UAB 0013 PRINCIPLES OF ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT

ADVANCES IN MANAGEMENT THEORY

Prepared by: Muhammad Fahmi bin Johan (MAJ101409) Muhammad Adam bin Abd Kadir (MA102003

INTRODUCTION Managing is one of the most important human activities. It has started since prophet Adam sent to the earth. When people are aiming for objectives or a goal they could not accomplish without a good management system. For example, a factory making shoes started with few workers in industrial age in Britain. They have started to use management in their factory system in order to ensure the coordination of individual efforts . Then they have grown to a bigger organization and even more. Now it has already become increasingly complex and management in the organization plays a very important role. By changing the way of work to be organised can have a big impact on profits if we are choosing the right method of management. So, scientific management was the first attempt.

AN OVERVIEW BETWEEN CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY MANAGEMENT The classical school of management is the oldest formal school of thought. It concerns ways to manage work and organisations more efficiently. There are three groups of classical school which started with scientific management, followed by administrative management, and lastly bureaucratic management. During scientific management, it has given a big impact on a management practice in the early twentieth century. However, it does not represent a complete theory of a management. What scientific management does is to work out different approaches and select the best one to do something scient ifically. Scientific management are still applicable today as it can improve efficiency of the organisation. Scientific management was idealised by Fredrick W. Taylor. There are also major contributors such as Frank Gilbreth, Lillian Gilbreth, and Henry Gantt. Important characteristic of scientific management is difficult to practice and produce a fair performance standard and the implementation of a pay-for performance incentive plan based on work standard. There are several major principles. First, it calls for the application of the scientific method to work in order to determine the best method for accomplishing each task. Second, it suggests that worker should be scientifically selected based on their qualifications and trained to perform their jobs in the optimal manner. Third, scientific management advocates genuine cooperation between workers and management based on mutual self interest. Finally, it suggests that management should take complete responsibility for planning the work and that worker s primary responsibility should be implementing management s plans. After scientific management, there is one more theory that has been introduced by Henry Fayol which is administrative management. Administrative management focuses on the management process and the principles of management. It is different to scientific management which deal largely with job and work at the individual level of analy sis. Fayol was a management practitioner used his experience to bear on the subject of management functions and principles. He stated a universal process of management, which are planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. He also believes that

all manager performed these functions, and production. Fayol has presented fourteen principles of management which some of them are authority and responsibility, unity of command and direction, centralization, subordinate initiative, and team spi rit. However administrative management has been criticized as being rigid and inflexible and the validity of the functional approach to management has been questioned. Many of Fayol s principles of management if applied with the flexibility that he advocated are still considered relevant. The idea of Bureaucratic Management has been introduced after administrative management during classical management. Max Weber was the major contributor. Bureaucratic management focuses on the ideal form of organization. Based on observation, Weber concluded that many early organizations were inefficiently managed, with decision based on personal relationship and loyalty. He proposed bureaucracy, characterised by division of labour, hierarchy, formalized rules, impersonalit y, and the selection and promotion of employees based on ability, would lead to more efficient management. Weber also stated that manager s authority in an organization should be based not on tradition or charisma but on the position held by managers in the organizational hierarchy. He has solved the problem of inflexibility and w aste but he did not favour the excesses found in many bureaucratic organization today. This idea formed the basis for modern organization theory and there are still descriptive of some organizations. Nowadays, management research and practice continues to evolve and new approaches to the study of management continue to be advanced. Contemporary theories of management tend to help interpret rapidly changing nature of today s organizational environments . Contemporary management may adept from classical theory but may need some justifications to fit into ou r current environment. Contemporary management has two approaches which are total quality management (TQM) and the learning organization. Since 1980, TQM has been applied all around the world. TQM is an approach to management that focuses on managing the entire organization to deliver quality goods and services to customers. Customer satisfaction is very important because of increasing of competition from around the world in this era of globalization. Customer always find the best and quality good for their use. They have many options to choose among the products available in the market. So, organization must retain or regain competitiveness so that the organization good can win the heart of the customer and hence give profit to the organization. This approach was implemented in Japan after world war two and was the major factor in their economic boost. TQM functions on the premises that the quality of the product and processes is the responsibility of everyone who is involved with the consumption of the prod uct or services offered by the organization. TQM covers involvement of management, workforce, suppliers, and even customers in order to meet the customer requirement. In an organization the biggest challenge is to continuously change in a way that meets th e demands of this rapid change and competitive environment. The learning organization can be defined as one in which all employees are involved in identifying and solving problems, which allows the organization to continually increase its ability to grow, learn and achieve its

purpose. These enable them to remain competitive in the business environment. However, they need to learn faster than their competitors in order to gain competitive advantage. The organization principle of the learning organization is not efficiency, but problem solving. There are three main points of learning organization are a team -based structure, empowered employees, and open information. There are some benefits if applying learning process in an organization such as organization c an maintain level of innovation and remain competitive. Secondly, organization can improve the quality of output at all levels because the learning process can help gaining knowledge and understanding of what customer needs. Furthermore, it can improve coo perate image by becoming more people oriented. Lastly, it can increase the speed of change within the organization.

