Classical Management theories

There are three eminent people who contributed a lot to the classical management theory:

1. Henri Fayol
2. Fredrick Taylor
3. Max Weber

Henri Fayol was a French mining engineer and director of mines who developed a general theory of business administration. He and his colleagues developed this theory independently of scientific management but roughly contemporaneously. He was one of the most influential contributors to modern concepts of management. Fayol's work was one of the first comprehensive statements of a general theory of management.He proposed that there were six primary functions of management and 14 principles of management. Functions of management

1. to forecast and plan,
2. to organize
3. to command or direct
4. to coordinate
5. to develop output
6. to control

14 principles of Management

1. Division of work. Work should be divided among individuals and groups to ensure that effort and attention are focused on special portions of the task. Fayol presented work specialization as the best way to use the human resources of the organization.
2. Authority. Managers must be able to give orders. Authority gives them this right. Note that responsibility arises wherever authority is exercised.
3. Discipline. Employees must obey and respect the rules that govern the organization. Good discipline is the result of effective leadership, a clear understanding between management and workers regarding the organization's rules, and the judicious use of penalties for infractions of the rules.
4. Unity of command. Every employee should receive orders from only one superior.
5. Unity of direction. Each group of organisational activities that have the same objective should be directed by one manager using one plan.
6. Subordination of individual interests to the general interest. The interests of any one employee or group of employees should not take precedence over the interests of the organization as a whole.
7. Remuneration. Workers must be paid a fair wage for their services.
8. Centralisation. Centralisation refers to the degree to which subordinates are involved in decision making. Whether decision making is centralized (to management) or decentralized (to subordinates) is a question of proper proportion. The task is to find the optimum degree of centralisation for each situation.
9. Scalar chain. The line of authority from top management to the lowest ranks represents the scalar chain. Communications should follow this chain. However, if following the chain creates delays, cross-communications can be allowed if agreed to by all parties and superiors are kept informed.
10. Order. People and materials should be in the right place at the right time.
11. Equity. Managers should be kind and fair to their subordinates.
12. Stability of tenure of personnel. High employee turnover is inefficient. Management should provide orderly personnel planning and ensure that replacements are available to fill vacancies.
13. Initiative. Employees who are allowed to originate and carry out plans will exert high levels of effort.
14. Esprit de corps. Promoting team spirit will build harmony and unity within the organization.

Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He is regarded as the father of scientific management and was one of the first management consultants.Taylor was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and his ideas, broadly conceived, were highly influential in the Progressive Era.

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.

Taylor believed in transferring control from workers to management. He set out to increase the distinction between mental (planning work) and manual labor (executing work). Detailed plans specifying the job, and how it was to be done, were to be formulated by management and communicated to the workers.

Taylor thought that by analyzing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the stopwatch time study, which combined with Frank Gilbreth's motion study methods later becomes the field of time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute. One of his most famous studies involved shovels. He noticed that workers used the same shovel for all materials. He determined that the most effective load was 21½ lb, and found or designed shovels that for each material would scoop up that amount. He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. Nevertheless, Taylor was able to convince workers who used shovels and whose compensation was tied to how much they produced to adopt his advice about the optimum way to shovel by breaking the movements down into their component elements and recommending better ways to perform these movements. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas. Moreover, the book he wrote after parting company with Bethlehem Steel, Shop Management, sold well.

Maximilian Karl Emil "Max" Weber was a German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist whose ideas influenced social theory, social research, and the entire discipline of sociology. Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as among the three founding architects of sociology.

Bureaucracy in this context is the organisational form of certain dominant characteristics such as a hierarchy of authority and a system of rules. Bureaucracy in a sense of red tape or officialdom should not be used as these meanings are value-ridden and only emphasize very negative aspects of the original Max Weber model. Through analyses of organisations Weber identified three basic types of legitimate authority: Traditional, Charismatic, Rational-Legal. Authority has to be distinguished from power in this discussion. Power is a unilateral thing - it enables a person to force another to behave in a certain way, whether by means of strength or by rewards. Authority, on the other hand, implies acceptance of the rules by those over whom it is to be exercised within limits agreeable to the subordinates that Weber refers to in discussing legitimate authority.

Weber presented three types of legitimate authority:

Traditional authority: where acceptance of those in authority arose from tradition and custom.

Charismatic authority: where acceptance arises from loyalty to, and confidence in, the personal qualities of the ruler.

Rational-legal authority: where acceptance arises out of the office, or position, of the person in authority as bounded by the rules and procedures of the organization.

It is the rational-legal authority form that exists in most organisations today and this is the form to which Weber ascribed the term 'bureaucracy'.

The main features of bureaucracy according to Weber were:

• a continuous organisation or functions bounded by rules
• that individuals functioned within the limits of the specialisation of the work, the degree of authority allocated and the rules governing the exercise of authority
• a hierarchical structure of offices
• appointment to offices made on the grounds of technical competence only
• the separation of officials from the ownership of the organisation
• the authority was vested in the official positions and not in the personalities that held these posts. Rules, decisions and actions were formulated and recorded in writing.