’s And Beyond Essay, Research Paper
Before we can dive into the subject of managerial styles ? what they were and where they?ve come, we first need to distinguish what a management style is. A management style, to us, and therefore, to the rest of this paper, is defined as a set of expectations an individual has, as to how they are to use their leadership position to involve themselves and to involve other people in the achievement of results.
Various aspects, such as value systems, technology, organizational design, and globalization, all affect the culture of an organization and come into play when determining what managerial style is best to use. As we move through the years, these components develop, resulting in the need for managerial styles to change too. If managerial styles are not developed along side with these aspects, the manager will be ineffective and fail.
Management ideas inherently go through a process of distillation before they attain widespread usage and become famous in stature. This process generally takes into consideration five key attributes; a) It has to be timely, that is it must address the problems of the current age. b) It must be brought to the attention of the audience. c) It must refer to organizational requirements in a way that meets the individual needs and concerns of the managers themselves. d) It must meet the needs of potential users with essential ingredients. e) It must be verbally presentable in a capturing way. The process can be viewed much like a funnel as in Figure 1.
Only a small number of management ideas make it through this filter and become mainstays in our society. It can be stated that there are approximately six management ideas that have successfully made it through this filter in the past 100 years.
These ideas or concepts include bureaucracy, scientific management, administrative management, human relations management, neo-human relations management, and guru theory management. The many writers and theorists of management philosophies are placed throughout these categories and will be mentioned in this paper. We will now briefly consider in rough chronological order each of these key management ideas.
Bureaucracy
Weber?s theory of bureaucracy is often presented alongside the works of Fayol and Urwick who, discuss administrative management. We will go into more depth with them later. Weber?s main interest was in the process of social change and in the effect of rationality on religious thought and capitalism. The key to bureaucracy is authority. From a historical perspective authority is based on the belief in the sacred or the extraordinary characteristics of the person giving the orders (e.g. Christ). In a more traditional form, authority was established through the belief that the person giving the orders had done so through tradition (e.g. King or Duke). Finally, the legal form of authority implied that the person giving the orders was acting in accordance with or under established rules or laws.
The Weberian model of bureaucracy offers a stable and predictable world that provides the blueprint for rationally designed structures in which rational individuals carry out their prescribed actions and tasks. The bureaucratic form of the organization posses specific features such as specialization, hierarchy, rules, impersonality, full time officials, career focus, and a split between public and private activity. Bureaucracy exists in its purest form in public organizations such as the government. This can be accounted for by the statement that the larger an enterprise is, the more complicated it becomes. Although one of the oldest management ideas, the appeal of bureaucracy to certain managers is still present today.
Scientific Management
The next popular management style to be discussed is scientific management. This focused upon the shop floor and upon the techniques that could be used to maximize productivity of workers doing manual labour. It is not likely to be applied in its purest form, although, it does make a template for a good number of job design work throughout the twentieth century. In a typical manufacturing firm one will see scientific management techniques on the shop floor while bureaucratic management would be applied in the office areas.
Fredrick Winslow Taylor originally developed this theory during the early years of this century. Taylor was an American engineer who established the foundations of the process of work management. The reason why his ideas were considered a science was his use of time and motion study techniques. He based his work upon the accurate and scientific study of unit times. His aim was to increase productivity by increasing the performance of workers by selecting manual tasks and fragmenting them into their simplest and smallest components.
Taylor is best known for his book, The Principles of Scientific Management, which was published in 1911. This book explained that in order to increase the productivity of labour, it was necessary to highlight the national loss being incurred through inefficiency. Systematic management could remedy this inefficiency and that the best management was a true science and rested upon a foundation of clearly defined laws, rules, and principles.
Taylor was appalled by the inefficiency of industrial practices and set out to demonstrate how managers and workers could both benefit by adopting his scientific approach. At the turn of the century in North America, managers expected their employees either to posses the appropriate skills for the work they were doing or to learn them from those who were around them. Notions of systematic job specifications, clearly established responsibilities, and training needs analysis were all unknown. It was Taylor?s plan to change this. He argued that mental and manual work should be separated. Management should specialize in planning and organizing the work, while workers should specialize in actually doing it. He believed there were clear advantages to specialization of activities – becoming an expert as well as becoming highly proficient at the task.
