Management, Fayol

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establish directives instead of entrusting everything to the workers

4. The very strict implementation of a control system, that makes sure that methods are being followed without any deviation by all of the employees.

We can see here, that Taylor’s objective is the same as Fayol’s, to improve the performance of his business. However, unlike Taylor, Fayol does not focalise his attention on the workers’ productivity. He looks to the management in the wider perceptive as compared to Taylor. This said, both of their theories have their limits.

First of all, the dehumanization of labour caused substantial absenteeism and an important “turnover”. It also caused tougher social conflicts against the infernal rates or salary. The salary is not the only stimulant for the individual at work, one searches to satisfy other needs like the need for gratitude or the need of fulfilment. Finally, last critic addressed to these theories results from the fact that they ignore the inter-relationships between the business and its environment. The sectorial specificities are not reflected, the flexibility problems, the adaptability of the business to environmental stress, in particular by the means of its structure, seem to be absent from the classical discourse. The business appears like a closed system, working according to pre-established rules.

It became then essential to find a more human sense to work. New approaches based on sociology and psychology began to emerge. Indeed, the role of a manager has changed significantly in a century. It is no longer a unique regulator of knowledge and power. Surrounded by collaborators as competent as him and that refuse to obey without understanding, he needs first of all to be an animator. A contemporary author, Henry Mintzberg, explains that a ‘good’ manager is a ‘leader’ (1975) who’s first responsibility is to coordinate the work of the members of his team and who then needs to know how to animate a group. Indeed, a large firm Is today a complex system of departments, divisions, services, a profit centre, project groups, a committee etc. In the daily life of a manager, the knowledge of how groups operate their psychology and their ways of articulating is essential to being able to coordinate with them. Fayol had no interest in such matters, if we consider, the very particular example of the ‘weekly conference of the department heads’, as an exception. This was in fact considered as an instance to facilitate the coordination of operations. He ignores also another capital aspect of the activity of a manager, the resolution of conflicts. Like most of his contemporaries who studied on the corporate governance, Fayol seeks for ways to reach harmonious organisations and consider conflict as a dysfunction. It is interesting to remark that he archives, ‘strikes and all the obstacles of social order’, with the accidents and natural disasters, not subject to the administration function but to the security function, in the same way as “fires, floods, robbery’s”.(Fayol, 1916)

In spite of all these shortcomings, Fayol’s principles still agree with the mindset of many managers, who fear the complexity of the interpersonal relations and prefer the role of leader who, ‘Plans, organises, commands, coordinates and controls’(Fayol 1916), rather than the leader who negotiates permanently with his collaborators.

Henri Mintzberg is considered as one of the most accessible management authors. In his work, Mintzberg rigorously criticizes Fayol’s work. For him, the five principal activities of a manager defined by Fayol; planning, organisation, coordination, control and command, it has little to do with the current daily reality and can not permit a company to achieve its pre-established objectives and adapt itself consequently to the fluctuations of it’s environment.

Mintzberg specifies that informational roles can be considered as essential roles for a manager. “The processing of information is a key part of the manager’s job. […] In a large part, communication is his job.” (p56, The Manager’s job: Folklore and fact). He also wants to prove that decisional roles are the most important ones and can be divided into four essential activities; entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator and negotiator.

By exposing this typology of the roles of managing, Mintzberg determines that the difficulty for the manager is to play all these roles, (difficult to separate), which points to the conclusion that management is more than a science that we can teach, it’s an art that requires a permanent commitment to a process of self-training and questioning. The smooth running of this process requires, in turn, the decomposition of the organisation in four types of management.

First of all, the action planning, which is the answer to what must come into to play to implement change, by specifying what has to be done, by who, when, how and where, so that the change can be realized.

Secondly, there is the system meant to organise, in other words, setting up a system serving the organisation in a company means creating a well-defined structure. It can be realized on the basis of five main elements.

Thirdly, we have the coordination system, which is the most important system in an organisation. It is made up from a set of ways, by which the organisations coordinate their work and collaborate between them.

Finally, the control system, which is a system aimed at controlling the general and global performance of the organisation. This performance control’s purpose is to regulate the overall results of a given unit. So, as we can see the principles established by Fayol are still here, but they have lived an important evolution with the changes and the fluctuations in the environment. Each author attaches a particular importance to one of the principles.

Indeed, Fayol considered that the command was the most important principle, from the fact that he considered that the performance of the organisation depended directly on the transmission of orders from the hierarchy. On the contrary, Mitzberg specifies that a good coordination of the actions between the entire staff of the organisation, can create a strong effect of synergy, which can establish a competitive advantage for the organisation.

As a conclusion, we have been able to see Fayol’s point of view on management by introducing five principals. Other classic theorists as Taylor also gave his vision and perspective on who to manage a business. We have seen that even if his visions were really different it had the same objective at the end. Then, we also observed that despite the limits his theories show, the five principles he introduced are still really present in our current society.