Identifying Obstacles against the Development of Senior Managers in Knowledge-Based Companiesat National and Enterprise Levels and Providing Solutions to Solve them

Many of the knowledge-based companies have recently come across failure in their businesses despite their remarkable situation in the country’s economic policy. Managerial deficiency can be regarded as one of the main causes of this problem. Even though management development is considered as a vital solution to cope with managerial deficiency, field researches show that most Iranian knowledge-based companies do not pay enough attention to this issue in their companies. In order to find out the causes of such neglections in knowledge-based companies, this study is intended to identify the obstacles against the development of senior managers in such companies at national and enterprise levels, and to provide solutions to deal with them. An inductive content analysis method, as a method which authorizes in-depth study of the issue without prior assumptions, has been employed in this study. At first, open codes were identified through 27 interviews with several executive managers of knowledge-based companies, university faculty members, and government authorities active in the knowledge-based fields. Then, the codes that conceptually resembled one another were classified in distinct categories. The results indicated that financial, cultural, and executive obstacles involve the main challenges at the enterprise level against management development in knowledge-based companies. Moreover, deficient knowledge production and diffusion in the management of knowledge-based companies, ineffective governance, and economic barriers bring about national challenges.