Management Principles

Theories of management:

Learning the skills about business management may have started in recent times but the practices have been around for a long long time around. A Business Management Theory is similar to the general concept of management which refers to directing and controlling a group of people for the achievement of a collective objective which is beyond the scope of individual effort (http://www.economywatch.com/business/business-management-theory.html) .

While discussing about theories of management, few obvious names and their management theories comes up and they are Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management, Elton Mayo's Hawthorne Works experiments and the human relations movement, Max Weber's idealized bureaucracy, and Henri Fayol's views on administration.

Frederick Taylor, with his theories of Scientific Management, started the era of modern management. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Frederick Taylor was decrying the " awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men" as a national loss. He advocated a change from the old system of personal management to a new system of scientific management. Under personal management, a captain of industry was expected to be personally brilliant. Taylor claimed that a group of ordinary men, following a scientific method would outperform the older "personally brilliant" captains of industry. (http://www.accel-team.com/scientific/scientific_02.html)

Max Weber postulated that western civilization was shifting from "wertrational" (or value oriented) thinking, affective action (action derived from emotions), and traditional action (action derived from past precedent to "zweckational" (or technocratic) thinking. He believed that civilization was changing to seek technically optimal results at the expense of emotional or humanistic content.

Viewing the growth of large-scale organizations of all types during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Weber developed a set...