Schools of mangement thought

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1. SCHOOLS OF MANGEMENT THOUGHT

2. Introduction The various approaches to the study of management as put forward by specialists from disciplines have come to be called the schools of management thought .Major schools of management thought are classified under the following heads :

3. The Management process school The Empirical school Human Behaviour school Social systems school Decision Theory School The Mathematical School The systems Approach school The contingency Approach school

4. 1.Management process school (operational schools of management) Henri Fayol is known as the father of this School of Thought. According to this school , management can be studied in terms of the process that involves. The management process consisting of five broad categories of functions, viz . planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling is evident in all managerial situations. Following this, this school evolved some universal principles of management. These principles of management could be equally well applied to business, government, or any other type of organisation.

5. The main features of the Management Process School i. Management is the study of functions of managers. ii. The functions of managers are the same irrespective of the type of organisation. iii. The functions of management, viz., planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling are the core of management.

6. Limitations of Management Process School: i. The various operational theorists do not agree about the functions of management. ii. The so-called universal principles of management do not always stand the test of empirical scrutiny. iii. Organisations function under dynamic conditions and, therefore, searching for universal prin­ciples may not always be a fruitful exercise.

7. 2. The Empirical school The important contributors to this approach are  Earnest Dale and group of researchers  from Harward Business School and The Management Associations of different countries. . This school of thought considers management as the study of experience of managers in the past. Analysing the experi­ences of successful managers or the mistakes of poor managers from case studies one somehow learns how to manage. The main technique suggested by this school is the case study method.

8. The main features of this school are: i. Management is the study of managerial experiences. ii. The managerial experiences can be passed over to the practitioners and students. iii. The techniques used in successful cases can be used by future managers. iv. Theoretical researches can be combined with practical experiences.

9. Limitations of the Empirical School: This school depends heavily on the historical methods of study. It goes mainly by precedents. It does not realize that a manager has to work under dynamic conditions and that history does not exactly repeats itself. The situations in the past may not have been exactly the same as of the present.

10. 3.Human Behaviour School The human relations theory of management began development in the early 1920’s during the industrial revolution. At that time, productivity was the focus of business . Professor Elton Mayo began his experiments (the Hawthorne Studies), to prove the importance of people for productivity – not machines.

11. According to this school, management is the study of the behaviour of the people at work. The main focus is on interpersonal relations. Good relations lead to good results. Motivation ,leadership, communication, participative management and group dynamics are the essential elements of human behaviour approach. The main merit of this school is that it recognizes human beings to be the most important resource of an enterprise.

12. The main features of this school are: i. The school draws its concept from psychology, sociology, human relations, inter-personal relationships, satisfaction of worker’s needs etc. ii. Since management is getting things done through people, the managers must have a basic under­standing of human behaviour and human relations in all its aspects, particularly in the context of work groups and organisations.

13. iii. Management must study inter-personnel relations among people. iv. Greater production and higher motivation can be achieved only through good human relations. v. Motivation, leadership, communication, participative management and group dynamics are the core of this school of thought.

14. 4. The Social System School: Chester Bernard is the founding father of the social system school of thought. The main features of this school of thought are: i. Management is a social system, a system of Cultural relationships. ii. Formal organisations represent cultural relationships of the social groups working within the organisation. iii. Cooperation and team spirit among the group members is necessary for the achievement of organisational objectives.

15. 5. Decision Theory School: The main contributors and thinkers belonging to this school of thought are Chester Bernard, James March, Herbert Simon, Forrester and Richard Cyert. According to this school, the essence of management lies in decision making. Whatever a manager does is the outcome of a decision made by him through rational choice from among different alternatives available to him. For taking the right decision at right time, the manager has to identify the problem, search for various alternatives, evaluate them and select the best alternative for implementation.

16. Main features of this school of thought are: i. Management is essentially decision-making. ii. The members of any organisation are essentially decision-makers and problem solvers iii. The quality of decisions is a prime factor for increasing the efficiency of the organisation. iv. Management information system and the process and technique of decision making form the subject matter of the study of management.

17. 6. The Mathematical School: The main contributors to this school are Joel Dean, Newmann and Hicks and others. According to this school of management mathematical tools or techniques should be used for solving the managerial problems. The dictum that “what cannot be measured cannot be managed is relevant here. Operations research, linear programming queuing theory, gaming theory, simulation and model building are some of the important techniques suggested by the mathematical school for solving managerial problems.

18. The essential features of this school are: i. Management is concerned with problem solving and it must make use of mathematical tools and techniques for the purpose. ii. The different factors involved in management can be quantified and expressed in the form of models .

19. Limitations: i. The mathematical models cannot be considered as a substitute for sound judgment. ii. There are certain phases of the management process which cannot be expressed in mathematical symbols and formulae.

20. 7. The Systems Approach School: According to this school, management is a system made up of a number of subsystems. This school suggests an integrated approach for solving managerial problems. That is , attention must be paid to the overall effectiveness of the system rather than the effectiveness of any individual sub-system in isolation from the other subsystems.

21. Features of Systems Approach: (i) A system consists of interacting elements. It is set of inter-related and inter-dependent parts arranged in a manner that produces a unified whole. (ii) The various sub-systems should be studied in their inter-relationships rather, than in isolation from each other. (iii) An organisational system has a boundary that determines which parts are internal and which are external. (iv) A system does not exist in a vacuum. It receives information, material and energy from other systems as inputs.

22. 8. The Contingency Approach (situational approach) The major contributors to this school of thought are Joan Woodward, Fiedler, Lorsch and Lawrence. Theorists of the process school, quantitative, behavioural and systems schools often assume that their concepts and techniques have universal applicability, which is not so. These concepts may, work in some situations and not in others. .

23. According to this school of thought management problems are different under different situations. Ther e is no one best way of management under all situations . Different situations demand different solutions. That means , the situation decides the pattern of management. In other words, the pattern of management is contingent (dependent) on the situation.