Developing Management

In recent years new striking evidence emerged showing a large tail of badly managed schools and hospitals in developing countries across a number of management areas such as operations management, performance monitoring, target setting and people management. But where exactly along the process of setting their management structures are these organizations failing?

This paper describes the development of an expanded survey tool based on the existing World Management Survey (WMS) instrument, but tailored to research in the public sector of developing countries (DevelopmentWMS). We collected detailed data from pilots in India, Mexico, and Colombia using face-to-face interviews in settings where weak management practices prevail and observe more variation in the left tail of the distribution. Using this data, we present a brief discussion of the type of data that can be collected and explored with the expanded tool, including three new processes used to systematically measure the strength of each management area in the WMS: (1) process implementation, (2) process usage, and (3) process monitoring.