fundamentals of management

The quantitative approach to management, sometimes referred to as operations research (OR) or management science, evolved out of the development of mathematical and statistical solutions to military problems during World War II. For instance, when the British had to get the maximum effectiveness from their limited aircraft capability against the massive forces of the Germans, they asked their mathematicians to devise an optimum allocation model. Similarly, U.S. antisubmarine warfare teams used operations research (OR) techniques to improve the odds of survival for Allied convoys crossing the North Atlantic and for selecting the optimal depth-charge patterns for aircraft and surface vessel attacks on German U-boats.
After the war, many of the quantitative techniques that had been applied to military problems were moved into the business sector. One group of military officers, labeled the “Whiz Kids,” joined Ford Motor Company in the mid-1940s and immediately began using statistical methods to improve decision making at Ford. Two of the most famous Whiz Kids were Robert McNamara and Charles “Tex” Thornton. McNamara rose to the presidency of Ford and then became U.S. Secretary of Defense. At the Department of Defense, he sought to quantify resource allocation decisions in the Pentagon through cost-benefit analyses. He concluded his career as head of the World Bank. Tex Thornton founded the billion-dollar conglomerate Litton Industries, again relying on quantitative techniques to make acquisition and allocation decisions. Dozens of other operations researchers from the military went into consulting. The consulting firm of Arthur D. Little, for instance, began applying OR techniques to management problems in the early 1950s. By 1954, at least 25 firms had established formal OR groups, and as many as 300 OR analysts worked in industry.
What are quantitative techniques, and how have they contributed to current management practice? The quantitative approach to management includes applications of statistics, optimization models, information models, and computer simulations. Linear programming, for instance, is a technique that managers can use to improve resource allocation. Work scheduling can become more efficient as a result of critical-path scheduling analysis. Decisions on determining optimum inventory levels have been significantly influenced by the economic order quantity model. In general, the quantitative approaches have contributed directly to management decision making, particularly to planning and control decisions.

Undoubtedly, many people in the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century recognized the importance of the human factor to an organization’s success, but five individuals stand out as early advocates of the human resources approach. They are Robert Owen, Hugo Munsterberg, Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, and Elton Mayo.

