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Internal consulting groups (ICGs) can offer the management of large organisations, including those in the public sector, with efficient and effective means of achieving improvement and responding to pressures such as reduced resources. Those charged with developing an ICG should follow an institution building approach. Through the ICG′s early, growth and mature stages, key principles and issues of an institutional development plan must be addressed and reasonable goals set. Top management commitment to the plan is vital to its success.

The paper advances research on the heterogeneity of client behavior and the understanding of “the client” as a key topic in the research of management consulting. First, this issue is addressed by summarizing the clients’ reasons for acquiring and utilizing management consulting services. Second, the purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which these reasons vary in four key client groups.

Building on 1,127 responses to a survey questionnaire, the clients’ motives for acquiring and using management consulting are examined in four different client groups. Principal component analysis with an eigenvalue greater than one and varimax rotation method was used to discern the motives for acquiring and using consulting.

The analysis identifies two co-existing factors as key reasons for acquiring and utilizing management consulting: “Impact” and “Significance.” This typology is used to show that the reasons for acquiring management consulting services are dependent on the hierarchical level of the client. While reasons related to “Impact” are consistently emphasized in the four examined client groups, reasons related to “Significance” show greater variance and are emphasized less higher up in the organizational hierarchy.

The paper argues for the need to reconsider the conventionally marginal and subordinate position of subjective motivations in the management consulting literature. The paper creates bridges between previously contending paradigms by developing a holistic and comprehensive framework of the client motives for utilizing management consulting.

For practitioners, the results complement prior understandings of client purchase decision making. More fundamentally, this paper provides elements for restructuring the overall discourse on the roles and uses of consultants.

The paper is the first large-sample examination of client heterogeneity, developing an empirically verified typology of the reasons for utilizing management consulting. More importantly, the paper specifies how these reasons vary among four key client groups. The primary contributions of the paper are: the paper posits a robust typology on the previously multivocal and fragmented reasons for utilizing management consulting. The paper specifies how the reasons vary in four key client groups, developing a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of “the client.”

Managers are increasingly using external consultants for the provision of a wide range of professional management services. The article discusses the structure of the consulting industry, addresses the question of whether consultants “add value” for their clients, and describes how to identify, select and use relevant consultants.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the major determinants that influence the management teachers to practice management consulting. The second objective of this research is to understand how the experience in management consultancy leads to value addition in their class room teaching.

To address the first research objective, focus group discussions were conducted with management teachers practicing consultancy. These results were used to generate items for the questionnaire. Factor analysis performed on the data revealed six determinants influencing management teachers to engage in consulting activity. To address the second research objective, focus group discussions with MBA graduates were used to comprehend how teachers with management consulting experience enrich the pedagogy.

The major findings of the study suggest that the determinants influencing management teachers to practice consulting are: improving competencies, furthering professional advancement, accruing strategic and financial benefit, enabling holistic development. Through study 2, the authors found out that management teachers add value in pedagogy by forging corporate world connection through real-time examples, enable critical thinking by breaking established paradigms, effective classroom delivery through storytelling, etc., and lending student support by assuming a mentor’s role.

This study found that faculty consulting reduces the perceived gap between the industry and academia and it also leads to effective class room teaching.

The study is the first attempt to empirically test the determinants influencing management teachers to practice consultancy services and qualitatively assess how the consultancy experience enriches the in-class performance.

This paper aims to conceptualize perceived management consulting success, derive relevant success factors based on principal-agent theory and the resource-based view as well as investigate the particular factors’ influence. Management consulting has become important for improving the competitiveness of a variety of firms. Surprisingly, there is little empirical evidence clarifying what constitutes a successful management consulting project.

The authors conduct a survey to empirically investigate the hypotheses. They develop the survey instrument through a literature review, expert interviews, a pre-test and an item-sorting test. To analyze the data from 348 management consultants, the authors apply structural equation modeling. Additionally, they choose a triangulation approach by asking secondary informants about the originally surveyed consultants’ responses.

Initially, the authors develop the second-order construct perceived management consulting success, consisting of the factors compliance with budget and schedule, degree of target achievement, profitability as well as expansion and extension. Additionally, they develop an understanding of management consulting’s success factors. In this regard, five of six factors show a significant impact on perceived management consulting success.

According to the results, the factor intensity of collaboration is of highest importance for perceived management consulting success. Further, the factors common vision, consultant expertise and top management support show comparably strong significant influences. Yet, the authors have to reject the hypothesis about trust. This result conveys the complicacy of the consultant–client relationship and shows that building a trustful relationship between both parties is hard to accomplish.

The primary intent of this study is to examine recent projects involving external management consultants at a North American telecommunications firm, from the employees’ point of view, to measure the extent to which the aforementioned “critical success factors” were perceived as being evident. A secondary purpose was to examine which, if any, of these factors differ between more or less successful consulting projects with a view to building a model to predict employees’ perceptions of the level of the projects’ success. A third objective was to gather employee opinions on the use of management consultancy and other factors that might contribute to the success of consulting projects.

