This survey was designed and developed to assess key issues related to management development practices in Malaysian corporations especially on needs assessment, programme selection, programme evaluation, and future directions and trends.  The survey research instrument is a questionnaire that was distributed to 189 selected Malaysian corporations listed on the Main Board of the Bursa Malaysia or formerly known as Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE). These corporations represent a cross-section of local industries and was selected through stratified random sampling.  The 16-percent or 31 responses were collated and the data analyzed and interpreted using descriptive statistics. The major findings suggest that despite being aware of the importance of MD practices to achieve productivity and enhance corporate performance, most Malaysian corporations are unsure how to practise MD. They seldom implement value-added MD programmes to improve managerial productivity and enhance managerial performance achievements. The main reason given is cost-effective considerations vis-à-vis actual bottom-line results. Specifically, the majority of the respondents articulated their concern over several areas such as the lack of needs assessment, indiscriminate programme selection, non-standardized programme evaluation and vague ideas about future directions and trends in MD activities. On the whole, the survey research suggests that there is a need for Malaysian corporations to redress the prevailing weaknesses so that any concrete management development initiative undertaken can produce the desired results and productivity outcomes including bottom-line achievements.

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This paper deals with a case study of Management Development (MD) practices at Malaysian Assurance Alliance (MAA). The aim of this research is to investigate how a large Malaysian insurance corporation developed and integrated MD initiatives with current organizational needs and tasks. Attempts were made to map and categorize the MD initiatives according to position and course content both for the staff and agency. Analysis of historical records and semi-structured interviews were conducted to identify the organizational MD needs as a result of context and task. Findings show that a company-wide development system for staff and agency was effectively integrated to provide a direct support to competence management endeavour. The company’s MD initiatives have also resulted in managerial implications including (1) increased effectiveness of MD initiatives through emphasis on needs and participation; (2) mutually conceived and aligned development system has formed a learning culture in Malaysian Assurance Alliance; and (3) effective MD initiative audit has ensured customer-oriented competence development in the organization.

The prevailing perspectives on Sun Zi’s Art of War are predominantly strategic and limit leadership to implemented actions. This study seeks to examine the framework of an understanding of leadership actions and wisdom of Sun Zi’s Art of War, including the values, ethics and morals. The qualitative design was used and semi-structured interviews were used in this study to answer the research questions. The inductive analysis on the participants’ responses shows that their wisdom or deep knowledge and understanding are dependent on moral influences (Dao) such as being patient, doing away with inner greed, honesty and fairness, morality and a strategic mindset. Specifically, the themes of the influences are pointed primarily to the ethics and moral dimensions and secondly to the strategic dimension. This study has implications for extending research of roles of ethics and morality of Sun Zi’s Art of War on leadership effectiveness. Keywords: Sun-Zi’s Art of War, ethics and morality, corporate leadership and inductive analysis.

Confronting with changeable and volatile business environment, organization entails a rapid growth of the trust relation. In the research of intra-organizational trust, it has become an increasingly remarkable trend to focus on the development of active trust, which marks an effective strategy to strengthen the awareness of trust. In this connection, organization and individual should make its ambition to establish and develop trust instead of recognizing trust process as a passive development as a accumulative result of passing time. This paper, from the dual perspectives of individual behavior characteristics and organizational risk control, makes endeavors to vindicate the inter-level model of trust development within an organization through comprehensive exploration and empirical analysis at the individual and organizational levels so as to promote the initiative of both individuals and organizations to enhance organizational trust atmosphere, and press ahead with the active trust development via confirmed measures.