Management limbo: The epistemological failure of leadership that corrodes organizational learning

Abstract

Administrative theory has enshrined control as a fundamental pillar of organizational effectiveness. Nevertheless, its chronic absence does not always manifest as an evident collapse, but rather as a latent condition of dysfunction whose analysis has often remained superficial. This article, through a critical hermeneutic reading of both canonical and contemporary literature (Drucker, Mintzberg, Simons, among others), unveils the primordial nature of this phenomenon. It introduces and conceptualizes the Management Limbo as an epistemological failure of leadership: a meta-stable state in which the lack of robust mechanisms of verification and feedback generates an illusion of control. This illusion, in turn, corrodes the very core of organizational learning, hindering not only error correction (single-loop learning) but, more critically, the questioning of underlying mental models and strategies (double-loop learning). Strategic drift, the perpetuation of inefficiencies, and innovative stagnation thus emerge as inevitable consequences of an organization that, unable to know itself, drifts toward obsolescence. The article concludes that the Management Limbo is not an operational void but rather a pathology of managerial knowledge, proposing a conceptual framework for its diagnosis and emphasizing the urgent need to train leaders with epistemological competencies that transcend mere intuition.