As an industrial engineer, he was concerned within efficiencies in manual labour jobs and believed that by scientifically studying the specific motions that made up the total job, a more rational, objective and effective method of performing the job could be determined. Taylor started scientific management in his time-and-motion studies at the Midvale Steel Company in the early 1900's. The managers in both cases applied the scientific method to their problems and they thought that effective management at all levels was the key to organisational success.įredrick W Taylor(1856 - 1915) is the recognized father of scientific management. Yet, the two approaches were certainly not contradictory. The scientific management movement around the turn of the century took an arrower, operations perspective.
An explosion of the orising, bounded rationality, informal organisation, contingency theory, resource dependence, institution theory and population ecology theories have contributed to the study of organisational behaviour. In the 1960's and 1970's, the field was strongly influenced by social psychology and the emphasis in academic study was quantitative research. Studies conducted by prominent scholars like Chester Barnard, Henri Fayol, Mary Parker Follett, Frederick Herzberg, Abraham Mas low, David Mc Cellan and Victor Vroom contributed to the growth of Organisational Behaviour as a discipline. The Human Relations Movement focused on teams, motivation, and the actualisation of goals of individuals within organisations. This shift of focus in the study of organisations was called the Hawthorne Effect. With this epoch making study the focus of organisational studies shifted to analysis of how human factors and psychology affected organisations. In 1920's Elton Mayo an Australian born Harvard Professor and his colleagues conducted productivity studies at Western Electric's Hawthorne Plant. Studies of different compensation systems were also carried out to motivate workers.
Proponents of scientific management held that rationalising the organisation with precise sets of instructions and time-motion studies would lead to increased productivity. Thus, it was Fredrick Winslow Taylor who introduced the systematic use of goal setting and rewards to motivate employees that could be considered as the starting of the academic discipline of Organisational Behaviour. Though the origin to the study of Organisational Behaviour can trace its roots back to Max Weber and earlier organisational studies, it is generally considered to have begun as an academic discipline with the advent of scientific management in the 1890's, with Taylorism representing the peak of the movement. One hundred years later, German Sociologist Max Weber introduced the concept about rational organisations and initiated the concept of charismatic leadership. In 1776, Adam Smith advocated a new form of organisational structure based on the division of labour. Historical Perspective of Organisational Behaviour