'Skills gaps among managers increase employee stress'
27/05/2008(16:57)
Managers who are not adequately trained can overload their colleagues with work and damage productivity, a management expert has claimed.
Professor Cary Cooper, from the Lancaster University Management School, believes managers with skills gaps contribute to stress-related illnesses which are now the leading cause of sickness absence in the UK.
"What ends up happening is people get overloaded, they get more stressed, have more burnout, become less productive and deliver less to the bottom line," he explained.
Stress-related absence is now experienced by businesses throughout the UK, with small enterprises unable to afford to lose people for days or weeks, Professor Cooper added.
According to last year's National Employer Skills Survey, almost 163,000 managers in England experienced a skills gap, with almost three quarters of them lacking management skills.
Professor Cooper is also the president of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and editor-in-chief of the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Management.
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