What claim to fame does Robert Owen hold? Robert Owen was a successful Scottish businessman who bought his first factory in 1789 when he was just eighteen. Repulsed by the harsh practices he saw in factories across Scotland— such as the employment of young children (many under the age of 10), 13-hour workdays, and miserable working conditions—Owen became a reformer. He chided factory owners for treating their equipment better than their employees. He said that they would buy the best machines but then buy the cheapest labor to run them. Owen argued that money spent on improving laboring conditions was one of the best investments that business executives could make. He claimed that a concern for employees was both highly profitable for management and would relieve human misery.
Owen proposed a Utopian workplace. Owen is not remembered in management history for his successes but rather for his courage and commitment to reducing the suffering of the working class.10 He was more than a hundred years ahead of his time when he argued, in 1825, for regulated hours of work for all, child labor laws, public education, company-furnished tools and equipment, and business involvement in community projects.
For what is Hugo Munsterberg best known? Hugo Munsterberg created the field of industrial psychology—the scientific study of individuals at work to maximize their productivity and adjustment. In his text, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913) he argued for the scientific study of human behavior to identify general patterns and to explain individual differences. Munsterberg suggested the use of psychological tests to improve employee selection, the value of learning theory in the development of training methods, and the study of human behavior to determine what techniques are most effective for motivating workers. Interestingly, he saw a link between scientific management and industrial psychology: Both sought increased efficiency through scientific work analyses and through better alignment of individual skills and abilities with the demands of various jobs. Much of our current knowledge of selection techniques, employee training, job design, and motivation is built on the work of Munsterberg.
What contributions did Mary Parker Follett make to management?   One
of the earliest writers to recognize that organizations could be viewed from the perspective of individual and group behavior was Mary Parker Follett. A transitional figure who wrote in the time of scientific management but proposed more people-oriented ideas, Follett was a social philosopher whose ideas had clear implications for management practice. Follett thought that organizations should be based on a group ethic rather than on individualism. Individual potential, she argued, remained as potential until released through group association. The manager’s job was to harmonize and coordinate group efforts. Managers and workers should view themselves as partners—as part of a common group. As such, managers should rely more on their expertise and knowledge to lead subordinates than on the formal authority of their position. Her humanistic ideas influenced the way we look at motivation, leadership, power, and authority.
Who was Chester Barnard? A transitional figure like Follett, Chester Barnard proposed ideas that bridged classical and human resources viewpoints. Like Fayol, Barnard was a practitioner—he was the president of New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. He had read Weber and was influenced by his work. But unlike Weber, who had an impersonal view of organizations, Barnard saw organizations as social systems that require human cooperation. He expressed his views in his book The Functions of the Executive (1938).14
Barnard believed that organizations were made up of people with interacting social relationships. The manager’s major functions were to communicate and stimulate subordinates to high levels of effort. A major part of an organization’s success, as Barnard saw it, depended on the cooperation of its employees. Barnard also argued that success depended on maintaining good relations with the people and institutions with whom the organization regularly interacted. By recognizing the organization’s dependence on investors, suppliers, customers, and other external stakeholders, Barnard introduced the idea that managers had to examine the external environment and then adjust the organization to maintain a state of equilibrium. Regardless of how efficient an organization’s production might be, if management failed to ensure a continuous input of materials and supplies or to find markets for its output, then the organization’s survival would be threatened.
The current interest in building cooperative work groups, making business firms more socially responsible, and matching organizational strategies to opportunities in the environment can be traced to ideas originally proposed by Barnard.
What were the Hawthorne studies? Without question, the most important contribution to the human resources approach to management came out of the Hawthorne studies undertaken at the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois.
The Hawthorne studies, begun in 1924 but expanded and continued through the early 1930s, were initially devised by Western Electric industrial engineers to examine the effect of different illumination levels on worker productivity. Control and experimental groups were established. The experimental group was presented with different levels of illumination intensity, and the control group worked under a constant intensity. The engineers expected individual output to be directly related to the intensity of light. However, they found that as the light level was increased in the experimental group, output for both groups rose. To the surprise of the engineers, as the light level was dropped in the experimental group, productivity continued to increase in both groups. In fact, productivity decreased in the experimental group only after the light intensity had been reduced to that of moonlight. The engineers concluded that illumination intensity was not directly related to group productivity, but they could not explain the behavior they had witnessed.

In 1927, the Western Electric engineers asked Harvard professor Elton Mayo and his associates to join the study as consultants, a relationship that would last through 1932 and encompass numerous experiments covering the redesign of jobs, changes in the lengths of the workday and workweek, the introduction of rest periods, and individual versus group wage plans. For example, one experiment evaluated the effect of a piecework incentive pay system on group productivity. The results indicated that the incentive plan had less effect on workers’ output than did group pressure and acceptance and the concomitant security. Social norms or standards of the group, therefore, were concluded to be the key determinants of individual work behavior.
Scholars generally agree that the Hawthorne studies, under the leadership of Elton Mayo, had a dramatic impact on the direction of management thought. Mayo concluded that behavior and sentiments are closely related, that group influences significantly affect individual behavior, that group standards establish individual worker output, and that money is less a factor in determining output than are group standards, group sentiments, and security. These conclusions led to a new emphasis on the human factor in the functioning of organizations and the attainment of their goals. They also led to increased paternalism by management.
The Hawthorne studies, however, have not been without critics. Attacks have been made on procedures, analyses of the findings, and the conclusions drawn. From a historical standpoint, it is of little importance whether the studies were academically sound or their conclusions justified. What is important is that they stimulated an interest in human factors. The Hawthorne studies went a long way in changing the dominant view of the time that people were no different than machines; that is, you put them on the shop floor, cranked in the inputs, and caused them to produce a known quantity of outputs. Furthermore, the legacy of Hawthorne is still with us today. Current organizational practices that owe their roots to the Hawthorne studies include attitude surveys, employee counseling, management training, participative decision making, and team-based compensation systems.
Why was the Human Relations Movement important to management history? Another group within the human resources approach is important to management history for its unflinching commitment to making management practices more humane. Members of the human relations movement uniformly believed in the importance of employee satisfaction—a satisfied worker was believed to be a productive worker. For the most part, the people associated with this movement—Dale Carnegie, Abraham Maslow, and Douglas McGregor—were individuals whose views were shaped more by their personal philosophies than by substantive research evidence.
Dale Carnegie is often overlooked by management scholars, but his ideas and teachings have had an enormous effect on management practice. His book How to Win Friends and Influence People was read by millions in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In addition, during this same period, thousands of managers and aspiring managers attended his management speeches and seminars. What was the theme of Carnegie’s book and lectures? Essentially, he said that the way to succeed was to (1) make others feel important through a sincere appreciation of their efforts, (2) make a good first impression, (3) win people over to your way of thinking by letting others do the talking, being sympathetic, and “never telling a man he is wrong,” and (4) change people by praising good traits and giving the offender the opportunity to save face.

