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Scientific Management - Frederick Taylor - U.S.
Frederick Taylor published "The Principles of Scientific Management" in 1911. Taylor asserted that scientific management involved a division of labor between the responsibilities of the managerial group and the group that performed the work. The role of management was to gather information on work processes, analyze it, and derive guidlines for the most efficient way to perform tasks. Workers were then to be selected and trained in these procedures so they could maximize their output. -
Bureaucracy - Max Weber - Germany
Max Weber's "Economy and Society" is published in 1922. Due to this and his other famous work "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" Weber is credited with founding organizational sociology or the analysis of complex organizations. Weber wrote that the fully developed bureaucracy had five characteristics. This freed the organization from personal motives and provided technical advantages. -
Hawthorne Studies - Elton Mayo & W. Lloyd Warner - Chicago
The Hawthorne Studies were a series of experiements conducted at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company. In contrast to the Scientific Management and Principles of Administration, the Hawthorne Studies show that social and psychological factors influence employee motivation and productivity -
Administrative Management School - Gulick & Mooney - U.S.
Luther Gulick and James Mooney were the principal authors among a group of writers known as the administrative management school. This group asserted that their principals would provide effective organization. Gulick's work discussed the division and cordination of work. Mooney's work, published in 1930, stated that an organization must be like a scale, a graded series of steps, in terms of levels of authority and corresponding responsibilities. -
Organizations as an "Economy of Incentives" - Chester Barnard - U.S.
Barnard published "The Functions of the Executive" in 1938 in which he defined an organization as "a system of consciously coordinated activities or forces of two or more persons." He diverged from classical principals and sought to describe the emperical reality of organizations -
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - Abraham Maslow - New York
Maslow published his paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" in 1943 in which he argued that human needs and motives fall into a hierarchy, ranging from lower-order to highter-order needs. The highest level, self-actualization, refers to the need to fulfill one's own potential. Maslow's theory influenced many other theories due to its emphasis on the motivating potential of higher-order needs. -
Administrative Behavior - Herbert Simon - U.S.
Simon had numerous publications including "The Proverbs of Administration" in 1946 in which he criticized the principles of the administrative management school. He called for a more systematic examination of adminstrative processes and emphasized analysis of actual behavior -
Social Psychology & Group Dynamics - Kurt Lewin - U.S.
In his article written in 1957, Lewin coined the term "group dynamics." He was a leading researcher on the influence of leaders on groups and group influence on member attitudes and behavior. Lewin developed ideas about attitude and behavior change based on "force field analysis" and the concept of "unfreezing, moving, and refreezing" group and individual attitudes and behaviors -
Theories X & Y - Douglas McGregor - U.S.
McGregor published "The Human Side of Enterprise" in 1960 where he argued that management in industry was guided by "Theory X" which saw workers are passive and without motivation. It also stated that management should adopt "Theory Y" which states that workers are self-motivated. "Theory Y" would take advantage of worker capacity for self-motivation and self-directon -
Contingency Theory - Emery, Trist, Katz, Kahn, Burns, Stalker, Perrow, Thompson, et al. - U.S. & Great Britain
All of these individuals contributed to the idea of organizations adapting to contingencies like their operating environment. They discovered that organizations structured themselves differently accross different industries. They refuted the idea of a best way to do things in favor of an organization operating based on the factors that influence it (contengencies). -
Distinction Between Public & Private Organizations - Hal G Rainey - Georgia
Despite much work in the field of organizational theory their is a call for further research as those like Rainey point to a gap between literature on public vs. private organizations. He states there is still an incomplete analysis of public organizations and the influences of their political and institutional environments
