Chapter 2: Management Theory

Creating Modern Management: The Handbook Of Peter Ducker

  • Drucker introduced several ideas that now underlie the organization and practice of management:

    • Workers should be treated as assets

    • The corporation could be considered a human community

    • There is “no business without a customer”

    • Institutionalized management practices are preferable to charismatic cult leaders


The Progression of Management Viewpoints


Frederick Taylor and the Four Principles of Scientific Management

  • Evaluate a task by scientifically studying each part of it

  • Carefully select workers with the right abilities for the task

  • Give workers the training and incentives to do the task with the proper work methods

  • Use scientific principles to plan the work methods and ease the way for workers to do their jobs

  • Taylorism: method of dividng production into simple steps

  • Ford’s Recipe: mass production, low cost, high wages

    • High pay for hard work


Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and Industrial Engineering

  • Identified 17 basic motions workers can perform

  • Demonstrated they helped workers eliminate unnecessary motions and reduce their fatigue

  • Reinforced the link between stuyding and physical movements in a job and workers’ efficiency


Charles Clinton Spaulding

  • Suggested considerations such as the need for

    • Authority

    • Division of labor

    • Adequate capital

    • Proper budgeting

    • Cooperating and teamwork

  • Highlighted the need to enrich “the lives of his organizational and community family”


Henri Fayol

  • Fayol was not the first to investigate management behavior, but he was the first to systemize it

  • Fayol was the first to identify the major functionings of management—planning, organizing, leading, controlling and coordinating


Max Weber

  • Weber believed bureaucracy was a rational, efficient, ideal organization based on principles of logic

  • Bureaucratic organizations reduced ambiguity in three ways

    • Defining a hierarchy


Viewpoint: Too Mechanistic

  • A flaw in the classical viewpoint is that it tends to view humans as cogs within a machine, not taking into account the importance of human needs

  • The essence of the classical viewpoint was that work activity was amenable to a rational approach

  • The classical viewpoint also led to such innovations as management by objectives and goal setting


Early Behaviorism: Pioneered by Follet and Mayo

  • Organizations should be operated as “communities”

  • Conflicts should be resolved by having managers and workers talk over differences

  • Tha work process should be under the control of workers with the knowledge, rather than of managers, who instead should act as facilitators


Early Behaviorism: Pioneered by Follett and Mayo:

  • Elton mayo led a Harvard research group to conduct worker productivity studies at Western electric’s Hawthorne (Chiago) plant in the late 1920s

  • Hawthorne Effect: employees worked harder if they received added attention, if they thought that managers cared about their welfare, or that supervisors paid special attention to them