CLASSICAL

ORG.THEORY
Prepared By: Raymark Grado Angeles
 MAJOR
CONTRIBUTORS TO
THE CLASSICAL
ORGANIZATIONAL
THEORY:
Scientific Management:
 Frederick Taylor
Administrative
Management:
 Henri Fayol
 Luther Halsey Gulick
 Max Weber
FREDERICK
TAYLOR
• dubbed as the “Father of Scientific
Management,” is best known for
his “one best way approach” in
accomplishing task. Classical
organization theory evolved from
this notion.
Scientific management – focusing on
the management of work and workers
Taylor, Generally considered the father of
scientific management pioneered the
development OF TIME AND MOTION STUDIES.

He wrote and published the result of his

studies in 1911 on the PRINCIPLES OF
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT.
 INGENUITY AND
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
• Creates systems to gain maximum
efficiency from workers and machines
in the factory.
• Focuses on time and motion studies to
learn how to complete a task in the
least amount of time.
• Becomes consulting engineer for
many other companies
REVISITING TIME AND MOTION
STUDIES
The time studies performed by Taylor, which were later
classified as time and motion studies, were characterized
by timing a worker’s series of motions and determining
the optimal way in which to perform their particular job.
The goals of the study are as relevant today as they were
back then - to increase the efficiency of a business
process.

Time and motion studies have

been successful in various
implementations enabling companies
to move forward in providing logical
frameworks for improving and leaning
their operations.
 “ONE BEST WAY”
TAYLOR'S SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT CONSISTED OF
FOUR PRINCIPLES:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods

based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee
rather than passively leaving them to train
themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each
worker in the performance of that worker's discrete
task" (Montgomery 1997: 250).
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and
workers, so that the managers apply scientific
management principles to planning the work and
the workers actually perform the tasks.
 HENRI
FAYOL
• Engineer and French industrialist
• In France works as a managing director in
coal- mining organization
• Recognizes to the management principles
rather than personal traits
• While others shared this belief, Fayol was the first
to identify management as a continuous process
of evaluation.
FAYOL’S 5 MANAGEMENT
FUNCTIONS
Fundamental roles performed by all managers:
 Planning
 Organizing
 Commanding
 Coordinating
 Controlling
Additionally Fayol recognizes fourteen
principles that should guide the
management of organizations.
 FAYOL’S 14
PRINCIPLES:
1. Division of Work —improves efficiency through
a reduction of waste, increased output, and
simplification of job training
2. Authority and Responsibility—authority: the right
to give orders and the power to extract
obedience
– responsibility: the obligation to carry
out assigned duties
3. Discipline—respect for the rules that govern
the organization
4. Unity of Command—an employee should
receive orders from one superior only
5. Unity of Direction—grouping of similar activities
that are directed to a single goal under one
manager
6. Subordination of Individual Interests to the
General Interest—interests of individuals and
groups should not take precedence over the
interests of the organization as a whole.
7. Remuneration of Personnel—payment should be
fair and satisfactory for employees and the
organization
8. Centralization—managers retain final responsibility
– subordinates maintain enough responsibility to
accomplish their tasks
9. Scalar Chain (Line of Authority)—the chain of
command from the ultimate authority to the
lowest
10.Order—people and supplies should be in the
right place at the right time
11.Equity—managers should treat employees
fairly and equally
12.Stability of Tenure of Personnel—managerial
practices that encourage long-term
commitment from employees create a stable
workforce and therefore a successful
organization
13.Initiative—employees should be encouraged
to develop and carry out improvement plans
14.Esprit de Corps—managers should foster and
maintain teamwork, team spirit, and a sense of
unity among employees
 LUTHER
HALSEY GULICK
(1892-1992)
• A specialist in municipal finance
and administration
• Gulick works with the Institute of Public
Administration, professor of municipal
science and administration at Columbia,
and serves on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
Committee of Government
Administration
• Expands Fayol’s five
management functions into
seven functions:
1. Planning - developing an outline of the
things that must be accomplished and
the methods for accomplishing them
2. Organizing - establishes the formal
structure of authority through which
work subdivisions are arranged, defined,
and coordinated to implement the plan
3. Staffing - selecting, training, and
developing the staff and maintaining
favorable working conditions
4. Directing - the continuous task of
making decisions, communicating and
implementing decisions, and evaluating
subordinates properly
5. Coordinating - all activities and
efforts needed to bind together
the organization in order to
achieve a common goal
6. Reporting - verifies progress
through records, research, and
inspection; ensures that things
happen according to plan; takes any
corrective action when necessary;
and keeps those to whom the chief
executive is responsible informed
7. Budgeting - all activities that
accompany budgeting,
including fiscal planning,
accounting, and control
 MAX
WEBER
(1864-
• German sociologist
1920)
• Weber first describes the concept
of bureaucracy – an ideal form of
organizational structure
• He defines bureaucratic administration
as the exercise of control on the basis
of knowledge
• Weber states, “Power is principally
exemplified within organizations by
the process of control”
Weber uses and defines the
terms authority and power as:

• Power: any relationship within

which one person could impose his
will, regardless of any resistance
from the other.
• Authority: existed when there was a
belief in the legitimacy of that
power.
 WEBER CLASSIFIES
ORGANIZATIONS ACCORDING
TO THE LEGITIMACY OF
THEIR POWER AND USES
THREE BASIC
CLASSIFICATIONS:
Charismatic Authority: based on the
sacred or outstanding characteristic of
the individual.

