A company can have organization charts, KPIs, and managers with the title of director on their business card, and still remain devoid of a true managerial function. It is a difference that weighs on the numbers: businesses with truly structured managerial practices expected turnover growth in 2026 in 51% of cases, compared to 38% for those where management remains more on paper than in practice.
This is the phenomenon analyzed in the research “Leadership che fa bene. Benessere, produttività e managerializzazione delle PMI italiane“ by Rome Business School, authored by Carlo Imperatore, General Director of Federmanager Rome, and Valerio Mancini, Director of the Dissemination Research Center of Rome Business School. The authors define it as “apparent manageriality”: the distance between the formal presence of a role and the real power to decide a budget, hire a person, or change a process. In Italy, where 99.6% of businesses are small or medium-sized (ISTAT), the gap weighs particularly heavily. In fact, according to the OECD, managerial inefficiencies explain a significant part of the reason why the productivity of Italian SMEs stops at 65% of that of large enterprises.
Italian managers are “simultaneously recipients and producers of organizational well-being,” write the authors. They suffer the pressure of top management, the market, and results, while through their own behavior they determine a significant part of the collaborators’ experience. A paradox arises: the manager is asked to protect people without always receiving organizational protection, suffering the risks of hyper-connection, responsibility without effective power, and the precarization of managerial careers.
The problem is aggravated by demographics: in 2024, 24.6% of the Italian population was at least 65 years old, compared to an OECD average of 18.6%, while the under-15 share stopped at 11.9% (OECD, 2026). With a population aging faster than the international average, and with 42.9% of professional figures requested by businesses still difficult to find in May 2026 (Unioncamere), retaining and training those who already manage becomes as much a priority as training new ones.
Manageriality is not distributed evenly across the territory. ISTAT notes that the Center-North has a density of businesses and an average number of employees per business superior to the South, where micro-enterprises prevail and the average size remains more contained. The response does not only pass through the hiring of internal managers: temporary management, consortia, business networks, and competence centers can make managerial skills accessible even where territorial networks are weaker.
Bridging this gap is not just a question of growth: managerial quality also affects the ability of businesses to react to shocks. The Survey of Industrial and Service Firms of the Bank of Italy shows that in 2025 businesses with at least 20 employees maintained substantially stable sales and accelerated investments, but expectations for 2026 indicate a possible contraction especially among smaller businesses. “The particularly relevant data is that organizational quality is not just an outcome of growth, but can influence the company’s ability to react when the context changes,” states Imperatore.
From this reading come proposals such as a territorial “management voucher” to finance mentoring and temporary management in SMEs below a certain size threshold; academy programs built between Chambers of Commerce, universities, and employer associations; anticipated assessments of the organizational structure in view of generational handovers; and territorial observatories on managerial maturity promoted by the Chambers of Commerce, capable of shifting the debate from qualitative impressions to comparable evidence across territories.
To distinguish the formal presence of management from its effective autonomy, the report proposes a managerial maturity scale across six areas: governance, planning, people, data, innovation, and transparency. Each area is evaluated from one to four, from the predominantly informal level to the structured and measured level over time.
In governance, for example, the minimum level is the simple distinction between ownership and operational responsibility, while the advanced level provides formalized delegations and succession procedures; in planning, it goes from the absence of budget to a forecast system with periodic revision; in transparency, from discretionary remuneration criteria to readable criteria and defined bands, the same principle underlying Legislative Decree 96/2026, which implements European Directive 2023/970 on pay transparency and has been in force since June.
The purpose is diagnostic: to help each business identify its own organizational bottleneck before intervening, whether it is an SME strong in innovation but weak in people management, or one with solid family governance and no management control. The scale measures how much management is needed for the real complexity of each company, a parameter that changes case by case.
No measure alone produces well-being or productivity, as international comparison also shows: from 2007 to 2025, value added per hour worked grew in Italy by just 1.4%, compared to over 7% in France, 11% in Germany, and almost 18% in Spain (Istat, 2026). To bridge this gap, the report proposes acting on multiple fronts simultaneously.
On the incentives front, the recommendations ask to judge managers not only on turnover, but also on avoidable turnover and the quality of the climate they leave behind, and to link economic bonuses to innovation and safety in addition to results. In daily practice, it is suggested to measure turnover and absences in aggregate form, never to monitor individuals, and to cut what is superfluous, starting from meetings and simultaneous priorities, before introducing new benefits. Finally, the authors ask to involve workers and representatives in the diagnosis of problems, not just in the implementation of solutions.
“The future of managerial work belongs to those who will know how to produce results without consuming people. The quality of a manager will not be measured solely by what they obtain, but by the human and professional system through which they obtain it,” concludes Mancini. “Leadership that does good tackles difficult decisions without turning pressure into permanent disorder, and distributes autonomy instead of withholding it.”