COMPARISON BETWEEN CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY MANAGEMENT THEORIES Theories of management created during classical age are basically based on writer s experiences as a manager or consultant with only dealing with certain type of management generalise from those situations to the others especially to young, high -technology firms of today that are facing daily with changes in their competitor s product. For current environment, contemporary management will give a significant role by using theories created during classical school of thought and improvise them to make it more applicable. During classical management, many of the assumption made by the writers were not on scientific test but on value judgement that expressed what they believed to proper life styles, moral codes, and attitudes towards success. For example, the classical approach based on assumption that workers are primarily motivated by money and they only work for more money. They also assume that productivity is the best measure of how well a firm is performing. These assumptions fail to recognis e that employees may have wants and needs unrelated to the workplace. Classical approaches aim at achieving high productivity, at making behaviours predictable, and at achieving fairness among workers and between managers and workers and yet they fail to recognise that several unintended consequences can occur in practice. For instance, a heavy emphasis on rules and regulations may cause people to obey rules blindly without remembering their original intent. Oftentimes, since rules establish a minimum level of performance expected of employees, a minimum level is all they achieve. Perhaps much more could be achieved if the rules were not so precise. Classical management approach may not be suitable for current environment because it is static or not flexible. From the previous theories such as Weber s bureaucracy and Taylor s scientific management has failed because they neglected that management style and organizational structure were influenced by various aspects of the environment . Organizations are influenced by external conditions that often change over time, yet classical management theories presents an image of an organization that is not shaped by external influences. However we must know why it is static during classical management. Over hundred years ago work force was not highly educated or trained to perform many of the jobs that existed at that time. It was not common for workers to think the terms of what career they are going to pursue. Rather, for many, the opportunity to obtain a secure job

and a level of wages to provide for their families was all they demanded from the work setting. Much of theories proposed during classical management took place when technology was undergoing a rapid transformation, particularly in the area of manufacturing. Indeed, for many writers, technology was the driving force behind organizational and social change. Thus, their focus was on finding ways to increase efficiency. It was assumed that all humankind could do was to adapt the rapidly changing co nditions.

CURRENT TREND IN MANAGEMENT There are many industry in this world that competed each other to get the profit in fulfil the need for residential to get the better live. Because of the variety of industry sectors, that involved many theories in management. So the management trends beco me, come and go. Just as a business, it is must be flexible with market condition. However they are good or bad management depends on many variables that can influence the result of the managing. The variables are such as the type of industry, company culture, education level of workers, tied up to the existing contract and laws. However they are good or bad depending on how well they are applied. In rapidly growth production such as manufacturing, various companies continue to look for ways to become more efficient in the process and save more money in both short and long run. In order to do this, they re-evaluating their process and using the new technology so that the production will be more effective and efficient. Now the managing is become more easily with using the development software. Much softwares are developed to ease the organization management system. There are several software for planning we are use it now day such as primavera, Microsoft project Milestone and etc to manage the activity of the organization. Using softwares in management now is a trend of managing because of various activities not easy to manage by manual anymore. The rapid making decision is need in now day. Also in analyzing the information, we now use the software such as SPSS. Now day, the management become more globalize and the information become various and difficult to make decision for the organizational. The need for the information is a necessity to compete to others organization. So the boundary spanning is the goo d practice of relating people outside the organization to gain more information so that the manager can make good decision about changing to the organization . The activity such as reading the trade journal and attending trade show also can gain the informa tion for the management the organization. In boundary spanning also can make an inter -organizational that the firms need alliances globally to best utilize resources. Communication is a critical element in the organization to distribute the information and giving the direction to the worker s. When the management become global, of course the range of communication become wide and involve many personnel in the organization and it is need better communication and collaboration among the others. The traditional tool of email is not fulfilling the need of communication anymore because of the limitation of filing system. So, the others collaboration tools such as Web Conferencing, Wikis, SharePoint and

others tool being used to help bridge the communication gap. E ven now, the current trend in using the social network such as Facebook and Twitter become more popular to communicate each others in the organizational because of increasing of need to communicate will increase our reliance on social network. With the arising the educational level and the information technology accelerating, the distinction between managers and worker will fade away. Current trend need that person have a more knowledge and skill so that the company not hiring so many worker in organizational, especially in small organizational. The small organizational prefer to hire young worker so that they can employ them with low salary. But is it good for the organizational? Even though they are not yet surely experienced or knowledgeable. Sometimes the trend that calls brightsizing is being practiced by the organization. This happens when a company lays off those workers with the least seniority with reason they not afford to pay wages for them. Seriously it is not good for the organizational because it is can reduce the performance of that organization, so we need to protect our organization from it.

CONCLUSION Everyday, this world always changing in many matter. The changes actually is from our management. So, everyone as individual or organization necessary to take responsibility in enhancing the education level and get more the latest information. As information becomes the chief product of every business and as knowledge continues to explode, everyone will be a learner and the manager's foremost task will be to promote learning. The trend of the management will be changed base on the recent of the knowledge and information. However, all the trend of the management is actually to become more effective and efficient management. So the bad or good management is depend on the how well the management is applied. No specific theories that give the best result in management now days.

REFERENCES Gareth R. Jones, Jennifer M. Geor ge, Charles W. L. Hill. Lecture Note: Contemporary Management Second Edition. The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2000. Jim LoPresti. Lecturer Note: Management Historical Perspectives. John Wiley & Sons, Inc Brief Overview of Contemporary Theories in Management http://managementhelp.org/mgmnt/cntmpory.htm Classical School of Management http://www.scribd.com/doc/21051187/Classical -Theory Modern Management Theories And Practices http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/AAPAM/UNPAN025765.pdf Top 10 Project Management Trends for 2010 http://www.projecttimes.com/articles/top-10-project-management-trends-for-2010.html 2010 Trends in Project Management http://www.cmcrossroads.com/cm-journal-articles/13194-2010-trends-in-projectmanagement Appendix 1: Contemporary management trends http://updates.expertchoice.com/assets/dbo/Chappendix1.pdf