Traditional Authority: essentially a

respect for customs.

Rational Legal Authority: based on a code

or set of rules.
 RATIONAL LEGAL
AUTHORITY IS USED IN THE
MOST EFFICIENT
FORM OF ORGANIZATION
• BECAUSE:
A legal code can be established which can
claim obedience from members of the
organization

• The law is a system of abstract rules which are

applied to particular cases; and administration
looks after the interests of the organization within
the limits of that law.
• The manager or the authority
additionally follows the impersonal
order

• Membership is key to law obedience

• Obedience is derived not from the

person administering the law, but rather
to the
impersonal order that installed the
person’s
authority
 Weber outlined his ideal bureaucracy
as defined by the following
parameters:

• A continuous system of authorized jobs

maintained by regulations

• Specialization: encompasses a defined “sphere

of competence,” based on its divisions of labor

• A stated chain of command of offices: a

consistent organization of supervision based on
distinctive levels of authority
• Rules: an all encompassing system of
directives which govern behavior: rules may
require training to comprehend and
manage

• Impersonality: no partiality, either for or

against, clients, workers, or
administrators

• Free selection of appointed officials:

equal opportunity based on education
and professional qualification
• Full-time paid officials: only or major
employment; paid on the basis of
position

• Career officials: promotion based

on seniority and merit; designated
by supervisors
• Private/Public split: separates business
and private life

• The finances and interests of the two

should be kept firmly apart: the
resources of the organization are quite
distinct from those of the members as
private individuals.
(a) A tendency to a leveling of social
classes by allowing a wide range of
recruits with technical competence to
be taken by any organization

(b) Elite status because of the time

required to achieve the necessary
technical training

(c) Greater degree of social equality due

to the dominance of the spirit of
impersonality or objectivity
Simon(1946) in his book, “Administrative
Behavior,” created a distinction
between theoretical and practical
science. He
introduced more common principles in the
literature of administration administrative
efficiency and specialization when he
wrote the article, "The Proverbs of
Administration.” (Simon 1946 as cited in
Shafffritz and Hyde 1997; Stillman
1991)
 PROVERBS OF
ADMINISTRATION
HEBERT A. SIMON
Proverbs are useful but are not without defects. Simon works
to expose these defects as well as offer some suggestions as to
how the existing dilemma can be solved.

Some Accepted Administrative Principles:

1. Administrative efficiency is increased by a specialization of the

task among the group.
2. Administrative efficiency is increased by arranging the members
of the group in a determinate hierarchy of authority.
3. Administrative efficiency is increased by limiting the span of control
at any point in the hierarchy to a small number.
4.Administrative efficiency is increased by grouping the workers,
for purposes of control, according to (a) purpose, (b) process, (c)
clientele, or (d) place.
None of the four principles survive criticism
very well. Administrative description suffers
currently from superficiality, oversimplification,
lack of realism. It is too concerned with
allocation of authority and not with modes of
influence or behavior. Until administrative
description reaches a level of sophistication,
there is little reason to hope that a rapid
progress will be made toward the identification
and verification of valid administrative
principles.
• in 1945, Appleby, led a postwar attack
on the concept of politics-
administration dichotomy by drafting
a convincing case that “public
administration was not something
apart from politics” but rather at the
“center of political life.” (Stillman
1991: 123)
• In 1948, Dwight Waldo tried to establish
the direction and thrust of Public
Administration as a field of study in his
book, “The Administrative State,” which hit
the “gospel of efficiency” that dominated
the administrative thinking prior to Word
War II. That same year, Sayre attacked
public personnel administration as “the
triumph over purpose.” (Shafritz and
Hyde 1997: 74)
 “GOSPEL OF
EFFICIENCY”
Revisiting Waldo's Administrative State brings together a group
of distinguished authors who critically explore public
administration's big ideas and issues and question whether
contemporary efforts to "reinvent government," promote
privatization, and develop new public management
approaches constitute a coherent political theory capable of
meeting the complex challenges of governing in a
democracy.
Probing the material and ideological background of modern
public administration, problems of political philosophy, and
finally particular challenges inherent in contemporary
administrative reform. It concludes with a look ahead to
"wicked" policy problems -- such as terrorism, global warming,
and ecological threats -- whose scope is so global and
complex that they will defy any existing administrative
structures and values
 “GOSPEL OF
EFFICIENCY”
Waldo warned that public administrative
efficiency must be backed by a framework
of consciously held democratic values.
Calling for a return to conscious
consideration of democratic accountability,
fairness, justice, and transparency in
government
In 1949, Selznick introduced the so-called
“cooptative mechanism” where he
defined “cooptation” as “the process of
absorbing new elements into the
leadership or policy determining
structure of an organization as a means
of averting threats to its stability or
existence.” (Shafritz and Hyde 1997: 147)
 SINCE ADMINISTRATION IS CONCERNED
WILL ALL PATTERNS OF COOPERATIVE
BEHAVIOR, IT IS OBVIOUS THAT ANY
PERSONS ENGAGED IN AN ACTIVITY IS
IN COOPERATION WITH THE OTHER
PERSONS WHO IS ENGAGED IN
Everyone has cooperated with others
ADMINISTRATION
throughouthis life and he has some basic
familiarity with administration and some of
its problems.
(Simon, 1991)
A contemporary of Goodnow was William
Willoughby (1918). Willoughby stressed the role
of the trilogy covering all three branches of
government but he was more known for his
budgetary reforms. He discussed the movements
for budgetary reforms in the US in view of the
budget as an instrument for democracy, as an
instrument for correlating legislative and
executive action, and as an instrument for
securing administrative efficiency and economy.
Mary Parker Follet (1926) also made some
significant contribution to the discourse of
Public Administration as one of the proponents
of participatory management and the “law of
situation” which can be attributed to the
concept of contingency management.
She illustrated the advantages of
participatory management in her article,
“The Giving of Orders. “
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Elton Mayo
conducted the Hawthorne experiments
on the theory of individuals within an
organization which propelled the
human relations school of
management thought.
 HAWTHORNE
EXPERIMENTS
The Relations Movement began with
Human the Experiments. They were
•atHawthorne
Western Electrical Works in USA, b/w 1924-1932 conducted

