IS MANAGEMENT THEORY RELEVANT TO MANAGERS

Is Management Theory Relevant to Managers

Is Management Theory Relevant to Managers

Management

When people meet a leader for the first time, they are not a blank slate. Rather, they have ideas as to what this person may be like and how he or she might behave. General ideas about what leaders are like and how they behave are called implicit leadership theories (ILTs). This term was introduced in 1975 by Eden and Leviatan. Although for a long time, leadership research and practice focused on actual leaders' traits and behaviors, the existence of implicit leadership theories is now widely acknowledged. This theory draws attention to the role of the follower in the process of leadership. Leadership is not only what a leader does but also what a follower makes of it. Research has focused on the contents of implicit leadership theories and their effects. In this chapter, after briefly introducing the most prominent concepts associated with the theories, the focus is on the latter, namely, an outline of how prior research may influence management decisions.

Management Theories

Follett's theories were bolstered by the writings of John Dewey and Kurt Lewin, but perhaps most significantly by the studies of Elton Mayo and colleagues at Western Electric Company's Hawthorne (Illinois) plant. From 1924 to 1932, Mayo and his colleagues dismissed the assumption that wages and physical working conditions did not drive employee motivation and productivity above all others. Mayo and colleagues also found that the amount of work completed was determined in part by workers' social capacities and their self-perceived importance to management; they also found that social codes, conventions, traditions, and routine or customary ways of responding to situations influenced effective work relations. Their studies prompted further research of behavior as the human relations approach to management escalated in profile between 1930 and 1950.

Chester I. Barnard, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, influenced a third theoretical perspective of management—the management behavior theory within a social science framework. In 1938, Barnard amalgamated scientific management and humanistic concepts, resulting in a new view of effectiveness and efficiency. Barnard emphasized the importance of management's leadership role and organizational cooperation, but he recognized the influence of the individual, social groupings, and surrounding conditions on organizational leadership.

Thus, he considered authority delegated from the bottom of the organization rather than from the top. Using a functionalist's argument (that systems function in order to satisfy certain human needs), Barnard considered organizational effectiveness as having to do with achievement of goals, which are of two kinds, physical (environmental) and social. He suggests that the organizational systems of effectiveness and efficiency are linked together through an identifiable, stable system of communications, maintained by the executive. He considered executives of complex organizations to have three chief functions:

The executive preserves organizational communication through an organizational division of labor and the control or supervision of the organizational whole, which includes effective selection, promotion, demotion, and dismissal of personnel. The executive also maintains an informal communication system involving ...