Line managers have played a role in organisations for as long as organisations have existed; in fact, it is commonly accepted that ‘management’ has been around for centuries prior to the ‘industrialised era’. Davidson and Griffin (2000) argue that many ancient and medieval civilisations applied management functions in constructions such as, for example, the building of pyramids. While this may be the case, the largely slave-style labour used in the making of the pyramids holds limited transferability to the modern human resource management (HRM) driven organisations of the twenty-first century.