Management Theories

Management Theories

The Classical School of Management Theory

The Classical School is thought to have originated around the year

1900 and dominated management thinking into the 1920s, focusing on the

efficiency of the work process. It has three schools of thinking:

Bureaucratic management, which focuses on rules and procedures,

hierarchy and clear division of labour; Scientific management, which

looks at ‘the best way’ to do a job; and Administrative management,

which emphasises the flow of information within the organisation.

Classical management theory is now considered to be an outdated form

of management for the principal reason that people and their needs are

considered by Classical theorists as secondary to the needs of the

organisation. However, Classical management theory is important

because it introduced the concept of management as a subject for

intellectual analysis and provided a basis of ideas that have been

developed by subsequent schools of management thought.

Scientific Management

Frederick Taylor is known as the father of scientific management. His

approach emphasised empirical research to increase organisational

productivity by increasing the efficiency of the production process.

Scientific management theory states that jobs should be designed so

that each worker has a well-specified, well-controlled task and

specific procedures and methods for each job must be strictly

followed.

Taylor's management theory rests on a fundamental belief that managers

are not only superior intellectually to the average employee, but that

they have a positive duty to supervise staff and organise their work

activities. Thus, it was only applied to low-level routine and

repetitive tasks that could be managed at supervisory level.

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was born in

Pennsylvania, USA, and began work at the age of 18 as an apprentice to

a pattern-maker. He later joined the Midvale Steel Company as a

labourer, but within eight years had risen to the position of chief

engineer. During this period at the company he performed exhaustive

experiments on worker productivity, which eventually developed into

the theory of scientific management.

Taylor developed four principles of scientific management:

1. A ‘best’ methodology should be developed scientifically for each

task.

2. Managers should sel...

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goods; within the shop there will be interrelated systems that control

stock, orders, purchasing and selling.

Survival of the organisation will depend upon the continual adaptation

of interactions between systems to meet the dynamically changing

internal and external environmental processes. Pressure from

political, social, environmental, economic and technological factors

will influence the objectives of an organisation.

Key concepts in systems theory are that:

· feedback is essential between systems for organisational growth and

for homeostasis (a state of relative constancy despite varying

external conditions) within the organisation;

· an organisation must be considered as an open system, with

boundaries based on social relationships, if an organisation acts as a

closed system and ignores environmental influences, it will become

self-satisfying and inward-looking;

· if inputs into a system diminish, then the system will eventually

run down (entropy);

· the whole of a system is greater than the sum of its parts

(synergy);

management is the process of maintaining effective relationships

between the sub-systems of the organisation.