PRINCIPLES & THEORY OF MANAGEMENT

Principles & Theory of Management

Principles & Theory of Management

Over the past hundred years management has continuously been evolving. There have been a wide range of approaches in how to deal with management or better yet how to improve management functions in our ever changing environment. From as early as 1100 B.C managers have been struggling with the same issues and problems that manager's face today. Modern managers use many of the practices, principles, and techniques developed from earlier concepts and experiences.

The evolution of management though the decades can be divided into two major sections. One of the sections is the classical approach. Under the classical approach efficiency and productivity became a critical concern of the managers at the turn of the 20th century. One of the approaches from the classical time period were systematic management which placed more emphasis on internal operations because managers were concerned with meeting the growth in demand brought on by the Industrial revolution. As a result managers became more concerned with physical things than towards the people therefore systematic management failed to lead to production efficiency. This became apparent to an engineer named Frederick Taylor who was the father of Scientific Management. Scientific Management was identified by four principles for which management should develop the best way to do a job, determine the optimum work pace, train people to do the job properly, and reward successful performance by using an incentive pay system. Scientific management was widely accepted with productivity and efficiency improving dramatically however not everyone was convinced that this approach was the best solution to all problems. Administrative management evolved from Henry Fayol who published a book summarizing his management experiences. Fayol identified five functions and 14 principles in management. Typically all the writings in the administrative area strongly emphasize management in large corporations (Willmott, 1984).

Frederick Taylor's "The principles of Scientific Management" discusses the steps to achieve "national efficiency", which is when all employees and machines work to their fullest potential to achieve maximum prosperity for both the employer and the employee. Taylor argues that the present day workforce is in no way efficient, but is the main cause of our economic turmoil. We must remember that Taylor wrote in a time when factories were creating problems for management who needed new methods to deal with the management challenges brought on by the influence of the Industrial Revolution on organizations. But is his statement "maximum prosperity can exist only as the result of maximum productivity" still accurate today, what impact on working conditions and society did this philosophy have, and are these ideas of scientific management still in effect today?

Many workers condemned his time-and-motion studies because his system sought to remove decision making from labour and hand it over to management. Before Taylor introduced scientific management onto the factory floor, production was largely in the hands of skilled craftsmen, who followed their own routines and worked at their own pace. Relationships between owner-managers and their workers were also quite ...