Every third employee – nearly one million Danes – feels their immediate manager is doing a lousy job, according to a survey conducted by the consulting firm Ennova.
“There are 100,000 managers who should, according to their employees, never have been made leaders. That is too many,” Henry D Sørensen of Ennova told Jyllands-Posten newspaper.
Nearly 35 percent of the country's workforce was “extremely critical” of their immediate superiors. They said that their work days were poisoned by unclear objectives, poor planning and a lack of feedback and staff development. Bad leadership mostly infects small businesses, which employ half of the workers in the private sector.
Management experts cited the lack of training and knowledge of best practises among the nation’s managers as the reason for employee dissatisfaction.
“Bad management lowers not just morale and job satisfaction among employees, it also leads to lower productivity, lower competitiveness and lower contribution to the gross domestic product,” Steen Hildebrandt, a professor at the Aarhus School of Business, told Jyllands-Posten. “Bad management is not just a problem for companies, but also for the country as a whole.”
Professor Børge Obel, from the University of Aarhus, said management problems could be harming the country's international competitiveness.
"The need for good management is increasing because we are in a global world and that leads to more competition all around,” Obel told Jyllands-Posten.
