Academic Research

European Style of Management

Abstract

There is an overwhelming amount of management literature worldwide on American business practices and Japanese management. This is contrary to the relatively inadequate attention given to the management practices of other successful countries in the world. When thinking about management in Europe, there is a tendency for diversity to dominate among countries. The question that arises often, however, is whether there are some common management philosophies and practices which form a genuine European management style. The purpose of this term paper is to answer this question and investigate the characteristics of such a system with special attention to its commonalities and differences with U.S. and Japanese management styles.

James Heskett of the Harvard Business School says in his article, Are We Entering an Era of European Management Leadership?[1], “In recent weeks, I have sat in on several meetings with heads of major European companies in which questions about American leadership have been raised. What's new, at least in my experience, is that the questions aren't confined to political leadership; those are perennial favorites among our European counterparts. Instead, the questions deal with issues of business leadership. They prompt the question of whether the highly-touted American style of management of the 90s is giving way to a new and different European style, just as Americans replaced Japanese management style as the sine qua non among the world's managers just a little more than a decade ago. In a word, the Europeans are acting as if they know something we in the U.S. don't.”

If Europe is viewed from within there are several differences between countries in the way businesses are managed, but if a holistic view is taken from outside, comparing it with Japan and the U.S., it looks different and relatively homogeneous.

EUROPEAN MANAGEMENT MODEL VS. U.S. AND JAPANESE...