Economistic and humanistic of leadership - MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Economistic and humanistic of leadership. Answer: The Incident: While being in one of my courses in the university, I had been given the task of planning our annual event of award distribution and the entertainment show that is associated with it. I chose six people from our class whom I knew were good at specific areas. I had distributed the responsibilities associated with the execution of the programme on different individuals of the team, basing on their strengths. I had taken up the role of the manager and had kept an eye on the planning of the programme and other details. However, as the process of work begun there aroused a certain number of problems like lack of synchronization, absence of proper communication and understanding among the group members. This made the progress of the work slow and I as a manager had to apply my skills of Planning, Organising, Leadership and Controlling (POLC) to handle the situation in a proper manner and make the task run smoothly. Analysis: After identifying the basic problem that our group was facing while planning the programme I started to work in accordance with the POLC strategy of function. I realized that our team members lack the basic planning, which is very necessary for any task to be done successfully. I had allocated their respective tasks to them but they could not plan their course of action and thus I decided to prepare for them a detailed planning chart. I had clearly stated that how much of time they should allocate to each of the tasks they had been given and I had also given them a routine, following which will make their tasks get done easily. The next thing that I did was organizing the group. At the beginning of the project, there was no proper communication among my group members, which made them unaware of each others progress. I made sure that they communicate with each other on a regular basis and keep each other updated about the progression of the task. In this way I by applying my organisin g skills, I made my disorganized team an organised one. The next thing that I had to do was to use my leadership skills as otherwise I would not have been able to manage a team of six people. I motivate them to do their share of tasks and when they completed their tasks successfully, I praised them in front of the group, which made them motivated and eager to work. As the team lead, I had also done my share of hard work so that they can get motivated by seeing me working and work in accordance with me. Another thing that I had to do was controlling my teammates. Some of them were unruly and were not ready to work the way I asked them. In that situation I had to use my controlling skills and give the unruly ones basic warnings so that they work properly. The warnings worked in a positive way and I handled the situation properly by applying my controlling skills. Critical Evaluation: I believe that my approach towards executing the annual prize distribution ceremony and the associated function has been quite effective as the programme was a successful one and everyone, including my professors was happy with the outcome. However, I believe that there were certain points where I could have worked in a better way and been more effective. According to me I started to organize the team at a later part of the project, which should have been made earlier as that would have saved us from taking the additional pressure of time crunch that we had to face due to poor organising plans. Apart from this, I believe the rest of the actions were apt and just. Scientific Management Theory and Ford Motors: Frederick Winslow Taylor developed the Scientific Management theory in the early of the twentieth century. The theory focuses on performance on the given task, supervising and motivating qualities of the employers or managers. The main principles of the theory are to develop a scientific outlook towards the given task, training the employees in a scientific manner so that they can aptly handle the tasks given to them and ensuing proper division of labour (Cameron and Green 2015). The theory encourages the managers of any given organization to give the employees a lucrative incentive scheme in accordance to their performances as that helps in motivating the employees to work better. However, there are a number of assumptions that the theory includes. For example, the theory assumes that the world can be predicted, human beings will take rational decisions only, all kinds of projects are created in an equal manner and the lifecycle of any project is stable. These kinds of assumptions m ake the theory harmful to the management of the project, as not everything might happen in accordance with the assumptions. The company of Ford Motors is one of the companies that use the Scientific Management Theory and are quite successful as well in the market. The making of the automobiles of Henry Ford was in a simultaneous process with the development of the management theories of Taylor. Ford used to name his designed cars alphabetically from that ranged from A to S. The most successful car was the model that was named as T. The cars of the series T started getting produced from the year 1908, which was just three years before Taylors Principles of Scientific Management came out in 1911 (Waring 2016). Implementing the scientific theory of Taylor, the Ford Motor company successfully produced almost fifteen million models of the cars belonging to the series T in between the years of 1908 and 1927. Henry Ford followed the theory of scientific management that helped him to reduce the production cost of the cars and enabled him to make his cars available to the mass. According to the scientific theory of Taylor, the production of a company will get significantly high if the individual workers are assigned the roles that they can perform the best as depending on their personal area of strengths and abilities. Taylor further pointed out that the productivity is bound to increase if unnecessary physical movement made by the workers is lessened. Henry Ford believed that applying these strategies will help him to reach his goal of making cars for the mass successful and thus, he hired Taylor to observe the employees of the company and guide them in accordance with the concepts of the theory (Kipping and sdiken 2014). The first step that Ford took to implement the scientific theory into his production was to train each of his employees in a scientific manner focusing on their personal strengths and it significantly helped the company to produce more cars that could be affordable by the mass, which helped the business of Ford Motors go higher. Till the present the company follows the Scientific Management strategy and has successfully held its position in the market. Humanistic Theory: Humanistic perspective emerged as a management theory around the late of the nineteenth century as a theory that emphasized on the understanding of the human behaviour and the needs and attitudes of the employees in the workplace. Mary Parker Follett and Chester Barnard mainly advocated the theory (Dierksmeier et al. 2016). Mary Parker Follett was of the opinion that though the employee and the employers belong to the same organization and are a part of the same project, there remains a distinction between them, which needs t be abolished in order for better production and growth of the company. Another advocate of the theory, Chester Barnard opined that the success of any given organization depended on the good relationship between the employers and the employee as well as the relationship of the entire organization with external institutions and groups (Pirson and Von Kimakowitz 2014). He further developed the concept of planning in a strategic way and accepting the theory of autho rity. According to this theory the managers must gain the acceptance of the authority that they possess. This theory further argues that the main functions of the executives of any organization is to create and maintain a proper communication with the market, to hire employees and also to motivate the employees so that they can work in benefit of the organization (Shafritz, Ott and Jang 2015). However, this theory can have the negative impact of the employees going unruly as the concept of authority is not given much importance to and it is the individuals controlling abilities that are being given focus on. The founder of the motor company Ford had from the very beginning along with the scientific management strategy, taken help of the humanistic strategy to produce cars that can be afforded by the mass. He had trained his employees basing on their personal fields of strengths and had made sure that each of the employees was placed in the field that he was best at. This strategy has helped Ford to increase its production and thus the company has successfully achieved its goal of producing cars that can be afforded by the mass in general. References: Cameron, E. and Green, M., 2015.Making sense of change management: A complete guide to the models, tools and techniques of organizational change. Kogan Page Publishers. Dierksmeier, C., Amann, W., Von Kimakowitz, E., Spitzeck, H., Pirson, M. and Von Kimakowitz, E. eds., 2016.Humanistic ethics in the age of globality. Springer. Hrisch, J., Freeman, R.E. and Schaltegger, S., 2014. Applying stakeholder theory in sustainability management: Links, similarities, dissimilarities, and a conceptual framework.Organization Environment,27(4), pp.328-346. Kipping, M. and sdiken, B., 2014. History in organization and management theory: More than meets the eye.Academy of Management Annals,8(1), pp.535-588. Lawrence, P.R. and Pirson, M., 2015. 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Waring, S.P., 2016.Taylorism transformed: Scientific management theory since 1945. UNC Press Books.