A Controversial Issue Of The Definition Of Management

A precise definition of the term “management”, especially one that encompasses all of the responsibilities held by a person who is a “manager” is not a simple one to give due to the significant impact of individual opinion. The expectation of a manager to oversee the work of employees and tasks whilst keeping the interests of an organization at heart is present in several management scholars’ definitions; the large difference between them is the approach recommended to use while carrying out these responsibilities.

There is yet to be a universally accepted definition of management. Contributors from disciplines such as Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Statistics, and Anthropology have all viewed and described management differently. Where economists have treated management as ‘a factor of production’, sociologists have treated it as ‘a group of persons’; the personification of management by sociologists in comparison to its treatment as a process by economists is an example of the contrast that makes it so difficult to hone in on a unified definition.

One of the larger discussions in the definition of management is the controversy of its classification as an art or as a science. Mary Parker Follet’s popular definition described management as “the art of getting things done through people”. Her definition recognizes the manager as separate from other personnel in an organization and by referring to it as an art, she introduces the necessity of a built skillset to be utilized in order to achieve results. In a more modern writing Paul Hawken refers to “Good management as the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them”. That which is “interesting” is subjective to every workplace and individual, and therefore cannot be defined in an exact manner. This consequently requires a manager to apply knowledge learned with a certain flexibility in order to manage an organization in the best way possible.

The definition of management as a science deals with the implementation of decisions based on collected and analyzed data. Frederick W. Taylor first proposed management’s scientific nature in the late nineteenth century, and led him to devise a system that intended to tackle a motivational problem amongst factory workers by scientifically measuring productivity and setting higher goals for his employees to achieve. Taylor separated the process of planning from execution of tasks and set up planning departments that developed scientific methods of working, established productivity goals, set up reward systems for meeting these goals and then trained his employees on the application of methods in order to achieve their targets. After “careful investigation of each of the many modifications of the same implement [and] after time and motion study has been made of the speed attainable with each of these implements”, findings may be unified to “enable the workman to work faster and with greater ease than he could before”. Taylor summarized his theories on scientific management into four principles of management:

1. The development of a true science.
2. The scientific selection of the workman.
3. The scientific education and development of the workman.
4. Intimate and friendly cooperation between the management and the men.

The implementation of first and third principles is clear in the changes he introduced into the structure of his company whilst testing the outcomes of his actions, as would be done to prove any scientific theory. The second principle is perhaps more relevant to the nineteenth century when employees were perceived as uneducated and therefore were to perform very explicit, simple tasks. This would make the criteria for a job far more specific and therefore it would be easier to dictate a set of characteristics necessary. This is still applicable today of course, though workers in today’s ‘modern’ world are credited with more capabilities to influence the workplace, especially with combinations of disciplines being more common, therefore making selection of workers more difficult to define in an exact manner. The fourth principle, although related to his scientific theory is almost entirely artistic as it relies on a skillset and interpersonal relations that cannot be defined by a set of actions or rules. These principles therefore demonstrate a fusion of the theories, Artistic and Scientific.

Though management is not an exact science because of the variability in human behaviors, it can be seen as a ‘social science’ where patterns and findings have led to verified principles that are universal in nature, while its artistic nature requires an adaptive attributes and skillsets. A balance between the two is necessary in order to achieve the best results.