Management Case

Robbins, Bergman, Stagg and Coulter (2006) state "management involves the efficient and effective completion of organisational work activities with and through other people" (p9)."

To compare and contrast how the scientific and behavioural theories suggest managers to do this.

Organisation composed of people, therefore, the core of any organisation is its personnel and its success depends on people in the organisation.

At the beginning, it is crucial to define manager. Manager is a person who embraces process, seek stability and control, and instinctively try to resolves problems quickly (Zaleznik, 1992), as well as work with and through other people by coordinating their work activities to achieve organisational goals. Efficiency is a vital part of management. It refers to getting the most output from the least amount input. Hence, people are concerned with the efficient use of those resources. Efficiency is doing things right, while effectiveness is doing right things. Effectiveness is completing activities so that organisational goals are attained. Therefore, it must be fulfill these two elements as a manager.

Management is regarded as an art that often makes or break a business. Management theories and practices that we study and use today were the outcome of revolutionary changes of the past triggering the need for new methods. Early nineteenth century, where labour intensive is the key job nature and so the scientific management approach gained great success. It is a method in management theory that determines changes to improve labour productivity. The idea was first devised by Frederick Winslow Taylor. According to Taylor's four principles of management, each worker has their specific tasks and duties to be completed. Managers use time-and-motion studies to eliminate the wasted motion, thus, increase efficiency and productivity. Taylor suggested hiring the best qualified employees and also offering bonus payments when the targets/ goals are exceeded. Frederick W. Taylor assumed everybody is equal such as a machine. He is a mechanical engineer and he had strong believed that there should be "one best way" for each job to be done. He suggested the above mentioned four guidelines for productivity improvement. Just like Taylors's shovel size experiment, he found out that there was a relationship between size of shovel and the weight of the material being moved. Productivity increase if heavy material used small-faced shovel and light material used large-faced shovel. Organisations would gain from the division of labour, the breakdown of jobs into narrow and repetitive tasks. The argument is that the scientific management is biased on managing labor intensive tasks without considering other behavioural aspects such as team work, motivation, and leadership. Go back to the question concerning the statement

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