Peter Drucker – The Father of New Management
Management guru Peter F. Drucker was the most popular consultant after the World War II (1991; 2003). He wrote several management related literatures that served a great function to every reader especially the people involved in management. Because of Drucker’s apparently unsystematic style, one historian has concluded that his “real contribution” to management had been not so much in “the cash value of his ideas as in the rigorous activity of mind” by which they were formulated and that managers could learn more from “watching him think than from studying the content of his thought (1980).”
He developed management by objectives to integrate European political ideas with American management and to direct the new professional employees that he called knowledge workers. Drucker did develop a political theory of management. He popularized decentralization, privatization, empowerment, knowledge worker, MBO, and flat organizations ( 1996).
Drucker is a corporatist thinker. The key to his corporatism is the technique he labeled as “management by objectives and self-control,” or popularly called MBO in the business language. He designed it to overcome problems that Taylor and Mayo had been unable to solve. In creating such principle, he aims to help managers stop treating people as factors of production and transcend an irrational separation of planning and performing for supervising professional employees (1991).
With such belief, he compared the managerial function to that of the orchestra. The goal is the piece and the manager is the conductor who selects it. Like management, each musician played one instrument and one part. But the conductor harmonized the efforts of all the performers in the orchestra so that the goal was achieved. “The conductor himself,” Drucker explained, “does not play an instrument. He need not even know how to play an instrument. His job is to know the capacity of each instrument and to evoke optimal performance from each.” “Instead of ‘doing,’ he leads (1954; 1955; 1968).”
Initially, Drucker labeled these new workers the “new industrial middle class,” but eventually he called them “knowledge workers” (1977). Knowledge workers, as he saw it, were the new skilled workers, and their tasks and self-perceptions were different from those of manual workers. They used knowledge rather than “physical force or manual skill” and produced ideas rather than things. Each saw himself or herself as a professional, if not as an intellectual. Collectively, they saw themselves as a part of management without being ‘managers,’ and as ‘workers’ without considering themselves ‘proletarians’. They did not command people, but their command of information influenced management (1955; 1968; 1977).
With his belief in employees as knowledge workers and the given importance of empowerment, Drucker emphasized the interconnection of organizational behavior in the organization’s performance. Organizational behavior by itself is a social science discipline. (2002) expounds on this as much like cultural anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. This means that it uses the scientific method to establish truth and to validate its theories. It is a discipline that historically has had its intellectual home in business schools. And it is a new discipline relative to the other social sciences, having its origins in the middle of the twentieth century. The key points are that it is a science and that it has a history which, though short, has been quite turbulent (2002). The concern of organizational behavior is, first, with the behavior and nature of the people within organizations and, second, with the behavior and nature of organizations within their environments.
Being part of an organization requires an individual to embrace initial changes within him/her. In the business context or regardless of the nature of how it is practiced, Organizational behavior has become a common label of pertaining to the varied concepts over people management and organization behavior. However, even with many different connotations of human resource and management, this is not sufficed to say that the approach on the content has changed. Instead the common theoretical factors on group communication, Individual and group teamwork, perception within an organization, learning styles per individual (1996), cultural differences still remains and needs to be efficiently addressed for an organization to eventually succeed.
As based on Drucker’s principle, organizational behavior is a vital and constantly growing field of study which is dedicated to the new generations of constantly growing body of knowledge which advances the human conditions in any organization ( 1988). Understanding its studies on social and organizational aspects from the with respect on human personalities, organizational behavior spans its relevance to society, based on the need to understand the developmental processes on persons, groups, organizations, systems and even global communities at large, the historical roots of organizational behavior goes back to more than a century and even includes psychiatry in its study, individual and social psychology, sociology, social philosophy, political science and anthropology (1991).
Today, Drucker’s principles are still applicable and constantly flourishing. It plays an imperative function in every growing business. Its proven and tested effects and advantages are the reason why most management practitioners utilized it. Further, organizational behavior is still more studied upon and stands as a fertile ground for the many disciplines of study, theoretical and practical endeavors which defines not just itself but proving to be a generative discipline reaching across boundaries. Once totally understood, organizational behavior will eventually demonstrate its potentials, all available for the success of the organizations that practices it.
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