Management Theories

Professional management positions in schools evolved after other approaches failed to administer effectively the growing, complex, urban systems of public education. There have been four major theoretical shifts in management thinking, the roots of educational administration.

Frederick Taylor was credited with founding the “scientific management” or “efficiency” movement; this was the first movement considered to have professionalized school superintendency. In his 1917 text, Scientific Management, Taylor stated that that the waste and inefficiency prevalent in most industries was rife in the educational system as well. He emphasized organization—including scientific analysis of all aspects of work, the necessity of job descriptions, and clarification regarding recruitment, training, appraisal, and employee rewards—as the solution for making operations leaner and more effective. Time study, price rate, separation of planning from performance, and scientific methods of work were Taylor's chief principles of management. When those principles were applied to education, organization and efficiency would increase, but Taylor's critics claimed that education was becoming a production process, [Page 636]with schools as factories and students as raw materials en route to becoming products—all under the guidance of teachers being closely monitored by managerial staff who specified production goals and controlled all methods of achieving those goals.

Influenced by Taylor's attitudes toward management and workers, Ellwood Cubberley concluded that the duties of the superintendent were to organize and direct the work of the schools, lead the school board and staff, arbitrate between the board and staff, and supervise instruction. In 1949, Henry Fayol described a set of common processes and principles adopted by educators as descriptive of the functions of administrators. The processes included planning, organization, commanding, coordination, and control. Thus Taylor and Fayol addressed the same efficiency and productivity concerns using the scientific method—Taylor for the bottom of the organization pyramid up and Fayol for the top of the organization down.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the human relations movement in management developed as a reaction to Taylor's heavy emphasis on production and the apparent lack of respect for workers. Mary Parker Follett, the most influential contributor to the philosophy of the period, held in 1924 that the fundamental problem of any organization was the building and maintenance of dynamic, yet harmonious, human relationships. Among the first to speak out on the value and dignity of satisfied workers, she helped lay the groundwork for organizational behavior as an interdisciplinary science. Perhaps her best known contribution is her four principles of organization. Follett maintained that adherence to the principles should contribute to dynamic, harmonious human relationships; there should be direct contact with workers in the early stages of their work; coordination of work activities is a reciprocal and a continuing process; and, in dealing with conflict, which Follett considered a normal process in management, she urged the creative solution or problem-solving approach, “integration,” rather than domination or compromise.

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.

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