It may be well to assert that judgment and intuition are important aspects of intelligence. It is another thing to assert that that kind of intelligence is important in managerial work. Aren’t there some aspects of intelligence that simply are not appropriate at work?
As long as one conceives of the manager’s job as being orderly, controlled, and systematic, one would be hard pressed to show that greater use of judgment, for instance, would make a manager perform better. But managerial work is not orderly. The view that it is is probably more a product of wishful thinking than careful study of manager’s jobs.
Perhaps because it’s easier to understand things that are orderly, behavioral scientists have been trying for years to organize the manager’s job. Recent studies, however, that the manager’s job defies organization; it simply is not systematic. Because of this lack of order, judgment, flexibility, and an ability to tolerate ambiguity may be more important in general managerial jobs than the ability to systematize, analyze, and control. In “Good Managers Don’t Make Policy Decisions,” for instance, H. Edward Wrapp discusses how in his experience the successful executive is the one that can muddle through, exploiting his or her sense of opportunism, resisting temptation to conceptualize long-rang plans.
The focus should be on the manager’s job, what he or she actually does and how so often the job requires a person to be flexible, to be able to ride with ambiguity, to be able to juggle, and finally, to come up with an assessment, a judgment.
Suddenly, the intuitive part of a manager can be seen to be an effective management asset rather than a quality that needs to be quashed in the name of efficiency, objectivity, and clarity.