grid is

The Managerial Grid (الشبكة الإدارية), also called the Leadership Grid, is a model that describes the style of a manager on two axes: concern for production and concern for people. Each is rated on a scale from 1 to 9, which yields a grid of 9 × 9 = 81 cells. It is attributed to Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, and in the literature it is tied to their book “The Managerial Grid”, published in 1964 according to secondary summaries.

The grid is a descriptive model of leadership style. It is not a test of a particular manager, it does not report that one of its styles is better than another, and it is not a description of the styles of managers in the Kingdom.

Where the model comes from

We checked the following works in Crossref. The records show that the works exist, and they do not show what the works contain:

• Blake and Mouton. The article “Management by Grid Principles or Situationalism: Which?” in Group and Organization Studies, volume 6, issue 4, 1981, pages 439 to 455, and the article “Grid Principles Versus Situationalism: A Final Note” in the same journal, volume 7, issue 2, 1982, pages 211 to 215.
• Hersey and Blanchard. The article “Grid Principles and Situationalism: Both! A Response to Blake and Mouton” in the same journal, volume 7, issue 2, 1982, pages 207 to 210.
• Blake, Mouton, Sloma and Loftin. The article “A Second Breakthrough in Organization Development” in California Management Review, volume 11, issue 2, 1968, pages 73 to 78, and two reviews in 1969 of a book of theirs on developing organisations with the grid: the review by Clarke in Ergonomics, volume 12, issue 1, pages 93 and 94, and the review by Jarvis in the Journal of Industrial Relations, volume 11, issue 2, pages 194 and 195.
• Larson, Hunt and Osborn. The article “The Great Hi Hi Leader Behavior Myth: A Lesson from Occam’s Razor” in the Academy of Management Journal, volume 19, issue 4, 1976, pages 628 to 641.
• Nystrom. The article “Managers and the Hi Hi Leader Myth” in the Academy of Management Journal, volume 21, issue 2, 1978, pages 325 to 331.
• Judge, Piccolo and Ilies. The article “The Forgotten Ones? The Validity of Consideration and Initiating Structure in Leadership Research” in the Journal of Applied Psychology, volume 89, issue 1, 2004, pages 36 to 51.

The first book is not recorded in Crossref, so the year 1964 rests on the summaries alone. We did not see the text of any of the recorded works, so we quote no wording and no result from them. What we describe of the axes and the styles is a summary in our own words of what secondary summaries pass on, which differ in some of the names, and the Arabic names are a choice of ours.

The two axes and the five styles

The summaries state that the first number in each cell expresses concern for production, and the second expresses concern for people. They present five cells as landmarks on the grid, and their names differ between sources:

• (1 and 1) Impoverished management. A minimum of effort in both matters, so that neither the result nor the individuals receive attention.
• (9 and 1) Authority Compliance. A focus on production and efficiency with little concern for people. Some sources call it task management.
• (1 and 9) Country Club management. A great deal of concern for the comfort of individuals and the atmosphere of work, and little concern for production.
• (5 and 5) Middle of the Road. A balance struck by compromise between the two matters, without going to the extreme of either.
• (9 and 9) Team Management. A high concern for production and for people together, described as resting on commitment and trust.

Summaries attribute to Blake and Mouton the view that the (9 and 9) style is the best suited of the five, and we do not adopt that judgement because we did not see their words. All 81 cells remain possible positions, and the five are landmarks and not closed types.

How concern for production and for people shows in observable behaviour

Concern is hard to read while it remains a feeling, so we propose examples of observable behaviours that are ours and are not a list in a source:

• Concern for production. The manager sets a date for delivery, follows the outputs, asks about obstacles in the flow of work, and corrects the procedure when it stumbles.
• Concern for people. The manager asks about the workload of each employee, explains the reason for a decision, notices the person who was not heard in the meeting, and remembers what was agreed with that person.

Our view is that the two do not necessarily compete, since the same manager asks about the delivery date and about the employee’s load in one meeting. That is what makes the cells in which both dimensions are high possible on the grid, and it means that rating a manager on either dimension calls for examples from the manager’s work and not a general impression.

