Management Styles

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I will provide you with information regarding the three different types of management - based on the information, it will be up to you to determine what you believe would be the most effective to use in the criminal justice system.

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT THEORY
Scientific management, Taylorism or the Classical Perspective is a method in management theory which determines changes to improve labour productivity
decisions based upon tradition and rules of thumb should be replaced by precise procedures developed after careful study of an individual at work. In management literature today

Scientific Management Theory
(1890-1940)
At the turn of the century, the most notable organizations were large and industrialized. Often they included ongoing, routine tasks that manufactured a variety of products. The United States highly prized scientific and technical matters, including careful measurement and specification of activities and results. Management tended to be the same. Frederick Taylor developed the :scientific management theory" which espoused this careful specification and measurement of all organizational tasks. Tasks were standardized as much as possible. Workers were rewarded and punished. This approach appeared to work well for organizations with assembly lines and other mechanistic, routinized activities.

GENERAL APPROACH OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENTo
Standard method for performing each job.
Select workers with appropriate abilities for each job.
Training for standard task.
Planning work and eliminating interruptions.
Wage incentive for increase output.

CONTRIBUTIONS
Scientific approach to business management and process improvement
Importance of compensation for performance
Began the careful study of tasks and jobs
Importance of selection and training

ELEMENTS
labor is defined and authority/responsibility is legitimized/official
Positions placed in hierarchy and under authority of higher level
Selection is based upon technical competence, training or experience
Actions and decisions are recorded to allow continuity and memory
Management is different from ownership of the organization
Managers follow rules/procedures to enable reliable/predictable behavior

scientific management. This sort of task-oriented optimization of work tasks is nearly ubiquitous today in menial industries, most notably in assembly lines and fast-food restaurants.

Division of labor
Unless people manage themselves, somebody has to take care of administration, and thus there is a division of work between workers and administrators. One of the tasks of administration is to select the right person for the right job:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work.[citation needed]

This view?match the worker to the job?has resurfaced time and time again in management theories.

DISADVANTAGES OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

Criticism
Applications of scientific management sometimes fail to account for two inherent difficulties:

It ignores individual differences: the most efficient way of working for one person may be inefficient for another;
It ignores the fact that the economic interests of workers and management are rarely identical, so that both the measurement processes and the retraining required by Taylor's methods would frequently be resented and sometimes sabotaged by the workforce.
Both difficulties were recognized by Taylor, but are generally not fully addressed by managers who only see the potential improvements to efficiency. Taylor believed that scientific management cannot work unless the worker benefits. In his view management should arrange the work in such a way that one is able to produce more and get paid more, by teaching and implementing more efficient procedures for producing a product.

Although Taylor did not compare workers with machines, some of his critics use this metaphor to explain how his approach to be made efficient by removing unnecessary or wasted effort. However, some would say that this approach ignores the complications introduced because workers are necessarily human: personal needs, interpersonal difficulties, and the very real difficulties introduced by making jobs so efficient that workers have no time to relax. As a result, workers worked harder, but became dissatisfied with the work environment. Some have argued that this discounting of worker personalities led to the rise of labor unions.

It can also be said that the rise in labor unions is leading to a push on the part of industry to accelerate the process of automation, a process that is undergoing a renaissance with the invention of a host of new technologies starting with the computer and the Internet. This shift in production to machines was clearly one of the goals of Taylorism, and represents a victory for his theories.

However, tactfully choosing to ignore the still controversial process of automating human work is also politically expedient, so many still say that practical problems caused by Taylorism led to its replacement by the human relations school of management in 1930. Others (Braverman 1974) insisted that human relations did not replace taylorism but that both approaches are rather complementary: taylorism determining the actual organization of the work process and human relations helping to adapt the workers to the new procedures.

However, Taylor's theories were clearly at the root of a global revival in theories of scientific management in the latter two decades of the 20th century, under the moniker of 'corporate re engineering'. As such, Taylor's ideas can be seen as the root of a very influential series of developments in the workplace, with the goal being the eventual elimination of industry's need for unskilled, and later perhaps, even most skilled labor in any form, directly following Taylor's recipe for reconstructing a process. This has come to be known as commodification, and no skilled profession, even medicine, has proven to be immune from the efforts of Taylors followers, the 're engineers' - who are often called derogatory names such as 'bean counters'.

THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

Environment

Taylor's work was strongly influenced by his social/historical period. His lifetime (1856-1915) was during the Industrial Revolution. The overall industrial environment of this period is well documented by the Dicken's classic Hard Times or Sinclar's The Jungle. Autocratic management was the norm. The manufacturing community had the idea of interchangeable parts for almost a century. The sciences of physics and chemistry were bringing forth new miracles on a monthly basis.

One can see Taylor turning to "science" as a solution to the inefficiencies and injustices of the period. His idea of breaking a complex task into a sequence of simple subtasks closely mirrors the interchangeable parts ideas pioneered by Eli Whitney earlier in the century. Furthermore, the concepts of training the workers and developing "a hearty cooperation" represented a significant improvement over the feudal human relations of the time.

