Early Management
Thought in Perspective
Management is not a new concept. It has
been employed for thousands of years, as seen in the practices of the
Sumerians, the Romans, and the Roman Catholic Church. However, the emergence of
the factory system. presented
management with a new challenge. With industrialization it became necessary to
develop rational, scientific principles for handling workers, materials, money,
and machinery. The scientific managers played a major role in helping attain
this objective.
The primary goal of these managers was
that of achieving the highest productivity possible by devising efficient work
methods and encouraging employees to take advantage of these new techniques. In
the United States, scientific management was made famous by people such as
Frederick W. Taylor. His experiments at Bethlehem Steel illustrated the
importance of time-and-motion study, and his difFerential piece-rate system
provides students an insight into the types of wage incentive payment plans
used during this period. Another important scientific manager of the day was
Frank Gilbreth, renowned for his work in time-and-motion study and for a large
body of work in management in which he collaborated with Lillian Gilbreth.
The success of the scientific managers
brought about changes in the worker-manager ratio and moved the focus of
attention farther up the hierarchy. The result was two distinct levels of
inquiry about management. The first sought to identify generally the purview of
management. The second sought to examine both individual and group behavior in
organizations.
The most famous of the early management theorists
was Henri Fayol. Fayol's outstanding contribution was the conceptual framework
he provided for analyzing the management process. In the behavioral area, Elton
Mayo studied group behavior in organizations. The Hawthorne studies, however,
had an even greater impact on the field, and they became the single most
important foundation for the behavioral approach to management. Meanwhile,
Chester Barnard, whose acceptance theory of authority is still regarded as a
major landmark in the development of management theory, made the most memorable
contribution to early behavioral knowledge.
In perspective all three groups-the
scientific managers, the classical theorists, and the human relationists-had
shortcomings. Yet it must also be realized that they complemented each other,
helping to form the basis for modern management theory and practice. The
efficiency goals of the scientific managers and classical theorists led to the
human relations philosophy of treating people well, which in turn has been replaced,
as seen in Figure 2-4, by a human resources philosophy of using people well.
