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proliferation of a bureaucratically-run organizations
which Max Weber said was "part of a movement toward more rational and legal forms of authority" -
Scientific management
Frederick Taylor, a pioneer in managerial analysis and a major figure in the school of scientific management, brought attention to a division of responsibility and a difference between managerial and work performing groups where work duties were previously left primarily to skilled craftspeople. Taylor studied organizations in terms of analyzing each act to produce efficiency and discover the “one right way” to operate. -
Birth of Organizational Sociology, Thanks to Max Weber
Max Weber influenced the study of bureaucracy through his observation of it as a social phenomenon. He touted the bureaucratic organization as the most efficient due to its clear and consistent rules, hierarchy of authority and role descriptions. -
Mooney gets the Administrative Management School going with The Scalar Principle
The early stages of the Administrative Management School as written largely by Luther Gulick and James Mooney. In 1930, Mooney wrote “The Scalar Principle” a series of graded steps. -
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Administrative Management School
management theories began to encompass a broad range of modern administrative functions and the Administrative Management School sought to develop functioning principles of management. -
“Notes on the Theory of Organization”
Gulick wrote “Notes on the Theory of Organization” – Providing details on specific attributes of management. He wrote of the division of work (specialization) and coordination of work (Organization (or purpose) – span of control, one master, homogeneity of task and supervision). He defined management and administration as POSDCORB. -
Brownlow Committee
The Administrative Management School influenced federal government reorganization through the Brownlow Committee. This influence, along with that on the Hoover Commission in1947 “can be considered the most significant direct influence on practical events in government that organization theorists have ever had” (consistent with the broad progressive reform movement of the time) -
“The Functions of the Executive”
Chester Barnard set in motion a shift away from the Administrative Management School towards an understanding of the psychological impacts in the workplace built on the Hawthorne studies. In 1938, he wrote “The Functions of the Executive” and brought attention to organizational processes, people, environment, leadership, goals and values. Barnard focused on how leaders coordinate the activities of an organization and created a typology of incentives interrelated with communication and persuasion -
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Experimental Stage: Social Psychology, Group Dynamics, and Human Relationships
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Kurt Lewin's "action research" makes things more experimentable
Kurt Lewin coined the term "action research". Kurt Lewin identified a field of forces within groups. He found that to change the group, you must change the forces keeping the group in “quasi-stationary equilibrium” by 1. unfreezing 2. changing 3. refreezing. He conducted “action research” on social processes as one of the first to apply experimental methods to the study of human behavior leading to the development of experimental social psychology. -
Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT
Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT established by Kurt Lewin. And was instrumental in establishing the National Training Laboratory (training in group processes) the following year. -
“The Proverbs of Administration" and becoming more analytical
Herbert Simon more sharply divided the paradigms through “The Proverbs of Administration” in which he criticized and broke apart the principles of the Administrative Management School, pointing out uncertainty, ambiguity, and contradiction, and called for a systematic examination of administrative processes in search of a “more empirical and analytical approach to organizational analysis with decision making as the primary focus” which had a strong influence on subsequent work in the field towar -
The Hoover Commission
The Administrative Management School influenced federal government reorganization through the Hoover Commission of 1947. This influence, along with that on the Brownlow Committee in1937 “can be considered the most significant direct influence on practical events in government that organization theorists have ever had” (consistent with the broad progressive reform movement of the time) -
Participative Decision Making
members of the experimental social psychology group set in motion by Lewin conducted an experiment involving factory workers with varying levels of participation in change decisions, leading to the popularization of the concept of participative decision making (PDM) in management theory. After Lewin’s death in 1947 a group diverging from the experimental in favor of learning through experience in groups developed which would contribute to the birth of the field of Organizational Development. -
The Human Relations School
In 1960 Douglas McGreggor wrote The “Human Side of Enterprise” distinguishing two approaches to understanding people within organizations: Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X = humans are lazy and unmotivated by the needs of the organization, management must control the organization’s activities. Theory Y drew upon Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and purported that humans are capable of self-motivation and advocated worker participation. -
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Open Systems Approach and Contingency Theory
contingency theory became dominant based on research that demonstrated that successful organizations can take different forms under different circumstances and sought to define what forms worked best for what circumstances. Much was built on the 1951 study by Trist and Bamforth which defined an organization as a system and sparked further studies and the development of this view. -
Defining what types of organizations fare best in what types of circumstances
Burns and Stalker published Then Management of Innovation and expanded the view that successful organizations adapt their structure based on contingencies and that of mechanistic and organic type organizations, organic types performed better in times of rapidly changing circumstances and mechanistic under stable conditions. -
The Casual Texture
The influential article by Emery and Trist titled The Casual Texture noted the “turbulent” environment in which organizations exist and shifted the view of organization to that of an open system with a need to adapt. -
Defining which types of structure match which types of organizations
1965 Study by Joan Woodard (England) categorized firms by type and matched differing successful organizational structures to each type.
In 1967 study by Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch further developed the understanding of effective structure types by studying the structures of organizations in varying levels of complexity and concluded that the complexity of structure should match the complexity of the environments in which they operate for organizations to be successful. -
Systems Theory applied scientifically to organizations
Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn wrote The Social Psychology of Organizations and applied specific language of systems theory to organizations and the ways that they function. -
Defining the dimensions of contingencies
Perrow provided two dimensions, the predictability of the task and the analyzability of problems encountered, which enabled further detail in the analysis of which structures match which type. -
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Organizational Culture --> TQM
the theme of organizational culture became prominent, followed by a recent trend towards Total Quality Management programs.
