Distinguish between science of management and the art of management?

 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

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.