Abraham Maslow, a humanistic psychologist, proposed a hierarchy of five needs: physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization. In terms of motivation, Maslow argued that each step in the hierarchy must be satisfied before the next level can be activated and that once a need was substantially satisfied, it no longer motivated behavior.
A survey of management professors in the early 1970s found that Maslow’s 1943 publication on the needs hierarchy was cited as the second most influential article in all of management research. The needs hierarchy is arguably still the best-known theory of general motivation, despite the fact that “the available research does not support the Maslow theory to any significant degree.” Even today, no author of an introductory textbook in management, organizational behavior, human relations, supervision, psychology, or marketing is likely to omit a discussion of the needs hierarchy.
Douglas McGregor is best known for his formulation of two sets of assumptions—Theory X and Theory Y—about human nature. Theory X presents an essentially negative view of people. It assumes that they have little ambition, dislike work, want to avoid responsibility, and need to be closely supervised to work effectively. On the other hand, Theory Y offers a positive view, assuming that people can exercise self-direction, accept responsibility, and consider work to be as natural as rest or play. McGregor believed that Theory Y assumptions best captured the true nature of workers and should guide management practice.
A story about McGregor does a good job of capturing the essence of the human relations perspective. McGregor had taught for a dozen years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) before he became president of Antioch College. After six years at Antioch, McGregor seemed to recognize that his philosophy had failed to cope with the realities of organizational life.
I believed, for example, that a leader could operate successfully as a kind of advisor to his organization. I thought I could avoid being a “boss.” Unconsciously, I suspect, I hoped to duck the unpleasant necessity of making difficult decisions, of taking the responsibility for one course of action, among many uncertain alternatives, of making mistakes and taking the consequences. I thought that maybe I could operate so that everyone would like me—that “good human relations” would eliminate all discord and disagreement. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It took a couple of years but I finally began to realize that a leader cannot avoid the exercise of authority any more than he can avoid responsibility for what happens to his organization.
The irony in McGregor’s case was that he went back to M.I.T. and began preaching his humanistic doctrine again. And he continued to do so until his death. Like Maslow’s, McGregor’s beliefs about human nature have had a strong following among management academics and practitioners. For instance, the previously cited survey on important contributions to management identified McGregor’s book as the most influential book.
What common thread linked advocates of the human relations movement? The common thread that united human relations supporters, including Carnegie, Maslow, and McGregor, was an unshakable optimism about people’s capabilities. They believed strongly in their cause and were inflexible in their beliefs, even when faced with contradictory evidence. No amount of contrary experience or research evidence would alter their views. Despite this lack of objectivity, advocates of the human relations movement had a definite influence on management theory and practice.
Who were the behavioral science theorists? One final category within the human resources approach encompasses a group of psychologists and sociologists who relied on the scientific method for the study of organizational behavior. Unlike the theorists of the human relations movement, behavioral science theorists engaged in objective research on human behavior in organizations. They carefully attempted to keep their personal beliefs out of their work. They sought to develop rigorous research designs that could be replicated by other behavioral scientists. In so doing, they hoped to build a science of organizational behavior. A list of important behavioral science theorists and their contributions would number into the hundreds. But beginning after World War II and continuing today, they have created a wealth of studies that allow us to make fairly accurate predictions about behavior in organizations. Our current understanding of such issues as leadership, employee motivation, personality differences, the design of jobs and organizations, organizational cultures, high-performance teams, performance appraisals, conflict management, and negotiation techniques are largely due to the contributions of behavioral scientists.

