Covertly Concealed 'Jumper' Managers’ Ignorance, Distrust, and Amoral Careerist Mismanagement

Abstract

The explanation of organizational distrust missed covertly concealed managerial ignorance (hereafter: CCMI), a dark secret veiled on organizations’ dark side and facilitated by managers’ unknowing of their own ignorance and by unstudied “jumper” managers’ coping with gaps in local tacit know-how and phronesis (Greek for practical wisdom). Employees may trust “jumpers” coming from the outside who risk their own authority, expose their ignorance, learn, fill the gaps, and become competent, but managerial power enables defense of authority by using CCMI and camouflaging resulting mistakes and failures by bluffs, power abuses, scapegoating, and other subterfuges aimed at amoral careerism (AC). Anthropologists untangled subterfuges, but without becoming managers they missed how such defensiveness caused mutual distrust, curbed knowledge-sharing, learning, and problem-solving, furthering mistakes and failures in vicious distrust and ignorance cycles. A longitudinal study of five automatic processing plants by a management-educated and experienced semi-native anthropologist untangled that only few of their “jumper” executives, 7 of 32 studied, chose ignorance-exposing vulnerable involvement and became job-competent. As the import of “jumper” executives is now common, this problem is worsening and calls for solutions that are, suggested besides recommendations for further study.