Barnard, Chester I.

Chester I. Barnard (1886–1961), rightly considered the father of modern administration and “sociologist without portfolio,” revolutionized administrative thinking. Too impatient to spend his last semester at Harvard finishing a science lab, he headed to New Jersey Bell Telephone, eventually becoming president, and later the Rockefeller Foundation's president. Barnard was asked by Boston's Lowell Institute to lecture on administration in 1937; the series was published in possibly the most fundamental work in administration, The Functions of the Executive, in 1938. He was a profound thinker for all administration and leadership, dealing with the essential components of leadership and administration, focusing on the nature of complex organizations, teasing out three indispensable elements necessary to any effective organization, and focusing on revolutionary insights into the fundamental nature of authority and communication in organizations. Such insights apply directly to educational leadership, since we operate in very complex organizations.

Barnard perceived that the functions of the executive were to facilitate developing three indispensable elements for any organization to be effective. The first was to develop a purpose, necessary as a coordinating and unifying principle. Next, in order to implement the mission, the executive had to develop a system of communication as direct as possible to ensure that all members shared knowledge of the mission. The third indispensable element was to develop a system of cooperation, a personal willingness, to achieve the mission. Absent these, organizations are dysfunctional at best.

Barnard dealt with the nature of authority in organizations, reversing millennia-old thinking by noting that authority was the acceptance of a communication by the subordinate. Thus, authority is the characteristic of a communication that causes it to be accepted. This formulation turned thinking regarding the source of power on its head by instituting communication theory as basic to authority, a startling new approach. Barnard delineated four conditions for accepting a communication: the person(s) must understand the communication adequately; the communication cannot be inconsistent with the individual's perception of the organization's purposes; the communication cannot be contrary to the individual's perceptions of his or her own purposes; and the person(s) must be able to carry out the communication both physically and mentally.

Next, Barnard perceived formal organizations as complex social organisms comprising a system of corresponding human efforts and developed the insight that organizations are more than their formal structure, their table of organization. He pointed to the informal subgroups caroming within the formal organization that both breathe life into the organization and protect the individual from it.

The concepts of effectiveness and efficiency comprise another major contribution, the former focusing on achieving the organization's goals, the latter dealing with feelings of satisfaction deriving from membership in the organization, synthesizing Frederick Taylor and Henri Fayol's focus on organizational achievement with Elton Mayo and Mary Parker Follett's emphasis on individual satisfaction.