Managementa and Organization Behaviour.pptx

This is slide of one of topic of managment and organization behaviour.

1. Management and Organizational Behaviour Class 7

2. Recap Intended and unintended consequences Structure-Agency debate  Structuration Management/Organizing excessively complicated. Solution Realize this, be more humble, careful, respecting of other people’s inputs. Disjointed incrementalism

3. Two more causes of poor management/unintended consequences: Self-perpetuating busyness of managers The structure of management/political careers

4. Taylorism and Scientific Management Soldiering Time and motion studies

5. Positives Made workplaces safer Introduced a certain type of fairness in worker salary Increased efficiency (at least initially)

6. Negatives Racist, elitist assumptions. Evacuation of meaning from non-managerial work. Created large imbalance between manager and worker power. Depressed worker wages

7. New material 

8. How do you think these people responded to scientific management ? Workers Business owners and top managers

9. It was strongly resisted by workers and their trade unions because It entailed a massive transfer of power from workers to managers. It reduced autonomy Eroded working conditions Threatened unemployment

10. It implemented a near complete separation between planning and implementation. Managers would decide what was to be done and the workers would do it. This was the cooperation that Taylor referred to in his 4 th principle  . The selection and training of workers would also be done by managers.

11. Workers went on strikes or left their jobs. T&M studies were even banned by the defense industry.

12. Owners and some senior managers also objected because It created a new powerful breed of managers – mostly production engineers. It created unrest among the workforce. Taylor himself was fired for this reason. Embittered, he insisted that his ideas had not been implemented properly. More importantly he inspired a group of devoted followers who propagated his ideas for years to come.

13. The start of the First World War in 1914 proved a boon for the scientific management movement. Workers and owners were asked to set aside their reservations and maximize production for the national war effort. But once the war was over these methods were established and maintained leading again to a lot of resistance.

14. Led to a host of problems including Sabotage Absenteeism High turnover Low commitment Low quality

15. What was going on was a kind of unintended consequence of treating workers like money making robots. If money was all that was on offer it would be all that mattered. Why should workers care about product quality or company image. They churned out their products, got their bonuses (or not) and looked elsewhere for things that made life meaningful.

16. Led to a great flowering of working-class cultural activities in industrial towns. Choirs Art clubs Mechanics institutes Tarde unions Communist party

17. Much later as these towns collapsed so did these cultural activities to be replaced by Drugs Crime Populist politics This is another illustration of how work organizations and society are so deeply interlinked.

18. The evacuation of meaning from work also had implications for managerial work. For the next several years the problems thrown up by scientific management – low worker morale, product quality, and energ y - would be the one’s that pre-occupied this class of employee. But the lesson was a long time in coming and even when it came it reflected the engineering legacy of scientific management.

19. In the meanwhile, the Taylorist approach was actually intensified through the popularization of the Fordist approach . Main innovation: The introduction of the moving assembly line . Work processes simplified even further. Discretion of workers further decreased. Assembly lines used in production even today.

20. This apparent increase in power also allowed workers to come up new forms of resistance. Led to the popularization of the phrase: ‘ putting a spanner in the works .’ Ford managed to run this system by paying relatively higher wages and operating in high unemployment areas. But sabotage, absenteeism, and high turnover continued to dog him as well.

21. The Fordist system, despite its problems, spread throughout the world. Even non-capitalist states employed it to boost productivity. Example: Communist Russia after 1917. This approach, undergirded by an ethos of formal rationality, persists to this day. Example: The standardized scripts and timed phone calls in a modern call center.

22. A few comments on Weber and Taylor Both very different people. Taylor was an architect of his ideology. Weber more an observer and even a critic of modern formal-rational organizations. Books that portray him as a champion of bureaucracy provide a misleading account.

23. Classic theory # 3: Human relations theory and people management Conventional textbooks often set up a simple story about OT which has a very appealing structure. There is a bad guy (often scientific management) And a good guy (human relations theory) This is a flawed story Both approaches have deep similarities

24. Human relations theory (HRT) is generally thought of having roots in the Hawthorne Studies. Conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at the Hawthorne works of the Western Electric Company near Chicago, USA. This work conducted by many people over many years. Contains a lot of nuance which is missing in the ‘received version’. The work became linked to one of these researchers, Elton Mayo.

25. The basic suggestion of the received version of HRT is that through a series of interviews and experiments the Hawthorne researchers identified the importance of the human element in organizing. Workers were now recognized as having social needs and interests. They could no longer be regarded as economically motivated automatons.

26. Two parts of the studies received particular attention: The illumination experiment Productivity went up for all groups (control, low light, high light) because workers thought hey were doing something important. Thus, was born the notion of the Hawthorne effect The very fact of observing human behavior has an effect on that behavior.

27. The bank wiring room experiment A group male workers were observed assembling electrical components They set informal norms around production levels so that Rather than produce their max output (which could earn them a bonus), they performed sub-optimally.

