130 years of management theory — from scientific management to the learning organization.
In the 130 years since Frederick Taylor took out his stopwatch and timed the activities of workers at the Midvale Steel Company, successive waves of new thinking have refined our understanding of what management is and what managers do.
Taylor’s work led to decades of similar studies and the establishment of Scientific Management, which focused on workers and task performance. Around the same time, the French mining engineer and industrialist Henri Fayol was examining how individuals who supervised workers and work processes functioned.
Fayol observed these “managers” planning, commanding, coordinating, organizing and controlling the process of work and production. Successive inquiries led to an understanding of Administrative Management, and Fayol’s functions of management were condensed to planning, organizing, leading and controlling.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, studies were conducted at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works in Chicago to see if altering aspects of the working environment could improve productivity. What emerged was that the study itself seemed to have an impact on productivity, as workers responded to the attention being paid to them.
Elton Mayo, an anthropologist from Harvard University, was brought in to investigate the behavioural responses of study subjects — what became known as the Hawthorne Effect. With this work it became clear that an understanding of human behaviour would be an important component in the evolving knowledge of management.
The three approaches — scientific, administrative and behavioural — supported a dramatic surge of inquiry during the post-World War II economic boom. The results are reflected in the study of Organization Development, Systems Theory, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs applied to employee motivation, the delineation of leadership and management roles, and the notion of the learning organization.
These efforts continued through the 1960s and 1970s and were reflected in the concepts of Action Learning in Europe, and the Management Grid and Performance Technology in North America — all focused on developing behavioural models with accomplishment specifications as starting points in the development of performance standards.
One by-product of these efforts was Tom Peters’ “In Search of Excellence”, which looked at 47 of America’s greatest companies and identified eight common factors that made them great:
Bias for action
Close to the customer
Fostering innovation and nurturing 'champions'
Productivity through people
Hands-on, value-driven management
Staying with the business that you know
Simple form, lean staff
Autonomy within shop-floor activities guided by centralized values and visions
These discussions led naturally to the concept of the Learning Organization, as put forward by Peter Senge in “The Fifth Discipline.” A learning organization is one that understands itself as a complex, organic system that has a vision and purpose. To succeed, the organization must encourage and value teams and leadership at all levels.
Stated most simply, management is the process of coordinating and integrating work activities so that they're completed efficiently and effectively with and through other people.
Managers are the individuals within an organization designated to direct and coordinate the activities of others to attain the goals of the management process. Understanding this history is foundational to developing great managers today.
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