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management the initiative of the workmen – that is, their hard work, their good will, their ingenuity – is obtained practically with absolute regularity, while under even the best of the older type of management this initiative is only obtained spasmodically and lesser of the two great causes, which make scientific management better for both sides than the older type of management. By far the greater gain under scientific management comes from the new, the very great and the extraordinary burdens and duties which are voluntarily assumed by those on the management’s side. Taylor’s scientific approach to management was concerned with the formal structure and activities of the organization, i.e. the span of managerial control, the division of work, etc. His ideas were developed mainly when Taylor was a manager at a steel company in the United States. Taylor was mostly concerned with increasing efficiency in production methods, not only to lower costs and raise profits, but also to make it possible for workers to earn higher wages through their higher productivity. Taylor decided that the problem of productivity was a matter of ignorance on the part of both managers and workers. Unrealistic piece-rates of pay and production targets were set because managers had not analyzed the work properly, and workers did not know how to carry out their jobs to maximize their efficiency. Taylor saw productivity as the answer to both higher wages and higher profits, and he believed that the application of scientific methods of job analysis,(determining the best way of doing the job), and training the workers in these new production methods, could yield this greater productivity.
The human relations or behavioral school, in contrast, considers the people within the organization – their social needs, motivation and behavior. The fundamental idea behind the human relations approach to management is that people’s needs are the decisive factor in achieving organizational effectiveness. Elton Mayo (1880 – 1949), and his studies into the working conditions and levels of productivity at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Chicago, between 1927 and 1932, was the first real advocate of the behavioral approach to management. Many of the issues raised by Mayo and his colleagues were taken up in the post-war years by American social psychologists. An early major influence here was Abraham Maslow’s work on motivation based on a hierarchy of human needs, ranging from basic physiological needs (foods, sleep etc) to higher psychological needs, such as self-fulfillment. Other important contributors included McGregor, Argyris, Likert and Herzberg. The emphasis in the Hawthorne Studies was on the worker rather than on the work. Unlike Taylor and the Scientific Managers, the researchers at Hawthorne were primarily concerned with studying people, especially in terms of their social relationships at work. Their conclusions were that man is a social animal – at work as well as outside it – and that membership of a group is important to individuals. Group membership leads to establishment of informal groups within the official, formal, groupings as laid down in the organization structure.
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Herzberg’s studies concentrated on satisfaction at work. In the initial researchsome two hundred engineers and accountants were asked to recall when they had experienced satisfactory and unsatisfactory feelings about their jobs. The most important motivators, or satisfiers, to emerge were the following: achievement, recognition, work itself, responsibility, advancement. Herzberg pointed out that these factors were intimately related to the content of work, i.e. with its intrinsic challenge, interest and the individual responses generated by them. Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory was generally well received by practicing managers and consultants for its relatively simple and vivid distinction between factors inducing positive satisfaction and those causing dissatisfaction. It led to considerable work on so-called ‘job enrichment’, i.e. the design of jobs so that they contain a greater number of motivators. The approach here is basically to counter the effects of years of Taylorism, in which work was broken down into its simplest components, and over which there was no responsibility for planning and control. Herzberg’s ideas were less well received by fellow social scientists, mainly on grounds of doubt about their applicability to non-professional groups and his use of the concept of ‘job satisfaction’, which they argued is not the same thing as ‘motivation’.
By the late 1960’s another group of theories began to challenge the dominance of human relations and psychology. These were theories that viewed organizations as complex systems of people, tasks and technology. The early work on this approach was conducted by British researches from the Tavistock Institute of human relations, who, despite their title, recognized that human or social factors alone were not the most important consideration in achieving organizational effectiveness. They recognized that organizations were part of a larger environment with which they interacted and in particular were affected by technical and economic factors just as much as social ones. The coined the phrase ‘open socio-technical system’ to describe their concept of a business enterprise. An ‘open’ social system is one that interacts with its environment, e.g. a strict monastic community. Arising out of the open systems approach is an essentially pragmatic ‘theory’ which argues that there is no one theory at present which can guarantee the effectiveness of an organization. Management has to select a mix of theories which seem to meet the needs of the organization and its internal and external pressures at a particular period in its life. This has been termed a contingency approach to management. Notable exponents of this approach are Pugh and colleagues in the UK.
