FOUNDATIONS OF THE MANAGEMENT AS A SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE
Practicing
managers who believe in management as a science are likely to believe that
there are ideal managerial practices for certain situations. That is, when
faced with a managerial dilemma, the manager who believes in the scientific
foundation of his or her craft will expect that there is a rational and
objective way to determine the correct course of action. This manager is likely
to follow general principles and theories and also by creating and testing
hypotheses. For instance, if a manager has a problem with an employee's poor
work performance, the manager will look to specific means of performance improvement,
expecting that certain principles will work in most situations. He or she may
rely on concepts learned in business school or through a company training
program when determining a course of action, perhaps paying less attention to
political and social factors involved in the situation. Many early management
researchers subscribed to the vision of managers as scientists. The scientific
management movement was the primary driver of this perspective. Scientific
management, pioneered by Frederick W. Taylor, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and
others, attempted to discover "the one best way" to perform jobs.
They used scientific processes to evaluate and organize work so that it became
more efficient and effective. Scientific management's emphasis on both reducing
inefficiencies and on understanding the psychology of workers changed manager
and employee attitudes towards the practice of management. See Exhibit 1 for a
summary of the principles of scientific management.
FOUNDATIONS
OF THE MANAGEMENT AS AN ART PERSPECTIVE
x
Practicing
managers who believe in management as an art are unlikely to believe that
scientific principles and theories will be able to implemented in actual
managerial situations. Instead, these managers are likely to rely on the social
and political environment surrounding the managerial issue, using their own
knowledge of a situation, rather than generic rules, to determine a course of
action. For example, as a contrast to the example given previously, a manager
who has a problem with an employee's poor work performance is likely to rely on
his or her own experiences and judgment when addressing this issue. Rather than
having a standard response to such a problem, this manager is likely to
consider a broad range of social and political factors, and is likely to take
different actions depending on the context of the problem. Henry Mintzberg is
probably the most well-known and prominent advocate of the school of thought
that management is an art. Mintzberg is an academic researcher whose work capturing
the actual daily tasks of real managers was ground breaking research for its
time. Mintzberg, through his observation of actual managers in their daily
work, determined that managers did not sit at their desks, thinking,
evaluating, and deciding all day long, working for long, uninterrupted time
periods. Rather, Mintzberg determined that mangers engaged in very fragmented
work, with constant interruptions and rare opportunities to quietly consider
managerial issues. Thus, Mintzberg revolutionized thinking about managers at
the time that his work was published, challenging the prior notion that
managers behaved rationally and methodically. This was in line with the
perspective of management as an art, because it indicated that managers did not
necessarily have routine behaviors throughout their days, but instead used
their own social and political skills to solve problems that arose throughout
the course of work.