Summary of Chapter 2: History of Management Thought

Management’s history can be researched with three approaches: Classical Management

Approaches, Behavioral Management Approaches, and Modern Management Foundations.

From the Classical Management Approaches, we need to focus on three majors:

1. Scientific Management.
According to Frederick W. Taylor, scientific management can be guided by:
 Develop criteria for job hiring.
 Find the people with those criteria and hire!
 Train them.
 Support their work.
Scientific management is focusing on improving economic efficiency. Efficient is
achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort. To achieve efficiency, we
need to know motion study, which is the science of reducing it task to its basic physical
motions to make them more effective.
2. Administrative Principles.
Administrative principles are a rational way to design organization as a whole and Henry
Fayol explains the importance of communication from top - bottom for top synchronized
performance. According to Henry Fayol, there are five rules of management that support
the four function of management, P-O-L-C:
 Foresight: Planning for the future.
 Organization: Organizing resources.
 Command: Leading workers.
 Coordination: Coordinate workers performance.
 Control: Controlling the plan and action.

3. Bureaucratic Organization
A bureaucracy is a form of organization that rational and efficient. According to Weber,
characteristics of bureaucratic organization are:
  Clear division of labor: Workers knew their exact job and good at them.
 Clear hierarchy of authority: Each position has their own rights and duties.
 Formal rules and procedures: Guidelines for each worker and their position.
 Impersonality: Rules are the same for everybody, no exception.
 Careers based on merit: Workers gets the position by their achievement.

From the Behavioral Management Approaches, there are five foundations:

1. Organizations as Communities
Mary Parker Follett thought of organizations as communities where no party dominating
the other. Groups are a way for individuals to combine their talents to make the work
more effective. Managers need to manage the workers and unite their goals and interests.
Making every employee an owner in a business would create feelings of collective
responsibility. There is a wide variety of factors in business problems that connected to
each other. Business is service organizations and that private profits should goes along
side with public goods.
2. The Hawthorne Studies
The Hawthorne studies were part of a refocus on managerial strategy incorporating the
socio-psychological aspects of human behavior in organizations. The Hawthorne studies,
led by Elton Mayo discovered that workers were highly responsive to additional attention
from their managers and the feeling that their managers actually cared about, and were
interested in, their work. The studies also found that although financial motives are
important, social issues are equally important factors in worker productivity. From that
we can conclude that The Hawthorne Effect is the tendency of persons singled out for
special attention to perform as expected.
3. Theory of Human Needs
Abraham Maslow described a need as a psychological deficiency a person feels
compelled to satisfy. Maslow described human needs in five aspects:

 Physiological needs: Basic human needs

 Safety needs: Need for security and stability
 Social needs: Need for interpersonal relationships
  Esteem needs: Need for self-esteem and respect from the others
 Self-actualization needs: Desire to become the most that one can be
Maslow’s theory is based on two principles, deficit principle and progression principle.
The deficit principle is a satisfied need that does not motivate behavior. The progression
principle is a need that becomes active only when the next lower-level-need is satisfied.
4. Theory X and Theory Y
According to Douglas McGregor, Theory X assumes that workers dislike their work,
avoid responsibility, have to be controlled, need to be supervised at every step, and lack
of ambition. Meanwhile, Theory Y assumes that workers are willing to work hard, like
responsibility, self-directed, and creative. These assumptions create self-fulfilling
prophecies, which occurs when a person acts in a way that confirm another’s
expectations.
5. Adult Personality
In contrast to many classical management, Chris Argyris supports a diverse of job
responsibilities for each worker, high worker influence on the working environment, and
high employee participation in decision making. Argyris makes the case that the highest
levels of productivity will be achieved if employees treated like responsible adults.
Argyris believed that many of the current employee-related problem plaguing
organizations are the results of poor management practices such as limiting participation
and creating a very narrow scope of specialization for each worker.

There are five Modern Management Foundations for pursuing development in management.

1. Quantitative Analysis and Tools

It’s a technique that using mathematical and analytics modelling, measurement, and
research. Its goal to represent a given reality in terms of numerical value.
2. Organizations as Systems
Organizations as systems is the structure how organizations set up. The structure defines
how each division of a business is set up. With a system, people work together for a
purpose. With a subsystem (smaller component), workers work together to achieve
common goals. With an open system, the organizations structure affects the interaction
internally and with the external environment.
3. Contingency Thinking
Contingency thinking tries to match management practices with situational demands.
That’s why it avoids “one best way” arguments.
4. Quality Management
Quality Management is the act of supervising all activities needed to maintain a desired
level of excellence. This includes continual process of reducing errors, improving product
quality, and customer experience, which is known as Total Quality Management.
Meeting the worldwide quality standards will be awarded with ISO certification
5. Evidence-Based Management
Evidence-based management is how to make decisions based on hard facts about what
really works. To find the facts and evidence, researching using scientific methods is
important.