Managers get things done by working with people, which explains why some writers and researchers have chosen to look at management by focusing on the organization’s human resources. Much of what currently makes up the field of personnel or human resources management, as well as contemporary views on motivation and leadership, has come out of the work of theorists we have categorized as part of the human resources approach to management.

A number of our current ideas and practices in management can be directly traced to the contributions of the general administrative theorists. For
instance, the functional view of the manager’s job owes its origin to Henri Fayol. Although many of his principles may not be applicable to the wide variety of organizations that exist today, they were a frame of reference for many current concepts.
Weber’s bureaucracy was an attempt to formulate an ideal model for organization design and a response to the abuses that Weber observed within organizations. Weber believed that his model could remove the ambiguity, inefficiencies, and patronage that characterized most organizations at that time. Weber’s bureaucracy is not as popular as it was a decade ago, but many of its components are still inherent in large organizations.

Henri Fayol and Max Weber were two important individuals who helped to develop the general administrative theory. We mentioned Henri Fayol in Chapter 1 as having designated management as a universal set of activities—specifically, planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. Because his writings were important, let’s take a more careful look at what he had to say.
Fayol wrote during the same period that Taylor did. However, whereas Taylor was concerned with management at the shop level (or what we today would describe as the job of a supervisor) and used the scientific method, Fayol’s attention was directed at the activities of all managers, and he wrote from personal experience. Taylor was a scientist. Fayol, the managing director of a large French coal-mining firm, was a practitioner.
Fayol described the practice of management as distinct from accounting, finance, production, distribution, and other typical business functions. He argued that management was an activity common to all human undertakings in business, in government, and even in the home. He then proceeded to state 14 principles of management—fundamental or universal truths—that could be taught in schools and universities. These principles are listed in Exhibit .
Max Weber was a German sociologist. Writing in the early part of this century, Weber developed a theory of authority structures and described organizational activity on the basis of authority relations. He described an ideal type of organization that he called a bureaucracy, characterized by division of labor, a clearly defined hierarchy, detailed rules and regulations, and impersonal relationships. Weber recognized that this ideal bureaucracy didn’t exist in reality but, rather, represented a selective reconstruction of the real world. He used it as a basis for theorizing about work and the way that work could be done in large groups. His theory became the design prototype for many of today’s large organizations. The features of Weber’s ideal bureaucratic structure are outlined in

Fayol’s Fourteen Principles of Management
1 Division of Work This principle is the same as Adam Smith’s “division of labor.” Specialization increases output by making employees more efficient.
2 Authority Managers must be able to give orders. Authority gives them this right. Along with authority, however, goes responsibility. Wherever authority is exercised, responsibility arises.
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 organizational 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 Centralization Centralization 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 centralization 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.

Weber’s Ideal Bureaucracy
1 Division of Labor   Jobs are broken down into simple, routine, and well-defined tasks.
2 Authority Hierarchy   Offices or positions are organized in a hierarchy, each lower one being controlled and supervised by a higher one.
3 Formal Selection   All organizational members are to be selected on the basis of technical qualifications demonstrated by training, education, or formal examination.
4 Formal Rules and Regulations   To ensure uniformity and to regulate the actions of employees, managers must depend heavily on formal organizational rules.
5 Impersonality   Rules and controls are applied uniformly, avoiding involvement with personalities and personal preferences of employees.
6 Career Orientation   Managers are professional officials rather than owners of the units they manage. They work for fixed salaries and pursue their careers within the organization.

