Can Portuguese management compete?
Survey of senior expatriate managers in Portugal

Survey of senior expatriate managers in Portugal

Can Portuguese management compete?

Introduction

"This country has an enormous potential for development. There are a lot of things to do. The future will be brilliant!" [A Spanish manager]

Portugal has undergone an extraordinary transformation in the last quarter of a century. In 1974, at the time of the 25 April revolution which ended nearly 50 years of dictatorship, the economy was largely agrarian, heavily supplemented by income from the then colonies and what industry existed was in the hands of a few privileged families. Portugal itself was in many ways a third world economy with deep and widespread rural poverty and illiteracy of some 60%.

Now Portugal is a modern member of the European Union, with only 12% of its labour force in agriculture and fisheries and 53% in service industries and with sustained GDP growth since joining Europe in 1986. Trading patterns have changed dramatically with, for example, Spain moving up some twenty places to being Portugal's number one trading partner. Portugal's main industries are dependent on its external relationships - tourism and export products such as textiles, wood pulp, paper, cork and automotive parts. Foreign direct investment is warmly welcomed in Portugal and continues to be an important mechanism for change and growth.

The weight of a vast and inefficient public sector is not only a severe Budget problem with public spending at 52% of GDP but it is also crushing what vitality there is out of the private sector.

The cultural changes - social, economic and political - have been monumental and business and management have followed but the old autocratic, family management style is only slowly being replaced by meritocratic, team-based management, driven by customer and shareholder needs.

As Portugal now struggles to maintain sustained growth and to narrow the gap with its trading partners, productivity and management effectiveness are key issues. How Portuguese management culture compares with competitors in other developed countries is an important economic issue if the improvement in productivity needed to improve the structure of the economy is to be achieved.

The idea for this study was initially discussed in 2000 between Clive Viegas Bennett, Managing Partner of Ad Capita International Search in Lisbon and Professor Chris Brewster of Cranfield University School of Management in the UK. The project and its international successor (see below), continue to be supported academically by him and by the School of Management. Cranfield's Professor of Human Resource Management, Andrew Kakabadse, has also warmly endorsed these studies.

International study
The success of this survey led us to design a second, more extensive, study in other countries. Co-ordinated through the INAC world-wide network of executive search consultants, a similar survey to this one is being carried out in Argentina, Belgium, Chile, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain and the UK. Other countries within the network may be added at a later date. These international studies will allow us not only to compare different management cultures but also examine how they interact with each other.