Taylor?s theory was based on four key principles; a) The development of a science for each element of a persons work which would replace the old rule-of-thumb methods. b) The scientific selection, training, and development of workers to replace the previous practice of their choosing their own work methods, and training themselves as best they could. c) Co-operating with the workers so as to ensure that all the work was done in accordance with the scientific principles developed. d) An equal division of work and responsibility between management and workers.
Taylor?s ideas came to be incorporated in organizational design throughout the twentieth century. His principles were instituted regularly and extensively for over seventy years and continue to be applied today. In many cases it was the non-application of his ideas that received attention, such as the Volvo car plant in Kalmar. The work of Taylor was developed and extended by Gilberth and Gantt to name a few.
Administrative Theory
The primary focus of this idea is the determination of what types of specialization and hierarchy would optimize the efficiency of organizations. The application of these two concepts produced a very mechanistic form of organizational design, which paid little attention to the people and saw them more as parts of a machine. Administrative management is built around four key pillars. These are the division of labour, the scalar and functional processes, organizational structure, and the span of control. Additional concepts include discipline, unity of command, unity of direction, compensation, subordination of the individual interest to the general interest, centralization, and esprit de corps (group spirit).
The writer who is most closely associated with this system of management is Henry Fayol. He believed that the techniques of successful management could be described and taught and that managerial organization was as valid an area of study as worker organization. He sought to discover a set of principles, which would enable a manager to build up the formal structure of a firm and to administer it in a rational way.
Those who followed Fayol took these concepts, refined them, added to them, and often stressed a particular part of them. Mooney and Riley for example, emphasized the co-ordinative principle seeing it as the central point. Other classical writers such as Gulick and Urwick developed the notion of rationalizing the work process by bringing it together in as centralized an area as possible.
Administrative management has received extensive critical analysis, nevertheless, the majority of practices recommended by this system continue to be the central way in which modern firms are organized. Administrative management is not a historical fossil but continues to represent a major model for the design of large, highly integrated organizations of today.
Human Relations
Human relations arose from the American wish to humanize their society without interfering with the free operation of market forces. This idea promised a land in which everybody accepted that it was socially and economically desirable that there should be the greatest degree of competition outside the firm, but that any competitive or contentious elements within it were both socially and economically undesirable.
Taylor (Scientific Management) may well have known the potential dangers for management of work groups. In place of his attempt to destroy work group solidarity, the human relations went the alternative route to attain the same goal. That goal was to control the work group by integrating it into the organization. This focus on people also meant that fundamental structure redesigns were avoided.
The human relations? movement drew heavily on academic sustenance, mainly through a series of famous studies known as the Hawthorne experiments. These research projects began in 1924 at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric, company just outside of Chicago. They are linked to Elton Mayo, a Harvard Business School professor. The initial aim of the research was to examine the relationship between working conditions and output. To this day, the Hawthorne studies remain among the most diverse and most controversial pieces of social science research ever conducted.
Reduced to its essentials, the human relations? message was carried by six prepositions:
1.A focus on people, rather than upon mechanics or economics.
2.People exist in an organizational environment rather than an organizational social context.
3.A key activity in human relations is motivating people.
4.Motivation should be directed towards teamwork, which requires both the co-ordination and the co-operation of the individuals involved.
5.Human relations through teamwork, seeks to fulfill both individual and organizational objectives simultaneously.
6.Both individuals and organizations share a desire for efficiency, that is, they try to achieve maximum results with minimum inputs.
The growth of this style was promoted by the problem of motivating employees to share in the goals of the organization. The objective was to maintain both hierarchy and specialization while forming the equivalent of the ?family? in the workplace. This ?family? concept gave further justification to treating competition between departments as taboo within the same company.
Human relations represented just the first of many attempts to bring social science into the service of management. Despite numerous disappointments the applications of this theory continue to this day because of the hope that it offers. The hope of increased efficiency, increased satisfaction and finally the hope of management contribution. All of this can be attained through its (human relations) control of work, management then controls human happiness, fulfillment and perhaps sanity of their subordinates.
Neo-Human Relations
The basic thesis of Neo-Human Relations (NHR) was that the worker wanted the opportunity to grow and develop on the job. The theorists believed that it was this that would bring an end to industrial conflict. They assumed that if employees were allowed to do responsible meaningful work, their attitude towards the company would become entirely positive and they would come to share the goals of management.
