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AGORA INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ECONOMICAL SCIENCES, 
AIJES, ISSN 2067-3310, E - ISSN 2067 – 7669, VOL 11 (2017) 

 

The Adaptation of Management Consultant Profession from International 

Trends to Romanian Market Conditions 

Felix-Angel Popescu
1
, Laurențiu Petrila

2
 

1
 Doctoral School of Economics, University of Oradea, University Street, No. 1, Oradea, Romania

 

 2
 Doctoral School “European Paradigm”, Babeș Bolyai University, Emanuel de Martone Street, 

No.1, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 

E-mails felixangelpopescu@gmail.com, lauren.petrila@gmail.com  

Abstract  
As a point of reference on the Romanian market for management consulting services, it can be stated that its 

evolution over the last years has suffered a positive impact, in principle, due to the relative overcoming of the 

period of economic recession. Of course, this does not mean that the situation of client companies is extremely 

favorable, because it is precisely this period of return and re-adjustment to market requirements that has led to 

cost cutting measures, including management consulting costs. 

Keywords: management, consulting, profession, market, Romania.  

1 Introduction  

In order to understand such a general concept like management consulting, a broader 

definition given by specialists assimilates it to “an added value, an optimizing factor of the 

resources of organizations in the public and private environment, an instrument of human and 

material resource efficiency, adapting technological processes to market conditions and 

needs” [1].  Although it may sound like an eulogy, rather than a definition, other specialists 

think bigger when it comes to acknowledging the benefits of management consultancy by 

saying that a company is similar to the human body. “When a dysfunction occurs, it can be 

repaired following treatment. Similarly, in a company, many types of problems can arise: 

many companies are quite healthy although a little physical exercise and a change in diet 

would make them stronger” [1].  

The two definitions denote an evolution on the perception of consulting services, from simple 

research projects, in the past, to increasingly complex organizational transformation processes 

- from a personal point of view, from here a question can be raised: does economic growth 

generate the gradual development of the consulting services, or the benefits of the consulting 

services determine the economic growth?, question that we have tried to answer in a previous 

paper [4], in relation to the Structural and Cohesion funds consultancy sector in Romania. 

If we look in the past, we would find that in the early 1900’s, management was strongly 

related to technologies, in other words, the US initiators of this science like F. Taylor, H. 

Gantt, A. Little, H. Emerson [2] called it management engineering, only years later being 

transformed into a more commercial meaning, that of management consulting.  

There was also a generational shift in the existence of management consulting market, 

because during that period most of the companies were working with the industrial and the 

governmental sector, like the company of A. Little or E. Booz [2].  Then there started to 

appear companies mainly focused on strategic management, like those of J. McKinsey or 

Boston Consulting Group [2]. But why are we talking only on the US side? Because, in the 

American leadership psychology, the gesture to appeal to competences from outside the 

organization was seen as a normal solution to solve the respective problem.  

mailto:felixangelpopescu@gmail.com
mailto:lauren.petrila@gmail.com


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The introverted leaders were found in Europe, where it was not acceptable to call for help 

from outside the organization and even worse, to pay for it. In France or Germany, there was 

a higher self-esteem among the business sector and it was promoted the idea that European 

leaders were better trained than the fellow Americans. 

Indeed, if we analyze the creation of the global market for management consulting services, it 

can be observed that international trade expansion has left aside this kind of vanities and has 

permitted American management consulting companies to go deep into the European market, 

most of them gaining good reputation until present.   

2 The birth of management consultancy in Romania, during the transition from the 

state centralized economy to the market economy 

2.1 The introduction of management consultancy standards and the development of 

regulations regarding the management consultant profession in Romania 

In Romania of the mid 1900s, the state centralized economy did not have anything to do with 

the concept of management consulting, so the United Nations tried to implement this concept 

by establishing a Center for Professional Development [1] in Bucharest, with the aim of 

bringing in foreign lecturers. The late 1900s caused the fall of the communist regime and the 

institute, even if it changed its name into Romanian Institute of Management [1], it gradually 

lost its market and staff, facing direct competition from numerous American consulting and 

training companies installing on the Romanian liberalized market. 

