Chapter 1 - Moving Beyond the Bureaucratic Model

Abstract

With the rise of large corporations in the early twentieth century came a strong interest in research in fields such as leadership, management, organizational theory, and capitalism. Frederick Taylor, Henri Fayol, Mary Parker Follet, Chester Bernard, Adam Smith, Herbert Simon, Abraham Maslow, etc. (the list goes on and on), all contributed to the foundational research and set of organizational concepts of the early and mid twentieth century. This era created the formal foundation of management and organizational theory. Although the origins lay in Weber's bureaucracy, church and state autocracy, and military leadership, these were all modified by the social, political, and capitalistic drives in the free world after World War 11. The new theories and concepts such as Theory X, Theory Y, Theory Z, Charismatic and Transformational Leadership, General Systems Theory, and Organizational Linking Pins became popular and a noticeable shift occurred from bureaucracy toward a more benign and malleable organizational structure. Tools such as Management by Exception, Span of Control, Kurt Lewin's Force Field Analysis, and Taichi Ohno's Toyota Production Line techniques helped both managers and workers to implement change throughout their organizations. While some changes occurred, most organizations continued to be hierarchical and as Whyte (1956) noted in his widely read Organization Man , large organizations were still forcing people into molds and stereotypes. Knowledge and information were held close by supervisors and managers and protected as they represented power and authority. Economic progress was relatively steady and, until the 1970s) fairly predictable. During this post-bureaucratic era the key factors were a combination of Tayloristic time and motion management and participative management, slowly bringing some of the workforce into the arena of worker responsibility and empowerment.