Summary- History Of Management Thought- PEOPLE AT WORK: THE MICRO VIEW

PEOPLE AT WORK: THE MICRO VIEW

• Lindeman coined the phrase “participant observer “to describe the role of an observer planted inside a group to corroborate the finding of an outside observer.
• Jacob Moreno provided an analytical technique, sociometry, with had as is purpose “a process of classification, which is calculated to bring individuals together who are capable of harmonies interpersonal relationships and so create a social group which can function at the maximum efficiency and with a minimum of disruptive tendencies and processes.
• Psychodrama and sociodSrama were also the contribution of J. L. Moreno, and together these ideas formed as basis for role playing techniques and analysis of interpersonal relation.
• Another important construct for analyzing group behavior was that of group dynamic. Credit for originating this concepts is generally given to Kurt Lewin ( 1890-1947), although there is evidence that Moreno substantially influenced Lewin’s work. A group was never at a steady state at equilibrium, but was in a continuous process of mutual adaptation that Lewin called ‘quasi-stasionary equilibrium. “An analogy relatively stationary but there is nevertheless gradual movement and change.
• Lewin saw behavior as a function of the person and the environment or field. Using terms such as “life space,” space of free movement,” and field forces Lewin on that changes were more easily induced through group participation and discussion than through lectures and individual methods
• In 1945, Lewin founded the research center for Group dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1948 the center was move to university of Michigan
• Briefly, Lindeman, Moreno and Lewin brought a new foccuss to the group rather than the individual. They work, reflecting Gestalt psychology, led to further studies of social change, social control, collective behavior and in general, the effects of the group on the individual. Research move from the static state of the individual in isolation to the dynamic state of the individual in interaction with others.
• The 1930’s had witnessed the emergence of a more favorable political climate for organize labor in which explicit recognition of the role of the worker in industry was required.
• Human relations training picking popular during this period and was oriented toward overcoming barriers to communication enhancing interpersonal skills
• Joseph N.Scanlon’s (1899-1956) ideas were first implemented at Adamson company. Scanlon work out a union management productivity plan that provided for worker bonuses for tangible savings in labor costs
• According to Scanlon, such participation was not to create a filling of belonging or a sense or participation, but was management’s explicit recognition of a definite role for the worker and union representatives in suggesting improvements.
• James Lincoln (1883-1965) pleaded for and gave experience-based confirmation of appeals to the individual in his Incentive Management
• Lincoln’s plan sought to develop employees to their highest ability and then to reward them with a bonus for their contributions to the success of the company
• Walker and Guest found that assembly line workers rebelled against the anonymity of their work even though they declared themselves satisfied with their rate of pay and job security
• As a result of the pioneering efforts of Walker and Guest, job enlargement and job rotation assumed a new focus in studies of industrial behavior. Job enlargement served to relieve monotony, enhance skill levels and increase the workers’ feeling of commitment to the total product
• James C. Worthy (1910-1998), drawing on his experiences in Sears, Roebuck organization, argued for “flatter”, less complex organizational structures that would maximize administrative decentralization and thereby lead to improved subordinate attitudes, encourage individual responsibility and initiative, and provide outlets for individual self expression and creativity
• William Given (1886-1968) and Charles McCormick (1876-1970) using the catchphrase “bottom up management”, given sought to develop and apply a philosophy of participation that essayed “to release the thinking and encourage the initiative of all those down from the bottom up”
• McCormick’s plan of participation became a model for developing junior executive boards in three score or more companies by 1938. The Junior board conducted a market investigation took homemaker’s ideas into account, and came up with a new design that was immediately accepted by the senior board and market place
• In brief, participation in decision making received greater and greater acclaim during this period of management history. Participation was viewed as democracy in action, opening communication channels, diffusing authority, and motivating people to give a greater commitment of themselves to organizational goals. Participate management was a challenge to hierarchical, unilateral authority and sought to bring group forces into play
• The Micro facet of people and organizations may be characterized as the generation and extension of significant research into industrial behavior. The emphasis was on people in the group, on socialmotivation, on redesigning organizational tasks to yield greater worker satisfaction, on participation in decision making, and on leadership as a way of combining people and production