A total of 102 employees responded to a questionnaire consisting of 59 questions. A model including six independent variables was able to predict overall rating of project success, with an adjusted R²=0.68, F=27.81 (p<0.0001). The significant variables, in order of importance, were: the solution took into account one's internal state of readiness; the project included prototyping new solutions; the project deliverables were clear; the consultant partnered with the project team throughout; the consultant was professional; and the consultant understood the sense of urgency.

Substantial differences were seen on most measures between projects judged “successful” and projects judged “not successful”. Nevertheless, it is encouraging that many of the success factors suggested in the literature, and proposed under “an ideal client‐consultant engagement”, were judged as being present in management consulting projects at the telecommunications firm, to one degree or another. General opinions of management consultants were mixed and somewhat negative. Employees at the telecommunications organization do not agree with the traditional benefits of management consultants promoted by the industry.

The results of this study support the anecdotal and theoretical models, in particular those emphasizing the importance of process issues, the client‐consulting relationship and their impact on project outcome.

At the pinnacle of the knowledge management hype, international consulting firms were widely viewed as the undisputed champions of the discipline. They were the ones that pioneered the development of innovative knowledge management systems, they were at the forefront of creating knowledge management cultures and they recognized the productive potential of knowledge workers. While knowledge continues to be prominent on the strategic agenda of leading consulting firms, several knowledge management challenges remain unsolved. To shed light on this matter the paper aims to investigate how knowledge management is really embedded in their organizations and with which critical issues these firms still struggle .

The paper presents a qualitative empirical study based on 37 in‐depth interviews with representatives from international consulting firms in different locations around the world.

It is found that the promise of knowledge management can only be realized if people are open to changing business processes and adopt new ways of thinking.

The study sheds fresh light on the knowledge management practices that have emerged in the consulting industry, and provides insights into the interplay of people and systems, the structuring of knowledge management, the divide between knowledge generalists and specialists, and the knowledge management strategy.

The paper presents a general approach to embedding knowledge management along the dimensions of people, systems and business processes and develops an integrative framework that links knowledge management strategies to a typical consulting project cycle. In addition, it sheds light on individual perceptions on the benefits from knowledge management.

Strategy consultants have much to offer a top executive in terms of improving the bottom line. Yet little is known about the strategy consulting industry, because the firms and their clients are often reluctant to disclose details of their activities. This article surveys the leading strategy consulting firms and explores trends affecting the future of the industry.

The aim of the article is to explore the dynamics of the management consulting process for small firms as an outcome of interactive processes.

The explorative study is based on a summary sketch of an interactive research project (LOS) in which small firms and their interactions with management consultants were studied in a three‐year perspective. The theoretical framework employed is based on the industrial network theory.

The study suggests that clients are co‐producers of the consulting process. Therefore, management consulting in a interactive perspective has important elements of trailing, i.e. changing the frames of reference of the consulting process and creating room for consulting in which the consultant, as well as the client, allow themselves to experiment with their professional foundations. However, it is also suggested that innovative learning processes are difficult to foster in management consulting processes.

The empirical foundation of this explorative study is limited and thus invites to further interactive studies along the paradigm of action research.

Based on the findings, it seems important that both clients and consultants accept the consulting process as a co‐productive process, and that they find a way to work out the expectation gap at the beginning of the process.

The study adopts an industrial network perspective on the consulting process. In this perspective social exchange and adaptation processes among actors, i.e. consultant and client are in focus.

This study seeks to investigate causal relationships between sales management programs designed to build customer relationships by solving customer problems and selling firm performance.

Hypotheses were developed and supported based on theories developed from the market orientation and sales management literature. Using survey results from sales managers and reported profitability data, those hypotheses were tested using multiple regression.

Results indicate that consulting‐oriented post‐sales training and consulting‐oriented evaluation are significant influences on salesforce efficiency. Consulting‐oriented evaluation is a significant influence on customer retention. The strongest influences on profit growth are initial sales training and post‐sales training learning, but a composite variable of all elements of the consulting‐oriented sales management program is a significant influence on profit growth.

The sampling frame of this study was limited to medium to large industrial manufacturing firms; therefore any conclusions drawn from this study cannot be generalized beyond these types of firms. Future consulting‐oriented sales management research should expand the types of firms studied. Future research should also measure the relationships between consulting‐oriented sales management programs, firm market and learning orientation, adaptive selling, and salesperson customer orientation.

In industries where relationship building and partnering are considered mutually beneficial and important by buyers and sellers there should be greater emphasis on: listening skills, diagnostic skills, and problem solving skills in sales training; sharing effective strategies to build customer relationships and sharing of effective customer problem‐solving strategies in post‐sales training learning; measuring customer cost savings and obtaining customer satisfaction feedback in evaluation systems; and compensating salespeople for customer retention, positive customer feedback, and increased sales from current customers.

This study fills a gap in the literature for firm level research on the consequences of sales management programs, particularly programs that encourage sales consulting. This study makes a contribution to the literature by determining whether industry conditions encourage those programs or moderate their relationship to performance.