During the 1950?s and 1960?s the human relations movement had become socially unacceptable. This increased the adoption rate of NHR and because of the elimination of hierarchy and specialization; people were not only given room to grow but also became involved in a co-operative process.
While building on the views of Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne studies, NHR emphasized the contribution of Abraham Maslow. All of the NHR supporters established the need for acceptance, status and recognition. They then went further to argue that employees wanted to develop and apply their full range of abilities and obtained satisfaction through achieving demanding but worthwhile objectives.
NHR ideas were put into practice through the techniques of organizational development (OD). A major aspect of OD was the involvement of senior managers in the change programs. NHR offered specific techniques such as laboratory training. This was used in the belief that managers could become more authentic, increase their interpersonal skills, change their values and ultimately their behaviour.
The idea of NHR has been compiled using the writings of many well-known management experts. These experts include Abraham Maslow (Hierarchy Of Needs, 1943), Douglas McGregor (Theory X and Theory Y, 1960), Rensis Likert (System 4 Theory, 1967), Robert Blake and Jane Mouton (Managerial Grid 1964), Chris Argyris (Goal Congruence Theory 1964) and last but not least Paul heresy and Kenneth Blanchard (Situational Leadership Theory 1969). The combination of all of these and many other writers has led to the formulation of NHR through recurring features and relations.
Guru Theory
In order to bring popular management culture up to date, it is necessary to consider developments in management thought that have occurred since 1980. At first glance it appears that Guru writings represent a random collection of diverse contributors with no real link between them. However upon closer inspection there is a central theme. That theme states that the only object of business is to compete with others for the favours of the customer.
There are five main beliefs associated with the guru theory:
1.The innovation that leads to improved products services cannot be planned, but is dependent on many attempts by many employees.
2.You are more likely to ?act yourself into a feeling? than ?feel yourself into action?.
3.An organization can be effectively co-ordinated through its value system and culture, rather than through rules and commands.
4.Customers are the main source of innovation.
5.Strong customer orientation is important and has implications for management attitudes and behaviour towards staff.
The guru theory seeks to help managers build strong business systems, which can successfully compete in their chosen segments. Each guru idea relies upon the individual who developed and popularised it for authenticity. The term guru theory is used as a convenient label to refer to these contributions over the past twenty years. The label encompasses a grab bag of attributes including innovation, teamwork, empowerment, participation, fewer levels of hierarchy and less bureaucracy.
A useful way of considering guru theory authors is to differentiate between academic gurus, consultant gurus and hero-managers. As the label suggests, academic gurus are business school professors and others who have an educational affiliation. Consultant gurus are independent writers and advisors. Hero-managers are current or past CEO?s who are acknowledged to have been successful.
The most modern contributors to the guru theory are those in the hero-management sector. They are represented by the tycoon texts of individuals such as Lee Iacocca, Harold Geneen, Mark McCormack and john Harvey-Jones. The modern contributions in this area are currently practicing or recently retired successful managers who write down their secrets of success and also take the opportunity to expound their philosophy of life.
Guru theory took off at a time when managers appeared to need extra guidance and ideas. The rise of modern management guru theory can be dated to the early 1980?s. The movement is still strong; just look at the best sellers? lists with business books topping the charts. At one level, guru theory represents a break with the academically dominated neo-human relations? movement. At another level it represents a continuation of those ideas simply adapted to the circumstances of the modern era. It can be seen in today?s employees that the theme of commitment, responsibility, creativity, and putting people ahead of bureaucracy are still very much in style.
Handy?s View
Charles Handy has an interesting but differing view on management. He states that ?[t]here is no one right way to manage anything.? ?If you can find the right culture[/]style for your situation, you will thrive, and if not, you will struggle.? (Handy v) Therefore, his view is that the management style should alter/conform to changing situations, i.e., different organization types. He believes there to be four different management styles and four different organizational types, and has classified them by using the personalities of four ancient Greek gods, Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and Dionysus. Handy?s reason for doing this is to emphasize ?that the management of organizations is not a precise science but more of a creative and political process, owing much to the prevailing culture and tradition in that place at that time.? (Handy 3)