28. Peer pressure was used to control recalcitrant members. Transgressors were pinged with an iron rod. There was an unofficial gang leader.

29. This suggested that Workers were not solely motivated by economic incentives. The informal side of the organization was as, or even more, important than the formal side (i.e. the rules and official hierarchy).

30. The discovery of the human factor, so the story goes, ushered in an era in which the needs of the workers were acknowledged and met. This claim fits not just the good guy-bad guy story but also promotes a version of OT as gradually discovering and refining truths , much in the way science is supposed to proceed. There is one tiny flaw in this. Can you guess what it is ?

31. It’s not true ! First an interest in workers pre-dates the Hawthorne studies by many years. 19 th century industrialists, especially those of Quacker backgrounds , had long been concerned with meeting the moral needs (leisure time, good living) of their workers. Even the Western Electric Company was interested in these issues before the experiments were conducted.

32. Second, the original impetus for the Hawthorne studies was firmly located within the tradition of scientific management , well established by the1920s. The light changing idea was, for example, informed by the notion that management was about the control of working conditions, including its physical variables. Some theorists even suggest that the researchers knew about the Hawthorne effect before the experiments and its ‘discovery’ was no real surprise to them.

33. Finally, it is simply wrong to claim that Taylor had been unaware of, or uninterested in the ‘informal side’ of the organization. On the contrary, the heart of Taylor’s project was to overcome this informal side. For example, what was happening the bank wiring room would be called systemic soldiering by Taylor.

34. Sidenote How do you think the following forms of human knowledge evolve/progress? Science and technology Philosophy Literature Book Recommendation  Paradoxes of education in a republic (Eva Brann)

35. This is of course not to say that his approach was the same as HRT ; it was not. Taylor sought to eradicate the informal side of the organization HRT’s message was to acknowledge its irrepressibility and then find ways of managing it into alignment with the formal purposes of the organization.

36. HRT thus is in some ways a response to the failure , or at least the limitations, of scientific management as a tool for organizational control. But it is a response which does not offer an alternative to, but an extension of, scientific management. It bears the same footprint of instrumental rationality .

37. Main difference between scientific and HRT managers : They use a different set of tools to motivate their workers to achieve the same set of organizational goals the former by avoiding human relationships (i.e. focusing only economic incentives) and the latter by using them (i.e. listening to workers, resolving some of their problems, and thus increasing their motivation).

38. The difference between these two approaches is thus ‘tactical’. That is a real difference! It creates very different work environments. But it would be wrong to romanticize it for both approaches seek to maximize organizational outcomes (maximum profit; maximum productivity; etc.).

39. The goal of HRT is not to create a better balance between worker and organizational outcomes as some would have you . Both theories thus are instrumentally rational.

40. Why then does HRT not acknowledge this commonality with scientific management? Two main reasons for this: The reputation of management as an occupation The idea of humanism

41. Management as an occupation Your views on the issue ?

42. The establishment of management as a respectable , let alone respected , activity was by no means straightforward. In the early 19 th century, the term manager was regarded with some suspicion. Much like the words ‘scammer’ and ‘cowboy’ today. Even the Oxford Dictionary lists ‘trickery’ and ‘deceit’ under the archaic meanings of manager.

43. By the early 20 th century managers were much better established but The new breed of scientific managers were still viewed with suspicion and accused of undermining individual initiative and freedom. The profession was satirized and derided in popular culture In films like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) And books like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) Management in short had an image problem in the 1920s and 1930s.

44. Imagine a manager going home and being questioned by his child (most managers were male during this time). Child: What do you do all day, Dad? Dad: Well, I, sort of, exploit people. Child: How do you mean? Dad: Well, you know, I dehumanize them by making them as hard as they can for as little money as possible. Child: Oh.

45. This was embarrassing stuff . A much better picture was offered by HRT. Management could now be portrayed as helping rather than exploiting the worker. This spin is linked to Mayo’s tendency to conceptualize worker resistance as a sign of psychological maladjustment. He went so far as to say that workers who joined unions were mentally ill!

46. In this respect at least, Taylor was more sympathetic to workers than Mayo. He had worked as a machine operator and understood the reasons behind worker resistance., even though he wanted to overcome it at an organizational level. The problem: This overcoming presented management as being nakedly about power. Mayo’s less sympathetic approach paradoxically cast the manager as helping the worker make a normal adjustment to factory life .

47. So now a different conversation became possible. Child: What do you do all day, Dad? Dad: Well, I, sort of, help people. Child: How do you mean? Dad: Well, you know, if they feel unhappy at work, I make them see that I care about them and that its not so bad. Child: Oh, Dad, that’s great!

48. Reasons for popularizing the HRT myth To help managers save face. To prevent a worker led revolution  . Many quarters fearful of this happening after the problems created by scientific management.