Managment Essay

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INTRODUCTION

This essay discusses classical management and behavioural viewpoint, their limitations, and argues that their incompatibilities can be reconciled by systems and contingency theories.

The first part of this essay gives a brief overview of classical management and the second on behavioural viewpoint. The third and fourth compare the two approaches to find the similarities/compatibilities and dissimilarities/incompatibilities between them. The next two parts explain systems and contingency theories and how they reconcile the points of dissimilarity/incompatibility between these approaches. The final part contains some concluding remarks.

CLASSICAL VIEWPOINT

A BRIEF OVERVIEW

Classical management theory was based on the work experiences of certain key individuals in the early twentieth century, which collectively came to be known as the classical management school (Buchanan & Huczynski, 1997, p.393). The theory is called classical because it attempted to offer simple principles, which claimed a general application (Baker, 1972; Buchanan & Huczynski, 1997, p.393). There are three major approaches within the classical viewpoint: scientific, bureaucratic, and administrative (Bartol et al., 2005, pp.34-8).

The pioneers of the classical viewpoint include the "Father of Scientific Management" (Merkle, 1980, p.10) Frederick Winslow Taylor, Max Weber, Henri Fayol, and Lyndall Urwick (Buchanan