Participative Management versus Authoritarian Management Essay

Participative Management versus Authoritarian Management - Essay Example Management style is characterised by the degree of empowerment of team members, his focusing either on people or tasks, etc. The correct and appropriate management style is able to yield very good results. Management style is in many aspects the product of individual personal traits of the manager; however this does not mean there are no other components influencing it. These components constitute subjective part of the management style, yet it always has a common objective basis. Objectively, whichever management style is chosen by the manager, this choice is determined by the goal, the team and the situation. A lot of management theories have been developed during the decades of studying the very phenomenon of managing people. Some of these theories singled out, among others, authoritative and participative management styles which were often contrasted to each other. For example, Likert’s System 4 theory of management named four broad management styles which were â€Å"forming a continuum, with autocratic, task-centered leadership at one end and democratic, participative, employee-centered at the other†. (Morris&Pavett 1992, 169) W. Schneider identified four types of orgnisational cultures (control, collaboration, competence, and cultivation) (cited from: Schulz, J.W., Hauck, L.C.& Hauck, R.M. 2001, 2), and each of them presupposes the prevalence of particular management style. Authoritative managers are characteristic for control cultures with their order, predictability and conservatism and participative managers often can be found in the companies with collaboration culture that treasure the quality of relationships and aim to build highly cohesive teams with hight participation in running the company. Forecasting a manager’s effectiveness is much more difficult than e.g. determining personal traits that are the most characteristic for the leaders. Situational factors were eventually taken into

THINKING SKILLS AND GENERAL MANAGEMENT Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

THINKING SKILLS AND GENERAL MANAGEMENT - Essay Example Finally, a conclusion shall synthesize the main points of the paper and demonstrate the continued use and viability of systematic management in post-modern management practices. Taylorism is a method of management which was formulated by Fredrick Winslow Taylor in 1911, as in the title of his monograph The Principles of Scientific Management, which aimed to enhance labor productivity and manufacturing efficiency (Zahir, Themistocleous, & Love, 2003). Taylor's background as an industrial engineer in the USA later earned him the title of the "Father of Scientific Management" (Schroeder, 2003). He analyzed worker's behaviors across industries he was involved in and determined that "One Best Way" could achieve a higher rate of production that was standardized and so cut costs to the company. He also develop a time and motion study wherein he broke down each job in a manufacturing process into its component elements and measured the duration of each component to a hundredth of a minute. This reduced the number of movements or actions that a worker needed to make in order to perform each component of the overall job. Each component could then be standardized acro ss all workers performing that job, reducing "wasted" action and increasing productivity and subsequently company profits.It was also found that the reduction in the number of actions needed to perform a total job would dramatically reduce worker fatigue (Schroeder, 2003). Taylor is noted for his study into the use of shovels, he observed that workers used the same type of shovel for a range of materials. Through systematic evaluation Taylor determined that 211/2 lb was an ideal load for a shovel, and then located or designed a variety of shovels for each type of material that could scoop that amount. Ultimately, Taylor sought to portray industrial management as an academic discipline, so that evidence-based research could be used to make informed decisions about the most effective and efficient way of maintaining a cooperative and innovate workforce that could achieve maximum productivity at minimal costs.In summary, Taylor's theory of scientific management consisted of four distin ct principles: 1. Instead of the "rule-of-thumb" of traditional work methods, tasks should be grounded in the scientific study of each task and its component parts. 2. Use systematic and standard methods to recruit, select, train, evaluate and develop each employee instead of workers continuing to train them in a passive and non-standardized manner. 3. Collaborate with workers so that systematic and standardized methods of completing a task are followed. 4. Delegate work amongst managers and workers in an equal manner to ensure that managers implement scientific management principles when planning work, and to ensure that workers actually follow-through on task procedures. In this way, Taylor approached management of work tasks as a scientific problem. After Taylor, the rapid progress of technological development paved the way for advances in statistical analyses of scientific problems. This progress led to the improvement of Taylor's systematic principles to provide more stringent quality control during the 1920s and 1930s (Miner, 2002). Quality