Successes

Scientific management met with significant success. Taylor's personal work included papers on the science of cutting metal, coal shovel design, worker incentive schemes and a piece rate system for shop management. Scientific management's organizational influences can be seen in the development of the fields of industrial engineering, personnel, and quality control.

From an economic standpoint, Taylorism was an extreme success. Application of his methods yielded significant improvements in productivity. Improvements such as Taylor's shovel work at Bethlehem Steel Works (reducing the workers needed to shovel from 500 to 140) were typical.

HUMAN RELATIONS MANAGEMENT
This is also known as democratic management
Detailed attention is given to known as human factors - each person and situation is treated differently

Human Relations Movement - Hawthorne Works Experiments

Description

If Taylor believed that science dictated that the highest productivity was found in "the one best way" and that way could be obtained by controlled experiment, Elton Mayo's experiences in the Hawthorne Works Experiments disproved those beliefs to the same extent that Michelson's experiments in 1926 disproved the existence of "ether." (And with results as startling as Rutherford's.)

The Hawthorne Studies started in the early 1920's as an attempt to determine the effects of lighting on worker productivity. When those experiments showed no clear correlation between light level and productivity the experiments then started looking at other factors. Working with a group of women, the experimenters made a number of changes, rest breaks, no rest breaks, free meals, no free meals, more hours in the work-day / work-week, fewer hours in the work-day / work-week. Their productivity went up at each change. Finally the women were put back to their original hours and conditions, and they set a productivity record.

This strongly disproved Taylor's beliefs in three ways. First, the experimenters determined that the women had become a team and that the social dynamics of the team were a stronger force on productivity than doing things "the one best way." Second, the women would vary their work methods to avoid boredom without harming overall productivity. Finally the group was not strongly supervised by management, but instead had a great deal of freedom.

These results made it clear that the group dynamics and social makeup of an organization were an extremely important force either for or against higher productivity. This caused the call for greater participation for the workers, greater trust and openness in the working environment and a greater attention to teams and groups in the work place.

Environment

The human relations movement that stemmed from Mayo's Hawthorne Works Experiments was borne in a time of significant change. The Newtonian science that supported "the one best way" of doing things was being strongly challenged by the "new physics" results of Michalson, Rutherford and Einstein. Suddenly, even in the realm of "hard science" uncertainty and variation had found a place. In the work place there were strong pressures for shorter hours and employee stock ownership. As the effects of the 1929 stock market crash and following depression were felt, employee unions started to form.

Successes

While Taylor's impacts were the establishment of the industrial engineering, quality control and personnel departments, the human relations movement's greatest impact came in what the organization's leadership and personnel department were doing. The seemingly new concepts of "group dynamics", "teamwork" and organizational "social systems" all stem from Mayo's work in the mid-1920's.

Human Relations Movement
(1930-today)
Eventually, unions and government regulations reacted to the rather dehumanizing effects of these theories. More attention was given to individuals and their unique capabilities in the organization. A major belief included that the organization would prosper if its workers prospered as well. Human Resource departments were added to organizations. The behavioral sciences played a strong role in helping to understand the needs of workers and how the needs of the organization and its workers could be better aligned. Various new theories were spawned, many based on the behavioral sciences (some had name like theory "X", "Y" and "Z").

SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

THE PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF SYSTEMS THEORY

Much of systems theory resembles the scientific method: you hypothesize, design a controlled experiment, collect data, and analyze data. The purpose is to maintain the use of science in management to obtain "real time" results that can be used instantaneously to affect control in the organization (some have even accused systems theory of being "science in management" rather than a "science of management"). The goal is to maintain your attention on the whole at all costs. For managers, this means:

1. Define the company as a system
2. Establish system objectives (performance criteria)
3. Identify wider systems (the environment)
4. Create formal subsystems (including a humanistic, psychosocial subsystem)
5. Integrate the subsystems with the whole system (if not the subsystems themselves, whatever interrelates them with other subsystems)

SOME BETTER-KNOWN EXAMPLES OF SYSTEMS THEORIES

Robert Blake & Jane Mouton (1964) developed a theory known as the "Managerial Grid". It is based on two variables: focus on task and focus on relationships. The grid includes five possible leadership styles based on concern for task or concern for people. Using a specially designed testing instrument, people can be assigned a numerical score depicting their concern for each variable. Numerical indications, such as 9,1 or 9,9 or 1,9 or 1,1 or 5,5 can then be plotted on the grid using horizontal and vertical axes. Although their work is also often classified as a Leadership Theory, it is typical of the specially designed analysis and instruments of the systems theorists.

Victor Vroom (1964) studied the motivational and decision-making processes and developed what has come to be known as expectancy theory, (also known as equity theory as developed by Homans and other social psychologists). this approach attempts to measure the degree of desire to perform a behavior rather than the need to perform a behavior. Motivation strength is calculated by multiplying the perceived value of the result of performing a behavior by the perceived probability that the result will ...