Following its accession to the European Union in 2007, Romania adopted the liberal 

professions code, according to the Directive of the European Commission on the Recognition 

of Professional Qualifications (2005/36/EC) [3]. Even if Romanians were getting used to the 

idea that liberal professions were provided on the basis of a relevant professional qualification 

by those who provide intellectual and / or creative services, in the interests of clients, it was 

difficult to understand why management consulting was a liberal profession self-regulated 

through industry bodies, and not by laws. 

From this point of view, the transition from a state-centralized economy to the market 

economy gave some headaches in understanding the new forms of legal organization and 

functioning in Romania, and it became much easier for larger companies - which had their 

own procedures for attesting the consultants or were part of professional associations in which 

the ability of members to provide consulting services was verified and attested - to expand in 

the field of consultancy. At the opposite pole there were the small companies, recently 

established, which were not part of professional associations and did not know how 

management consulting should look like. 

The counter-offensive came along with the establishment of the Romanian Association of 

Management Consultants at beginning of the 1990s, which has strived, or better said, tried to 

make efforts to define the profession of management consultant and to inform the market and 

clients about the ways of working with a management consultant. The first normal steps 

resulted in the successful registration of the occupations of Management Consultant and ICT 

Consultant in the Romanian Classification of Occupations (CAEN code 7022) [6]. The 

liberalization of the Romanian market meant that more and more management consulting 

companies started to accommodate in, so it was necessary to implement a procedure of 

professional attestation according to European standards, which would assess the ethics, the 

logistics and the know-how- of the candidate company [6]. However, these procedures were 

not mandatory and newcomers did not have to obey all the rules, if they did not want to. 

In order to professionalize the market, there was borrowed again the American perception on 

management and was wide spread through all Europe the international certification specific to 

the profession of consultant and trainer in management, that was the CMC, meaning Certified 



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Management Consultant [6], which was worldwide accepted. But the European Union wanted 

more, so they issued an own European standard for management consulting service, through 

the European Committee for Standardization. As if it was not sufficient enough, each Member 

State approved its own standard for management consulting, so Romania’s liberalized market 

looked a bit odd, because at the end it has made a shift from a state-centralized economy to a 

European super state centralized economy.  

2.2 The characteristics of Romanian management consultancy market, between big 

international players and local newcomers  

In the Romanian market of management consulting services, the big players started to have a 

high degree of competitiveness, because, as we said before, they were subsidiaries of large 

consulting companies in the international environment, they had an extended portfolio of 

external clients and their employees had a reputation in the consulting profession. But this 

fact it should not be seen as a negative fact, because most of the international consultancy 

firms contributed to the early stages of Romania’s negotiations and compliances for the 

accession to the European Union. Even after this major step, these companies continued to   

carry out multiple activities, especially in international assistance projects. 

As it has succeeded to the European market, the first management consulting companies in 

Romania were subsidiaries of American companies such as McKinsey, Roland Berger, or AT 

Kearney [7]. At present, exact figures of the total number of management consulting 

companies in Romania is not known, because most of them have multiple CAEN codes. 

In the current period of stabilization of the annual growth of the market of management 

consulting services in Romania, the external companies of profile have the opportunity to 

develop, as close strategies for entering this market, the opening of a commercial office in 

Romania, the implementation of direct exports, the development of a chain of smaller 

companies by regions, as well as another form not yet fully exploited: the association or 

partnership with foreign consulting firms. This model is also applicable in reverse sense, 

taking into account the case of local consulting firms with smaller financial possibilities, who 

try to implement strategies of direct / indirect exports of consulting services outside Romania. 