•Part I - Illumination Experiments (1924-27)

•These experiments were performed to find out the effect of
different levels of illumination (lighting) on productivity of labor. The
brightness of the light was increased and decreased to find out the
effect on the productivity of the test group. Surprisingly, the
productivity increased even when the level of illumination was
decreased. It was concluded that factors other than light were also
important
 PARTII - RELAY ASSEMBLY TEST ROOM
STUDY (1927-1929)
Under these test two small groups of six female
telephone relay assemblers were selected. Each group was
kept in separate rooms. From time to time, changes were
made in working hours, rest periods, lunch breaks, etc.
They were allowed to choose their own rest periods and to
give suggestions. Output increased in both the control
rooms. It was concluded that social relationship among
workers, participation in decision –making etc. had a
greater effect on productivity than working conditions.
 PART III - MASS INTERVIEWING PROGRAMME
(1928-1930)
21,000 employees were interviewed over a period of three
years to find out reasons for increased productivity. It was
concluded that productivity can be increased if workers are
allowed to talk freely about matters that are important to
them.
Part IV - Bank Wiring Observation Room Experiment
(1932)
A group of 14 male workers in the bank wiring room were
placed under observation for six months. A worker's pay
depended on the performance of the group as a whole.
The researchers thought that the efficient workers would
put pressure on the less efficient workers to complete the
work. However, it was found that the group established its
own standards of output, and social pressure
 THE CONCLUSIONS DERIVED FROM
THE HAWTHORNE STUDIES WERE AS
FOLLOWS :-
• The social and psychological factors are
responsible for workers' productivity and
job satisfaction. Only good physical working
conditions are not enough to increase
productivity.
• The informal relations among workers
influence the workers' behavior and
performance more than the formal relations
in the organization.
• Employees will perform better if they are
allowed to participate in decision-making
affecting their interests.
• Employees will also work more efficiently,
when they believe that the management
is interested in their welfare.
• When employees are treated with respect
and dignity, their performance will
improve.
• Financial incentives alone cannot
increase the performance. Social and
Psychological needs must also be
satisfied in order to increase
productivity.
Chester Barnard (1938) presented a more
comprehensive theory of organizational
behavior when he wrote the functions
of the executive. He argued that for the
executive to become more effective, he
should maintain an equilibrium
between the needs of the employees
and the organization.
His concepts were later explored and
developed into more comprehensive
theories and principles as advocated by
other researches in organizational
behavior and management, such as,
Herzberg’s “motivation hygiene theory,”
Mc Gregor’s “Theory X and Y,” 11
Argyris’ “personality versus organization
and
Likert’s Systems 1 to 4, among others.
(Shafritz and Hyde 1997)
Maslow (1943), on the other hand,
focused on the hierarchical needs
of the individual. His “theory of
human motivation,” states that the
human being has five sets of
needs:
physiological, safety, love or affiliation,
esteem and ultimately, and self-
actualization.
Public Administration is often characterized
as a fragmented field – one that is
pulled in competing directions by
different intellectual and disciplinary
perspective as well as by the concerns of
practice and theory, Nevertheless, it
does have a common core of knowledge
and coherent intellectual history
 COMMON CRITICISMS OF
CLASSICAL ORGANIZATIONAL
THEORY
Classical principles of formal organization may
lead to a work environment in which:

• Employees have minimal power over their

jobs and working conditions
• Subordination, passivity and dependence
are expected
• work to a short term perspective
• Employees are lead to mediocrity
• Working conditions produce to psychological
failure as a result of the belief that they are
lower class employees performing menial tasks
REFEREN
CE
Vincent Myers and Nina Presuto.
Classical Organizational Theory
www.tcnj.edu/~wright/classicalb.pp