"Is management an art or a science?"
GMcN via the Internet "Is management an art or a science?"
GMcN via the Internet
THE INDUSTRY ADVISOR
By Gene Levine - www.genelevine.com
Let me explain why it has evolved to a
discipline that usually employs both elements. We’ll begin in the 1880s with
Frederick Taylor. Taylor is credited as the first person to study work with an eye toward
improving output. Based on the fragmented management styles that existed at the time,
Taylor’s unique ideas – on how to
approach work – are considered some of
the fundamentals of "Scientific Management" (a name he coined). Taylor proposed
that each employee’s work be planned one day in advance. Further, the work should be
described in detail with the method used to perform the task written on paper. Each job
was to have a standard time assigned by a time study analyst based on the capabilities of
a "first rate" employee, who was experienced and could do the job regularly.
Each job was broken into small divisions called elements, their collective values used to
determine the allowed time.
Among Taylor’s ideas was a simple formula for management:
1. Specify the Task - Analyze the sequence of operations for the whole job.
2. Specify A Definite Method - Indicate how the operation is to be performed.
3. Specify the Time - Determine from stopwatch study the time to complete an operation.
Taylor advocated financial incentives because he envisioned that by compensating extra effort it seemingly would improve worker output. Taylor could not foresee the havoc his ideas would create as he turned people into ever increasingly efficient output machines. Today we realize that "Taylorisms", as his ideas were called, focused more on the technology in businesses than its people. This oversight evolved into the "people problem" we now know of.
It didn’t take long for management to realize that even Taylor’s ideas were limited because workers could produce only so much regardless of how well management planned their workday. Right? No, wrong! Vast, additional production increases could and would come from workers using rather simple ideas that Taylor overlooked.
New ways to increase worker’s output began to surface in the early 1930s. It began with Harvard’s Elton Mayo and his now classic role in the landmark management experiment conducted by Western Electric at its Hawthorne, New Jersey telephone handset assembly facility. Western Electric was committed to experiment with lighting levels as a means to improve worker output. It was thought that if workers could see better they might be able to produce more. As it happened, the rationale appeared to work because whenever lighting intensity was increased, production rose. Yet, when lighting levels were deliberately reduced, production continued to increase. Unable to explain the dichotomy, Western Electric went to Harvard and retained Elton Mayo who had already gained notoriety for solving issues surrounding people at work.
Using the resources of the highly respected Harvard Graduate School of Business, he performed a series of carefully documented studies that established the springboard which human relation’s practitioners follow – to this day. Succinctly, Mayo’s findings concluded that it was the attention Western Electric management paid to satisfying employee’s wants and needs, not the lighting, that yielded the unimagined productivity increases and improved morale.
It wasn’t until the early 1940s that Hawthorne was thoroughly explained. The person to do that was Abraham Maslow, the father of Humanistic Psychology. Maslow theorized that people have ascending wants and needs that always require . . .
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