How the grid differs from nearby concepts

• Leadership styles. Classifications of what a leader does that gather similar behaviours under a name include the question “where does attention turn?” among task, persons and both together, which is the field of leadership styles. The grid is a detailed answer to that question alone, and it does not answer the question of who decides or the question of how far the leader intervenes.
• Situational leadership. A doctrine in which a manager chooses a style according to the state of the subordinate toward a particular task is set out in situational leadership, with a directing behaviour and a supporting behaviour that are independent. The titles of the registered articles of Blake and Mouton and of Hersey and Blanchard indicate that the two schools debated, and we set out the arguments of neither.
• Path goal theory. A theory that says the basic work of a leader is to clarify for subordinates the way to their goals and to ease it is detailed under path goal theory. It asks what hinders the employee, and the grid asks where the concern of the manager falls.
• Assumptions about workers. Two opposed assumptions that a manager holds about the nature of the people who work with the manager belong to Theory X and Theory Y. Those are assumptions about people, and the grid is a description of the concern of a manager for them and for production, so the two may meet or part.
• Participative leadership. A style in which the leader involves the team in analysing a matter and in taking the decision, in degrees that vary, is the matter of participative leadership. Its axis is who takes part in the decision and not the degree of concern for people, and in our estimate involving a team does not necessarily mean a high concern for people.

A hypothetical example: the picture of a manager in the eyes of the team

Take a hypothetical manager who answered a simplified questionnaire of our own devising and rated concern for production at 8 and concern for people at 6. Five members of the team then rated the manager on the same two axes. Their scores for production were 9, 8, 8, 7 and 8, which total 40, so the average is 40 ÷ 5 = 8. Their scores for people were 3, 2, 4, 3 and 3, which total 15, so the average is 15 ÷ 5 = 3.

The picture the manager holds of himself or herself is (8 and 6), and the picture in the eyes of the team is (8 and 3). The difference on production is zero, and on people it is 6 less 3, which is 3 points on a scale from 1 to 9. The scores of the team for people ranged between 2 and 4, a range of only 2, so the agreement among the five is good in this example.

The figures and the questionnaire are hypothetical and were set to illustrate. They do not represent a manager, a study or a real instrument of the grid. The difference does not prove that the manager is unconcerned for people, because the team might see what the manager does not, and each side might understand the word concern differently. The example opens a conversation: on what behaviours did each side build its score?

The limits of the model

• Two dimensions only. The style of a manager is affected by other things such as the task, the team and the situation, and the grid does not show them.
• A debate with the situational school. The titles of the registered articles show that the matter was not closed, and we did not see what each school says on superiority.
• A criticism of the claim to be high on both. The titles of Larson and colleagues and of Nystrom call the leader who is high on both dimensions a myth. They concern two concepts close to the axes of the grid, and tying them to the (9 and 9) cell is an inference of ours and not text in a source.
• A Saudi context not examined. In the sources we reviewed, we found no Saudi study that we adopt on the grid in Saudi organisations.
• Names and cells. The secondary sources differ in some of the names, and we do not count what we give as an original naming.

How the grid is misunderstood

• Classifying a personality by one cell. A cell describes behaviour in a period and in a task, and says nothing about the character of the person.
• Reading the middle as a virtuous balance. The (5 and 5) cell is, in the summaries, a compromise and not a full measure of both matters.
• Supposing that concern for people means flattering them. The axis is the degree of concern and not the manner of expressing it.
• Counting the grid as a training recipe. It is a language of description, and a training programme built on it is a decision outside the model.

The role of human resources

Human resources is in a position to use the grid as a language in a conversation with a manager about the difference between the picture the manager holds of himself or herself and the picture the team holds, as in the example, and to ask about the behaviours on which each side built its rating. The decisions on developing and assessing a manager stay with whoever holds them in management, and human resources takes part in them through its knowledge of training and of the patterns that appear in the questionnaires of a team.

What the sources allow us to say

We do not state that any style of the grid raises performance or satisfaction, or that a move from one cell to another achieves a particular result. We did not read the book by Blake and Mouton or the articles recorded in Crossref, and in the sources we reviewed we found no Saudi study that we adopt, so we attribute to a source neither an effect nor a figure.

The better course is to treat the grid as a language for describing where the concern of a manager falls between production and people, and to judge any style by what appears in the organisation: whether the goals have become clear, and whether the team knows what to expect from its manager. What is decided after that depends on the task, the team and the nature of the work.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.