THE LINE MANAGER AND PEOPLE MANAGEMENT

The CIPD research on employee well-being and the psychological contract (Guest and Conway, 2005) established that too many line managers are failing to motivate and improve the performance of the people they manage. Under half of respondents to the CIPD survey reported that they were regularly motivated by their line manager, only 45 per cent were happy with the level of feedback they received and just 37 per cent said that their manager helped them to improve their performance. This suggests that the organizations concerned were failing to get managers to understand their role in motivating people and were also failing to manage performance as effectively as they might. As the report emphasizes, ‘One of the biggest challenges for HR is to support line managers in managing and developing their people and this means that the respective roles of line and HR managers need to be understood.’