Many of the guidelines Taylor and others devised for improving production efficiency appear today to be common sense. For instance, one can say that it should have been obvious to managers in those days that workers should be carefully screened, selected, and trained before being put into a job.
To understand the importance of scientific management, you have to understand the times in which Taylor, the Gilbreths, and Gantt lived. The standard of living was low. Production was highly labor-intensive. Midvale Steel, at the turn of the century, may have employed 20 or 30 workers who did nothing but load pig iron onto rail cars. Today, their entire daily production could probably be done in several hours by one person with a hydraulic-lift truck, but they didn’t have such mechanical devices. Similarly, the breakthroughs Frank Gilbreth achieved in bricklaying are meaningful only when you recognize that most quality buildings at that time were constructed of brick, that land was cheap, and that the major cost of a plant or home was the cost of the materials (bricks) and the labor cost to lay them.

Taylor’s ideas inspired others to study and develop methods of scientific management. His most prominent disciples were Frank and Lillian Gilbreth,6 and Henry Gantt.
A construction contractor by background, Frank Gilbreth gave up his contracting career in 1912 to study scientific management after hearing Taylor speak at a professional meeting. Along with his wife Lillian, a psychologist, he studied work arrangements to eliminate wasteful hand-and-body motions. The Gilbreths also experimented with the design and use of the proper tools and equipment for optimizing work performance. Frank Gilbreth is probably best known for his experiments in reducing the number of motions in bricklaying.
The Gilbreths were among the first to use motion picture films to study hand-and-body motions. They devised a microchronometer that recorded time to 1/2,000 of a second, placed it in the field of study being photographed, and thus determined how long a worker spent enacting each motion. Wasted motions missed by the naked eye could be identified and eliminated. The Gilbreths also devised a classification scheme to label 17 basic hand motions—such as “search,” “select,” “grasp,” and “hold”—which they called therbligs (Gilbreth spelled backward with the th transposed). This scheme allowed the Gilbreths to more precisely analyze the exact elements of worker’s hand movements.
Another associate of Taylor’s at Midvale and Bethlehem Steel was a young engineer named Henry L. Gantt. Like Taylor and the Gilbreths, Gantt sought to increase worker efficiency through scientific investigation. He extended some of Taylor’s original ideas and added a few of his own. For instance, Gantt devised an incentive system that gave workers a bonus for completing their jobs in less time than the allowed standard. He also introduced a bonus for a foreman to be paid for each worker who made the standard plus an extra bonus if all of that foreman’s workers made it. In so doing, Gantt expanded the scope of scientific management to encompass the work of managers as well as that of operatives. Gantt is probably most noted for creating a graphic bar chart that could be used by managers as a scheduling device for planning and controlling work.

Frederick Taylor
Probably the most widely cited example of scientific management is Taylor’s pig iron experiment. Workers loaded “pigs” of iron weighing 92 pounds onto rail cars. Their average daily output was 12.5 tons. Taylor believed that if the job was scientifically analyzed to determine the one best way to load pig iron, the output could be increased to 47 or 48 tons per day.
Taylor began his experiment by looking for a physically strong subject who placed a high value on the dollar. The individual Taylor chose was a big, strong Dutch immigrant, whom he called “Schmidt.” Schmidt, like the other loaders, earned $1.15 a day, which even at the turn of the century was barely a subsistence wage. Taylor offered Schmidt $1.85 a day if he would do what Taylor asked.
Using money to motivate Schmidt, Taylor asked him to load the pig irons, alternating various job factors to see what impact the changes had on Schmidt’s daily output. For instance, on some days, Schmidt would lift the pig irons by bending his knees; on other days, he would keep his legs straight and use his back. Taylor experimented with rest periods, walking speed, carrying positions, and other variables. After a long period of methodically trying various combinations of procedures, techniques, and tools, Taylor obtained the level of productivity he thought possible. By putting the right person on the job with the correct tools and equipment, by having the worker follow his instructions exactly, and by motivating the worker with a significantly higher daily wage, Taylor was able to reach his 48-ton objective.
It’s important to understand what Taylor saw at Midvale Steel that aroused his determination to improve the way things were done in the plant. At the time, there were no clear concepts of worker and management responsibilities. Virtually no effective work standards existed. Workers purposely worked at a slow pace. Management decisions were of the “seat-of-the-pants” variety, based on hunch and intuition. Workers were placed on jobs with little or no concern for matching their abilities and aptitudes with the tasks required. Most important, management and workers considered themselves to be in continual conflict. Rather than cooperating to their mutual benefit, they perceived their relationship as a zero-sum game—any gain by one would be at the expense of the other.

