Managing without Managerial Skills? Management in the European Commission

Management has long been a problem in the Commission. The technical expertise of those holding management positions has traditionally been prized more highly than managerial skills, a system that is usually defended on the grounds that middle and senior managers in the Commission are routinely called upon to defend Commission proposals in the Council and the Parliament.  Drawing on primary source material from an online survey (n=5545), semi-structured interviews (n=244) and five focus groups, collected by a research team led by the authors in 2014, as well as data from an earlier project, ‘The European Commission in Question’, conducted in 2008, this paper investigates perceptions of managers and management on the part of cabinet members and of rank-and-file employees in the organization, and the perceptions, beliefs and values relating to management of middle and senior managers in the organization. Although it finds that management in the Commission is still not highly rated and that several managerial cultures co-exist uneasily within the organization, the paper hypothesizes that there has been an evolution in beliefs about the relative importance of managerial skills, not least among managers themselves.