Early Management
Management has been practiced for a long time. Organized endeavors directed by people responsible for planning, organizing, leading, and controlling activities have existed for thousands of
years. Let’s look at some of the most interesting examples.
The
Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China are proof that projects of
tremendous scope, employing tens of thousands of people, were completed in
ancient times.1 It took more than 100,000 workers some 20 years to construct a
single pyramid. Who told each worker what to do? Who ensured that there would
be enough stones at the site to keep workers busy? The answer is managers.
Someone had to plan what was to be done, organize people and materials to do
it, make sure those workers got the work done, and impose some controls to
ensure that everything was done as planned.
Another example of early management can be found in the city of
Venice, which
was a major economic and trade center in the 1400s. The Venetians developed an
early form of business enterprise and engaged in many activities common to today’s
organizations. For instance, at the arsenal of Venice, warships were floated along the
canals, and at each stop, materials and riggings were added to the ship.2 Sounds a
lot like a car “floating” along an assembly line, doesn’t it? In addition, the Venetians
used warehouse and inventory systems to keep track of materials, human resource
management functions to manage the labor force (including wine breaks), and an
accounting system to keep track of revenues and costs.
In 1776,
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, in which he argued
the economic advantages that organizations and society would gain from the
division of labor (or job specialization)—that is, breaking down jobs into
narrow and repetitive tasks. Using the pin industry as an example, Smith claimed
that 10 individuals, each doing a specialized task, could produce about 48,000 pins
a day among them. However, if each person worked alone performing each task
separately, it would be quite an accomplishment to produce even 10 pins a day!
Smith concluded that division of labor increased productivity by increasing each
worker’s skill and dexterity, saving time lost in changing tasks, and creating labor-saving inventions and machinery. Job specialization continues to be popular. For
example, think of the specialized tasks performed by members of a hospital
surgery team, meal preparation tasks done by workers in restaurant kitchens, or
positions played by players on a football team.
Starting in the late eighteenth century when machine power was substituted for
human power, a point in history known as the
industrial revolution, it became
more economical to manufacture goods in factories rather than at home. These
large efficient factories needed someone to forecast demand, ensure that enough
material was on hand to make products, assign tasks to people, direct daily
activities, and so forth. That “someone” was a manager: These managers would
need formal theories to guide them in running these large organizations. It wasn’t
until the early 1900s, however, that the first steps toward developing such theories
were taken.
In this module, we’ll look at four major approaches to management theory:
classical, behavioral, quantitative, and contemporary.Keep in
mind that each approach is concerned with trying to explain management from
the perspective of what was important at that time in history and the backgrounds
and interests of the researchers. Each of the four approaches contributes to our
overall understanding of management, but each is also a limited view of what it is
and how to best practice it.
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