PEOPLE ATWORK: THE MACRO VIEW

William Foote Whyte (1914 – 2000)
conducted one of the earliest and most perceptive studies of the interaction of the social system with the technical-work system (a study of restaurants) used status or the relative prestige of a job in the jobholder’s eyes or in the regard of others as a key concept in his analysis developed other nuances of statues on the job, such as differentiations among cooks who prepared different types of dishes, but his main argument focused on the use of knowledge of social science to improve performance as well as human relations by (1) understanding the nature and functioning of the social system, and (2) developing teamwork through incentives that fostered collaboration rather than conflict.

Whyte’s work was a contribution to the analysis of the interaction of the work system with the social system in an effort to reduce the interpersonal frictions that arose when these two systems met

E. Wight Bakke (1903 – 1971)
Did an empirical investigation of a New England telephone company found five major elements of “bonds of organization” :

• the functional specifications or the organization’s definitions of jobs and departmental relations;
• the status-system bond, which placed people in a vertical hierarchy of authority and deference with respect to direction;
• a communication system, which accomplished the transmission of essential information;
• the reward and penalty system, which provided incentives and controls in order to achieve organizational objectives;
• the organization charter bond, which included all those elements that contributed to giving the organization a “character” or a quality of entity
• concluded that all five bonds could be analyzed to demonstrate that the formal and informal systems interacted to influence human behavior and that any initiation of change would affect both sides of the equation
• attempted to classify the process by which the two systems, formal and informal, could be brought into conjunction (fusion), of which the elements were the “socializing process” and the “personalizing process”
• was not giving answers to specific human relations problems, yet was proposing a conceptual diagnostic tool for organizational analysis

Elliot Jaques (1917 – 2003)
conducted an extensive case study of the Glacier Metal Company based on Lewin’s field theory and examined industrial changes as they moved through work groups into the larger community

New Tools for Macro Analysis

Herbert A. Simon (1916 – 2001)
opened another facet of organizational analysis with Administrative Behavior, which was greatly influenced by the writings of Chester Barnard believed that management was decision making and substituted “administrative man” for “economic man” of classical economic theory wrote of limits that “bound the area of rationality” and “the environment that bounds the area of rationality of the person making the decision” postulated that individuals were limited in their ability to grasp the present and anticipate the future and that these limits to rationality made it difficult to achieve maximizing decisions reflected primarily the influence of Barnard, especially on authority, inducements, and communications, and to a lesser degree the ideas of Follett sought a science of decision making from the standpoint of the psychology of human choice and logic wrote the influential Organizations (with James March)

George C. Homans
Divided the total social system of a group into an external system, composed of forces or environmental factors such as policies, job descriptions, work flow, and so forth, outside the group an internal system, consisted of elements within the life of the group that could influence the external system Categorized various dimensions of group behavior that interacted and could be found in both the internal and the external system:
activities, what was formally required of members or behavior that informally emerged interactions, any transaction between any two or more group members that could be either organizationally prescribed or informally originated sentiments, an intangible, elusive concept that had to be inferred from observing behavior . Talcott Parsons drew together the ideas of Weber, Pareto, Alfred Marshall, and Durkheim developed a “voluntaristic theory of social action”

The Essence of the Micro View

The micro facet of people and organizations may be characterized as the generation and extension of significant research into industrial behavior.

• The view emphasized on people in group;
• social motivation;
• re-designing organizational tasks to yield greater worker satisfaction;
• participation in decision making;
• leadership as a way of combining people and production.

The Essence of the Macro View

The emergence of a number of individuals that paved the way for organization theory and a view of the organization as a socio-technical system