Henry Mintzberg: The Classical Theories Of Management

Management is a complex process, where the aim is to achieve a common goal and the best efficiency through various means. A manager is someone who gets things done with the aid of people and other resources (Stewart, 1967). There are many different views on management, however not one view would be effective for all organizations and managers, so the aim of this essay is to critically discuss the classical theorist views of management in an attempt to explain and understand why different schools of management would be useful in different situations depending on internal and external factors that impact organizations. There are three main schools of management such as Classical Theorists, the Human Relations and the Empiricists. Henri Fayol

Accordingly, he demonstrated that traditional assumptions about manager’s role are not true and he supported his views with some research evidence including his own research, which shows that management is much more than just planning, commanding, coordinating and controlling as proposed by Fayol, so he called Fayol’s elements of management a “folklore”. For instance, from his studies Mintzberg (1975) shows that managers spent most of their time communicating with subordinates and outsiders rather than spending the time planning what they should do. But, when they have to plan in advance, they seem to do it implicitly in the context of daily actions, not in some abstract process that would take them a long time to complete. Although, Fayol (1945) argued that a manager has no regular duties to perform, Mintzberg (1975) found in studies that managers are involved in a number of duties including negotiations, ceremony, rituals and processing information that links organization with its environment. Therefore, this evidence has led to the development of three roles of a manager such as interpersonal roles, informational roles and decision-making roles. The interpersonal role is about how managers deal with people, informational roles relates to communication information and the last one means making decisions and solving

This theory was popular in manufacturing industries between 1880s and 1990s. The main components of Scientific Management are rationality, analysis, logic, elimination of waste and standardized jobs, where all components help to boost efficiency. He believed that this approach would encourage motivation and “piece work”, which is an incentive bonuses payment based on the level of output produced. However, Taylor’s theory is heavily criticized for ignoring workers psychological needs and being dehumanizing, boring and inflexible and treating people as another resource. Taylor’s work is similar to Fayol to some extent, because both are reductionist. Despite the negatives, Scientific management still have an important impact on different businesses nowadays. For instance, McDonalds uses principles of Scientific management such as offering a competitive wage and promotion programs where employees hard work is rewarded and