If one had to pinpoint the year that modern management theory was born, one could make a strong case for 1911, the year that Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management was published. Its contents would become widely accepted by managers throughout the world. The book described the theory of scientific management—the use of the scientific method to define the “one best way” for a job to be done. The studies conducted before and after the book’s publication would establish Taylor as the father of scientific management. Frederick Taylor did most of his work at the Midvale and Bethlehem Steel companies in Pennsylvania (see Details on a Management Classic). As a mechanical engineer with a Quaker/Puritan background, he was consistently appalled at the inefficiency of workers. Employees used vastly different techniques to do the same job. They were prone to “taking it easy” on the job. Taylor believed that worker output was only about one third of what was possible. Therefore, he set out to correct the situation by applying the scientific method to jobs on the shop floor. He spent more than two decades pursuing with a passion the “one best way” for each job to be done.

Taylor sought to create a mental revolution among both the workers and management by creating clear guidelines for improving production efficiency. He defined four principles of management (see Exhibit HM-1). He argued that following these principles would result in the prosperity of both management and workers. Workers would earn more pay and management more profits.
Using scientific management techniques, Taylor was able to define the one best way of doing each job. He could then select the right people for the job and train them to do it precisely in this one best way. To motivate workers, he favored incentive wage plans. Overall, Taylor achieved consistent improvements in productivity in the range of 200 percent or more, and he reaffirmed the function of managers to plan and control and that of workers to perform as instructed.
The impact of Taylor’s work cannot be overstated.5During the first decade of the century, Taylor delivered numerous public lectures to convey scientific management to interested industrialists. Between 1901 and 1911, at least 18 firms adopted some variation of scientific management. In 1908, the Harvard Business School declared Taylor’s approach the standard for modern management and adopted it as the core around which all courses were to be organized. Taylor, himself, began lecturing at Harvard in 1909. Between 1910 and 1912, two events catapulted scientific management into the limelight. In 1910, the Eastern Railroad requested a rate increase from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Appearing before the commission, an efficiency expert claimed that railroads could save $1 million a day (equivalent to about $17 million today) through the application of scientific management. This assertion became the centerpiece of the hearings and created a national audience for Taylor’s ideas. Then in 1911, The Principles of Scientific Management became an instant best-seller. By 1914, Taylor’s principles had become so popular that an “efficiency exposition” held in New York City, with Taylor as the keynote speaker, drew a crowd estimated at 69,000. Although Taylor spread his ideas not only in the United States but also in France, Germany, Russia, and Japan, his greatest influence was on U.S. manufacturing. His method gave U.S. companies a comparative advantage over foreign firms that made U.S. manufacturing efficiency the envy of the world—at least for 50 years or so.

1. Taylor’s Four Principles of Management
   Develop a science for each element of an individual’s work, which replaces the old rule-of-thumb method.
2. Scientifically select and then train, teach, and develop the worker. (Previously, workers chose their own work and trained themselves as best they could.)
3. Heartily cooperate with the workers so as to ensure that all work is done in accordance with the principles of the science that has been developed.
4. Divide work and responsibility almost equally between management and workers. Management takes over all work for which it is better fitted than the workers. (Previously, almost all the work and the greater part of the responsibility were thrown upon the workers.)

The roots of modern management lie with a group of practitioners and writers who sought to formulate rational principles that would make organizations more efficient. Because they set the theoretical foundations for a discipline called management, we call their contributions the classical approach to management. We can break the classical approach into two subcategories: scientific management and general administrative theory. Scientific management theorists looked at the field from the perspective of how to improve the productivity of operative personnel. The general administrative theorists, on the other hand, were concerned with the overall organization and how to make it more effective.