So now we know. All that stuff I have been banging on about for the past 12 months was completely wrong. Open-minded, listening, team-playing bosses are rubbish; abrasive, tough, aggressive bosses are best.

A study of 300 chief executive candidates conducted by the University of Chicago's graduate school of business has found that the ones most likely to be hired had an array of "hard" skills, while not being overly burdened by too many "soft" ones.

In their paper, Which CEO characteristics and abilities matter?, Prof Steven Kaplan and co-authors Mark Klebanov and Morten Sorensen suggest that we worry too much about all that facilitating, empowering and fostering nonsense.

Action today is what we need. People get paid for doing their jobs, don't they? What more encouragement do they want?

So stop whingeing, get back to your desk, and get on with it.

But wait a minute. Another piece of research has just landed. A survey of 1,500 managers by the UK's Chartered Management Institute has found that aggressive and overbearing managers are destroying morale and undermining productivity.

In the past three years, the data indicate, "dictatorial approaches" among leaders have increased significantly. "Performance levels in workplaces across the UK are suffering as overbearing and dogmatic management practices top the list of management styles," the institute says.

"The effect of management styles on performance can be marked, and has a direct bearing on the levels of health, motivation and commitment linking employers and staff."

I see. So tough bosses are best, except when they are not. Interpersonal skills are overrated, but also underrated at the same time. All that really matters for financial performance is the ability to make difficult decisions and be persistent . . . as long as you remember people's feelings.

Confused? It's not an unreasonable reaction. But it is difficult to avoid the dismal end-of-year conclusion that we still know very little for certain about which management approaches work best.

Of course, context is everything. Different market conditions will influence the way managers behave. And you will have noticed that our two surveys happily reflect traditional stereotypical assumptions about US and European managers - the former being all action, the latter well meaning but less assertive.

All the same, they do seem to contradict each other almost completely.

But if managers are confused, struggling to widen their repertoire of responses and techniques, think what it is like for the workforce on the receiving end of mixed managerial messages. You might imagine that organisations being tugged first this way and then that could end up not achieving a great deal. You would be right to imagine that.

Now, thanks to an anonymous contributor to a British newspaper, we know what it feels like to work in that sort of aimless, unproductive environment.

The management world should be grateful to Mr/Ms Name Withheld of Shrewsbury, who wrote to the Guardian recently offering a superb description of management incompetence and organisational stasis.

"When did I stop doing any real work?" Name Withheld wrote. "By that I mean something where there is some kind of product or useful output at the end of the working day . . . The gradual creep of valueless activity has infiltrated the workplace to such an extent that I feel sure many of us now live in a world of virtual work."

Name Withheld described an all-too believable world of e-mail overload, futile meetings and constantly revised "metrics", processes and procedures. "Somewhere someone must be doing something productive to carry the burden of all this," s/he went on. "I just haven't worked out who they are." This thought prompted Name Withheld to repeat the old joke: "How many people work in your company? About half of them."

"Valueless activity" is the depressing byproduct of ineffectual management, of bosses who do not know whether to crack the whip or suggest a group hug. But being an effective manager ought not to be such an impossible task.

As the American writer William Feather once observed: "Management is the art of getting three men to do three men's work." It is not - unless you work for Nasa - rocket science. But Feather's apparently simple dictum invariably proves difficult to live up to. Too many managers still struggle to get a good day's work out of each of their people.