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Keywords
Organizational philosophy, Industrial performance, Management theory
Abstract
Early last century, for industrially-- developing economies, Fayol offered 14 principles of management aimed to help managers ascertain what to do to manage more effectively. Currently, service-based and hightech industries are becoming dominant in some economies, such as the United States. Many organizations in these industries interpret the principles quite differently from the way they were interpreted in Fayol's time. The differences and the cultural challenges managers face in implementing this new framework are presented.
Industrial manufacturing began to play an increasingly important role in the US economy more than 100 years ago. Since then, many writers have developed propositions about what managers of organizations must do to be able to perform their managerial duties more effectively. One of the most well-known and quoted early writers is the late French industrialist Fayol (1949). One of his key contributions was the 14 principles of management. These principles provided and continue to provide a general management perspective for practicing managers and an instructional tool for academicians teaching in the field of management. But, since Fayol's era, many of the US's manufacturing industries have been transferred to sites in other countries, and the vast majority of America's workforce is now employed in a service capacity.
Thus, the US has entered into what many writers refer to as "the postindustrial society." Basically, this society is characterized by rapid growth of its service sector, by enormous growth in the knowledge industry (Morley, 1974), by high levels of affluence, education, and leisure, by instability and uncertainty, by change becoming a way of life, and by the requirement for new organizational, political and cultural values (Trist, 1970). In this society, traditional organizational forms remain; traditional organizational politics diminish, however (Schick, 1971). The postindustrial society demands that organizational decision making be more frequent and faster and it requires "consideration of more variables and more complex relationships among these variables" (Huber, 1984, p. 933). In essence, decision making becomes a great deal more complex than it was in the past (Simon, 1973). Hence, it is likely that today effective managers in many organizations, especially in large service-based and high-tech organizations, interpret the 14 principles of management quite differently from the way they were interpreted...