There are also contradictory discussions about the fact that management consulting services 

would be substitutable. Indeed, each consulting firm has a different approach, offers different 

solutions as a method of application and logic, some services being of higher quality than 

others. But, even in a narrow field as management consulting, the sub-domains are different, 

ranging from management, accounting, taxation, insurance, to customs consultancy, therefore 

they cannot be substituted for each other, but they can be mutually complementary. At the 

same time, in the field of management consulting, most specialized companies offer services 

in approximately the same structural branches of a firm (management; financial; human 

resources; strategies; operations). A threat with substitutes would be the possibility for some 

companies to set up their own internal consulting departments or their own consultant 

employees, in this case not needing the services of the consulting companies from the external 

environment. Another case of substitutes is represented by the increasingly common practice 

of some accountants or lawyers, who, in addition to their specialized services, usually take 

over the consulting part in management, human resources, financial, fiscal, etc. Another case 

of substitutes is represented by the departments or offices / consultancy divisions within some 

public administration institutions or banks, which offer clients competitive services. 

Competitive rivalry in the field of management consulting services should not be viewed as 

an unwanted thing, as an obstacle or as a fact that impedes the development of this sector of 

activity, but on the contrary, as long as the multinational consulting companies decide to open 

their offices or consultants on the Romanian market, the quality of these services will increase 

considerably, because these services involve an increasing rate of updating knowledge in 



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management, a vast and continuously developing experience in management processes and 

strategies and a continuous need for market research. Indeed, the profits of the companies 

may fluctuate, but the demand for consultancy services will not show a high degree of affect, 

as the Romanian managerial culture is still in a stage of development and needs continuous 

support, with fundamental areas not yet fully exploited (agriculture, health, industry, ICTs). 

2.3 Doing business as a management consultant in Romania: high consulting fees versus 

high expectations of clients  

For Romanian clients, it was hard to understand, at the beginning, that management 

consultancy is a service with results that are more difficult to quantify and sometimes even 

materialize on paper, especially in the long term. According to some specialists [5], there was 

also a big gap in the mindset between the providers and beneficiaries of these kind of 

services, because for the client the fee was interpreted as a global cost, but the consultant does 

not fully benefit from it, due to the fact that there are other associated costs of the company. 

To clear up this misunderstanding, in each agreement, regulation or deontological code of the 

professional associations in a certain branch, it is mentioned that: “the liberal service provider 

can fix his desired fee and this must be made known to the client, clearly explaining the 

weight and the size of the component cost elements” [1].  In Romania, the most common fee 

systems are: days-consultant (man-days) and success fee [5]. The man-days pricing system 

starts from the premise that any consulting activity can be broken down into days worked for 

the benefit of the client, and the fee is determined by multiplying the number of days worked 

with the daily fee [1]. The success-fee system tries to correlate the results obtained in the 

consulting mission with the consultant's fee, but presents some implementation and uses 

abnormalities [5], in the sense that the effects of a consulting service do not appear 

immediately after the completion of a consulting mission (or during the course of the 

mission).   Romanian consulting firms have not taken any American or European organization 

model, some of them having permanent consultants in management, other working mostly 

with collaborators. The same can be said about the specialization of the consultants, most of 

them having training in the economic field or technical training, and the others in approximate 

proportions equally, having training either in the legal field or in the field of social sciences. 

3 Conclusions  

In the period before the economic recession, management consulting services went through a 

profitable period on the Romanian market, determined by the expansion of large corporations, 

which could not produce the management competence within the company as quickly as they 

developed. According to some specialists [7], this type of clients used appealed to 

management consultants in order to complete their management teams on different projects 

where they did not have sufficient or specialized resources. In other cases, clients just wanted 

to confirm certain managerial decisions that had to be implemented without further testing. 

However, with the economic downturn, the global consulting market contracted and the 

growth rates for the successive years were very low, therefore, the competition remained high, 

directly influenced by the contraction of the labor market and the changes in the consumer 

behavior, in the sense that client companies have not experienced such spectacular growth 

rates, so they started to cut any unnecessary expenses. Limiting the budgets has inevitably led 

to a reduction of demand for management consulting services.  

It is necessary to understand that, although the recession has passed, the economic situation of 

the businesses sector is difficult. Romania faces many challenges: each macro-sector of the 

economy urgently demands the definition and pursuit of clear objectives, and maybe this is 

the point where management consulting companies should bring decisive options and the 

ability to plan in the medium and long term, by capitalizing on strengths and opportunities. 



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REFERENCES  

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management, Brașov, 2007. 

https://www.scribd.com/doc/47415897/3 

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