Identifying Management in Chile: A Behavioral Approach

The Chilean economy has maintained a stable trajectory of relatively successful development for over ten years. The average GNP growth over this period has been about 6.5 percent per year. This has been achieved despite the international slowdown of the early years of the decade and despite recent (early 1995) Latin American upheavals, mainly in Mexico and Argentina. An important component of the Chilean economic model is the growing role of the private sector in the economy, which has been the result of a deliberate policy called the "subsidiary principle" articulated in the late 1970s. The subsidiary principle indicated that the government would not undertake those activities that could be successfully developed by the private sector, that it would maintain only a "normative and supervisory" role, including the regulative activities characteristic of government. This translated into a massive privatization of government-owned firms, extending the influence of privately owned firms in the economy (Hachette and Luders, 1992; Majluf and Rainieri, 1996). Moreover, the liberalization of the economy also meant a substantial opening of the import and export markets. This required Chilean firms to become more competitive. Either they adapted to the new situation or they disappeared. If they wanted to succeed, Chilean managers were forced to develop new approaches to conduct the activities of their firms (Montero, 1990; Smith, 1995). This paper reports on exploratory studies of management in Chile: particularly, the identification of those practices that seem to be peculiar to firms based