The Neoclassical Management Theory

In the early 1920s various classical management theorists devoted a great deal of time and resources exploring how a specific job was done, what steps were undertaken by an employee to complete a task, and the amount of time it took a worker to complete a task using various methods. Using the data acquired from this research they devised the most effective ways to complete tasks. However these accomplishments focused on the science of creating a specialized work processes and workforce skillsets but completely neglected the social and behavioral aspects of employees. Thus critics began to scrutinize classical management theory for its potentially harmful effects on workers. It was not so much the methodology of finding effective way to complete

The premise of this incorporation was based on the idea that the role of management is to use employees to get things done in organizations. Rather than focusing on production, structures and technology the neoclassical theory is concerned with the employee. Unlike classical management theory, the neoclassical theory was concerned with answering questions related to the best way to motivate, structure and support employees within the organization. Studies conducted by neoclassical theorists reveled that social factors such as employee relationships were an important factor for managers to consider. It concluded that for any manager who neglected to account the need of his or her employee, could expect to deal with results of resistance and lower performance. Employees need to find some essential value in their jobs besides completing standardized tasks which they certainly were not getting from classical management. Rather than placing workers into job roles were they completed one specific task all day with little to no interaction with other coworkers neoclassical management structures employees in such a way that they would frequently share tasks, information and knowledge with one another. The conclusion was that once workers were placed into this alternate structure their needs for

There are two main sources of neoclassical theory: the human relations movement and the behavioral movement. To better understand how these two movements influenced the management thought we need to look deeper on how psychologists and sociologists viewed human behaviors and relations. The Human Relations movement arose from the studies of several sociologist and social psychologists who concern themselves with how people relate and interact within a group. It was a direct result of the Hawthorne studies conducted by Elton Mayo and Frits J. Roethlisberger. The Hawthorne studies were designed to find ways to increase employee productivity by evaluating working conditions related to things such as length of work and rest periods. During such evaluations researchers found out that productivity levels of those participating in the evaluation increased, but not directly due to the conditions researchers such as Mayo and Roethlisberger imposed. Because they could not correlate the increase in productivity to the working conditions that they were controlling in the experiment alternative causes were explored. Eventually, researchers attributed the increase in productivity to the elevated moral of the group that was observed during the experiment. This morale and productivity boost was indirectly caused by the changes researchers made to the working conditions including