This document discusses the evolution of management thought through five approaches: universal process, operational, behavioral, systems, and contingency. The universal process approach views core management functions as the same across organizations, exemplified by Henry Fayol's 14 principles of management. The operational approach aims to promote efficiency through scientific and systematic methods. The behavioral approach focuses on understanding and addressing human needs. The systems approach views organizations holistically as interdependent systems. The contingency approach contends there is no single best way to manage and the effectiveness of techniques depends on the situation.

2. THE EVOLUTION OF
MANAGEMENT THOUGHT
 Management is an interdisciplinary and international
field that has evolved in bits and pieces over the years.
 Management historians believe that a better knowledge of
the past will lead to a more productive future.
 Thus, students of management who fail to understand the
evolution of management thought are destined to repeat
past mistakes.
 There is no single theory of management that is
universally accepted today. Therefore, to provide a useful
historical perspective that will guide our study of modern
management, we use the five different approaches to
management.

3. THE FIVE APPROACHES TO MANAGEMENT
THEORY
 The universal process approach,
 The operational approach,
 The behavioral approach,
 The systems approach, and
 The contingency approach.

4. THE UNIVERSAL PROCESS APPROACH
 It is the oldest and one of the most popular approaches to
management thought.
 According to universal process approach, also known as
universalist of functional approach, the administration of all
organizations, regardless the purpose or size, require the same
rational process.
 Universalist approach is based on two main assumptions;
First, although the purpose of organizations may vary, a core
management process remains the same across all organizations.
Second, the universal management process can be reduced to a
set of separate functions and related principles.

5. HENRY FAYOL’S 14 UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES
OF MANAGEMENT
1. Division of work: specialization of labor is necessary for
organizational success.
2. Authority: the right to give orders must accompany responsibility.
3. Discipline: obedience and respect helps an organization run smoothly.
4. Unity of command: each employee should receive orders from only
one superior.
5. Unity of direction: the efforts of everyone in the organization should
be coordinated and focused in the same direction.
6. Subordination of individual interest to general interest: resolving
the tug of war between personal and organizational interests in favor of
the organization is one of management’s greatest difficulties.
7. Remuneration: employees should be paid fairly in accordance with
their contribution.

6. 8. centralization: the relationship between centralization and
decentralization is a matter of proportion; the optimum balance
must be found for each organization.
9. Scalar chain: subordinates should observe the formal chain of
command unless expressly authorized by their respective
superiors to communicate with each other.
10. Order: both material things should be in their proper places.
11. Equity: fairness that results from a combination of kindliness
and justice will lead to devoted and loyal services.
12. Stability and tenure personnel: people need time to learn
their jobs.
13. Initiative: one of the greatest satisfactions is formulating and
carrying out a plan.
14. Esprit de corps: harmonious effort among individuals is the
key to organizational success.

7. THE OPERATIONAL APPROACH
 Dedicated to promoting production efficiency and reducing
waste, the operational approach has evolved from scientific
management to operational management.
 Fredrick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management, and
his followers revolutionized industrial management through
the use of standardization, time-and-motion study, selection
and training, and pay incentives.
 Operational management, like scientific management, aims
at promoting efficiency through systematic observation and
experimentation.

8.  However, operation management tends to be broader in
scope and application than scientific management was.
Whereas scientific management was limited largely to
hand labor and machine shops, operation management
specialists apply their expertise to all types of production
and service operations, such as the purchase and storage of
materials, energy use, product and service design, work
flow, safety, quality control, and data processing.
 Thus, operations management can be defined as the
process of transforming raw materials, technology, and
human talent into useful goods and services.

9. THE BEHAVIORAL APPROACH
 Advocates of the behavioral approach to management point out
that people deserve to be the central focus of organized activities.
They believe that successful management depends largely on
managers ability to understand and work with people who have
who have a variety of backgrounds, needs, perceptions, and
aspirations.
 The human relations management is an effort to make to make
managers more sensitive to their employees’ needs.
 Organizational behavior is a modern approach seeking to discover
the causes of work behavior and develop better management
techniques.
 Above all else, the behavioral approach makes it clear to present
and future that people are the key to productivity.

10. THE SYSTEMS APPPROACH
 A system is a collection of parts operating independently to
achieve a common purpose.
 Systems theorists study management by putting together and
assume that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. They
recommend synthetic thinking(inside out thinking) because
management is not practiced in a vacuum.
 Managers affect, and in turn affected, by many organizational
and environmental variables.
 According to Barnard, who established a new approach to
management on the basis of his experience, willingness to serve,
common purpose, and communication are the elements in an
organization.
 Barnard’s systems perspective has encouraged management and
organization theorists to study organization as complete and
dynamic wholes instead of piece by piece.

11.  General systems theory is an area of study based on the
assumption that everything is part of a larger, interdependent
arrangement.
 According to Ludwig Bertalanffy, a biologist and founder of general
systems theory, in order to understand an organized whole we must
know the parts and the relations between them.
 Levels of systems: identifying systems at various levels has helped
translate abstract general systems theory into more concrete terms.
 Closed system is a self sufficient entity while closed system depends
on the surrounding environment for its survival.
 New directions in system thinking are organizational learning
and knowledge management, which portrays an organization as
a living and thinking open system, and chaos theory and complex
adaptive systems, which states that every complex system has a
life of its own, with its own rule book.

12. THE CONTINGENCY APPROACH
 Its an effort to determine through research which managerial practices
and techniques are appropriate in specific situation.
 In real life management, success of any given technique is dedicated by
the situation.
 Three characteristics of the contingency approach are;
 an open system perspective theorists are not satisfied with focusing on
just the internal working of organizations but the need to understand
its relation to the outside social, cultural, political and economic
system,
 a practical research orientation, where contingency researchers attempt
to translate their findings into tools and situational refinements for
more effective management, and
 a multivariate approach, which is a research technique used to
determine how a number of variables combine to cause a particular
outcome.
 Although not fully developed, the contingency approach is a helpful
addition to management thought because it emphasizes situational
appropriateness.