The Player Manager: Collaboration and Involvement

This paper has as its objective to put forward a profile for the ‘manager of the future’. It draws on a review of the literature and on a series of unstructured interviews with 12 trainers, recruiters, directors and young graduates. Research carried out in large global companies in the fields of industry and multimedia confirms the under-exploitation of certain competences and the immergence of new forms of management and recruitment in modern companies. Generation Y is blossoming and, with its practices and its new demands, is jostling against traditional modes of management. This paper first highlights the tensions between individuals, the organization and its environment, plus the lack of recognition regarding these neo-managers’ competences and valuable talents. An analogy between managers and video game players leads us to the analysis of three case studies and to interviews with 12 experts in their individual professional fields: three trainers, three purchasing directors, and three young purchasing graduates. Their contributions, combined with the conclusions drawn from the case studies permit the co-construction of the profile of tomorrow’s manager, the “player manager”.