Operationalising Descriptive Phenomenology in Management Research to Derive Contextually Relevant Competency Frameworks

Abstract

Management may be understood as a contextual practice comprising a blend of analysis, experience, insight, and practical wisdom in an environment filled with ambiguity and uncertainty, with no single best way to take action. Much existing work on managerial competence continues to rely on generic competency frameworks; however, such frameworks offer only a partial representation of the practice of management and have limited capacity to capture its contextual and ambiguous character. Such frameworks tend to emphasise stable, clearly demarcated competencies and, in doing so, abstract management from the contexts in which it is practised. This reliance creates a methodological challenge for management research concerned with contextual relevance. Phenomenology provides a means of accessing lived experience and is therefore well suited to the study of management as contextual practice. By focusing on lived experience, phenomenological research enables the examination of management practice as it is meaningfully constituted in everyday organisational contexts. At the same time, phenomenological inquiry introduces substantial analytic and procedural demands, particularly in applied disciplines that require structured and communicable outputs. Concerns commonly cited relate to subjectivity, limited generalisability, and the perceived absence of systematic analytic procedures. As a result, phenomenological approaches remain relatively underutilised in management research. Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method offers a systematically articulated analytic approach that remains faithful to phenomenological principles while providing explicit procedural guidance, making phenomenological inquiry more tractable within applied fields such as management research (Giorgi, 1997). Drawing on this approach, the study uses descriptive phenomenology, following Giorgi’s human scientific method, to examine managers’ lived experience of the contextual practice of management. The study is located within an interpretivist paradigm and focuses on the systematic application of the phenomenological method. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted as open, dialogical engagements to obtain concrete and detailed descriptions grounded in participants’ lifeworld. The focus is on methodological design and analytic procedure rather than substantive findings. Practical decisions made during operationalisation are examined, including how accounts of lived experience were translated into discipline-relevant analytic expressions while remaining faithful to phenomenological principles. The analytic procedure involved working with participants’ descriptions as they were given, applying phenomenological reduction, identifying meaning units, and transforming these units into discipline-relevant expressions. Through this process, experiential accounts were translated into phenomenologically grounded structural statements that articulate essential aspects of the lived experience of management practice. By providing a transparent account of methodological operationalisation, this paper offers transferable methodological insight for management researchers seeking to work with descriptive phenomenology to produce contextually grounded, discipline-relevant outputs. It demonstrates how Giorgi’s human scientific method can be applied systematically within management research to move from lived managerial descriptions to phenomenologically grounded expressions without reducing experience to abstract categories.