Management Theories The Classical School of Management Theory The Classical School is believed to have originated around 1900 and dominated management thinking in the 1920s, focusing on the efficiency of the work process. It has three schools of thought: bureaucratic management, which focuses on rules and procedures, hierarchy, and clear division of labor; Scientific management, which looks at the "best way" to do a job; and Administrative management, which emphasizes the flow of information within the organization. Classical management theory is now considered an obsolete form of management for the main reason that people and their needs are considered by classical theorists to be secondary to the needs of the organization. However, classical management theory is important because it introduced the concept of management as a subject of intellectual analysis and provided a foundation of ideas that were developed by subsequent schools of management thought. Scientific Management Frederick Taylor is known as the father of scientific management. His approach emphasized empirical research to increase organizational productivity by increasing the efficiency of the production process. Scientific management theory states that jobs should be designed so that each worker has a well-specified and well-controlled task and that procedures and methods specific to each job should be strictly followed. Management theory is based on the fundamental belief that managers are not only intellectually superior to the average employee, but that they have a positive duty to supervise staff and organize their work activities. Therefore, it was only applied to low-level repetitive and routine tasks that could be handled at the supervisory level. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was born in Pennsylvania, United States, and began working at the age of 18 as an apprentice to a pattern maker. He later joined the Midvale Steel Company as a laborer, but within eight years rose to the position of chief engineer. During this time at the company he performed exhaustive experiments on worker productivity, which eventually developed into the theory of scientific management. Taylor developed four principles of scientific management: 1. For each task the “best” methodology should be developed scientifically. Managers should sell… half the paper… assets; inside the store there will be interconnected systems that will control stocks, orders, purchases and sales. Organizational survival will depend on continuously adapting interactions between systems to meet constantly changing internal and external environmental processes. Pressure from political, social, environmental, economic and technological factors will influence an organization's objectives. The key concepts in systems theory are the following: · feedback is essential between systems for organizational growth and for homeostasis (a state of relative constancy despite variable external conditions) within the organization; · a organization should be considered as an open system, with boundaries based on social relationships, if an organization acts as a closed system and ignores environmental influences, it will become self-fulfilling and inward-looking; · if inputs into a system decrease, then the system will eventually run out (entropy); · the whole of a system is greater than the sum of its parts (synergy); management is the process of maintaining effective relationships between the subsystems of the organization.