Micromanaging Behaviour and Engineering Management

Sammanfattning: Researchers argue that micromanaging behaviour has now become a common trait of management and been perceived as negative. Furthermore, there is little research on the technical perspective of micromanagement and why and how it occurs in an engineering environment. While each research covers only a few segments of the origin, symptoms and reasons of micromanagement, our thesis tries to consolidate all these segments to present the whole picture. Our research seeks to reveal and analyse the symptoms of micromanagement in an engineering environment. Additionally, quantitative and statistical analysis is performed to determine which factors of micromanagement are influential when managing a group of technical personnel. Through our analysis, we establish that the attitude of managers and subordinates towards the symptoms of micromanagement is rather different. The agreement of managers on the five symptoms were found to be greatly consistent while subordinates present an inconsistency in their opinions. From the examination of consistency of responses across the two groups, we determine that both groups are of the same opinion on the three out of five symptoms. However, the rank of each symptom in the two groups is slightly different. Through this study, we contribute towards academic learning of general micromanagement while strengthening the research of micromanagement in the field of engineering management. Moreover, this will also assist technical managers to identify the existence of micromanagement in their managerial role.