The emphasis in management theorizing over the last twenty years has been on organizational effectiveness with its focus on strategic issues. This emphasis implies more than just efficiency, which is concerned with ‘doing things right’. Effectiveness is primarily a question of ‘doing the right things’ even more than performing them
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efficiently. Thus, the concerns of modern theorists have been topics such as developing strategic mission and implanting organizational values/culture (i.e. doing the right things) as well as on managing change, promoting total quality management, achieving organizational excellence, facilitating personal empowerment and optimizing stakeholder relationships.
The task of management is carried out in the context of an organization. Over the past eighty years or so the development of coherent theories to explain organizational performance has moved away from approaches that relied purely on a consideration of structural or human relations issues in favor of more comprehensive perspectives. Early ideas about management were propounded at a time when organizations were thought of as machines requiring efficient systems to enable them to function effectively. The emphasis, therefore, was on the efficient use of resources, especially human resources, in the service of a mechanistic model of organizations. Later theorists modified this approach by taking account of social and environmental as well as technical factors in the workplace. Their emphasis was as much on employee satisfaction as on organizational effectiveness. Modern approaches to the analysis of organizational effectiveness do not necessarily rule out the ideas put forward by earlier theories, but emphasize that they must be evaluated in the context of an organization’s overriding need for flexibility in responding to change in its external and internal environment, in order to meet the competing demands of all its various stakeholders – customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders etc.
Over the past thirty years the impact of the behavioral sciences on the study of people at work has led to the ascendancy of organization theory over purely management theory. Management is no longer seen as the controlling factor in work organizations. Instead it is seen as a function of organizations. Its task is to enable the organization’s purposes to be defined and fulfilled by adapting to change and maintaining a workable balance between the various, and frequently conflicting, pressures at work in the organization.
Handy sums up the new relationship very neatly. Ina discussion on the role of the manager, he suggests that the key variables a manager has to grapple with are: people, work and structures, systems and procedures. These variables cannot be dealt with in isolation but within the constraints of an environment in which Handy sees three crucial components: the goals of the organization, the technology available, the culture of the organization (its values, beliefs etc). All six factors mentioned interact with each other, and change in one of them will inevitably lead to change in one or more others. To manage successfully is to balance these factors in a way that meets the needs of the organization at a particular period in time, which is essentially a contingency approach to management.
The subject-matter of this manual is management. The most important thing is use theory into practice, in the other hands, that means learn how to let theory into a real organization. We all know that it is useless if you just know theory, because theory is an academic thing, we can learn theory from a book or from school. For example, in working if you have not got enough ability to work, even you just graduate from a famous school. There’s no company willing to employ you. There are two examples which can improve this. First, it is a programmer which is talking about manager swap each other. One manager is from the north of England. The other is from London. These two managers both are successful in their own company. So they think they also can work successfully in other company. But it causes a lot of problems such as different culture, different environment, different motivation of employers etc. The company which is in the north, the employers like to work in a relaxed way. The new manager do not like this, he got a great motivation, because he is from London where is more competitive. He argue with his new employers, he want them to be more diligence and work harder. But the employers don not listen to him. In the other company, the situation is same, the employers got ambitions, they work very hard, and then they think their new boss is too lazy. At the end, two managers swap back in a week. The reason of this is the style of these management is different, the two managers don not know anything about the other companies. They have not change the way to manage people in different environment. So that causes the failure of this changing of two managers. The other example: A video company which called videopoint, they think they are successful, but not enough. Why? Because the manager did not mention the psychology of the employers, he don not care about the mind of the employers, so that the workers are willing to work hard, they always complained about the manager. For instance, there were two workers present their ideas to manager, the workers is serious. When they finished, the manager is not satisfied, and he think the ideas are stupid, and he speak loud. The two workers felt disappointed and not willing to do this work. If the employers are not happy when they are working. So how can they work well? I think the manager should pay more attention on employer’s felling, and encourage them not to always comment them. That will make the employers happy and work harder. The two examples above, both improve the importance of practice in organsations.
