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Organizational Spr2006 Sess06

Index Card Assignment due today

What motivates you to get a job done. Think about three different things you have accomplished. List them. Think about the things that motivated you to do those things. List five things that motivate you to get work done.

Group Assignment for today

For your groups assigned BOINC project: (1) evaluate the instructions for joining a project and make specific recommendations for improvements; (2) put together a proposal for how your group might create value (e.g. publicize and attract contributors to) for your BOINC project. Managers are responsible for providing a progress report on your group's progress.

Managers

You should have your group company statistics in place

Agenda

• Collect questions
• Start index card exercise
• Reports on BOINC
• Reports on company interests
• Lecture on basic management models

Classical Management Approaches

• Encompasses two important early approaches to management
  • Taylor's (1913) Scientific Management
  • Fayol's (1901) Administrative Science
• Very different approaches
  • But each treats organizations as efficient machines
  • There is nothing new about doing this
    • Strict divisions of Labor and Hierarchy have existed as long as there has been the power to do so
    • Servants, laborers, soldiers, and slaves are just a few of the names we give people at or near the bottom or these hierarchies
    • Hierarchical subassemblies are, as Simon observes, the principle emergent mode of organization
  • Understanding such organizations became more important as human society became more complex
    • Ocean trade
    • Mass production
  • Fayol and Taylor approaches resonated with managers of the early 20th century
    • But if they are still widely used today
    • It is because they describe approaches to management that, paradoxically, are both
      • rather inhuman, in that they treat people as machines
      • very human, as they allow us to simplify large organizations into something comprehensible
    • Both describes management perspective of how organizations work productively
      • Managers manage information and resources. They know rather than do.
      • Workers are passive receptors of "orders". They do rather than know. They do not respond, provide feedback, etc.
    • Worker perspectives on how the work actually got done were probably somewhat different than this, but they didn't have the resources or power to create a theory.
  • This top-down flow of information from management to employee is epitomized in factories
    • Hierarchy
    • Division of Labor

• The Principles of Scientific Management - Frederick Taylor (1913)
  • A scientist
  • Management is a science based on laws, rules, and principles.
  • Time and motion studies
  • Principles
    • Build productivity with time and motion studies
      • find the fastest worker
      • figure out how they managed to be fast
      • hold everyone accountable to that standard
    • Creation of "functional foremen"
    • Establish cost accounting
    • Pay for performance
• Administrative Science - Henri Fayol
  • A "turnaround specialist"
  • Five elements of classical management
    • planning
    • organizing
    • goal setting (commanding)
    • coordinating
    • evaluating (controlling)
  • Central decision making
  • Respect for authority
  • Fair renumeration

Group assignment for Monday

Pick one of the more interesting organizations as your object of study for the semester.

Task force assignment for Monday

Integrate the team recommendations.