100 5: Th eories of Public Management
- Coordinating
- Reporting
- Budgeting
Until the mid- to late 1950s, any treatment of management in public admin-
istration was essentially an elaboration of POSDCORB. Oft en combined with an
essentially scalar, or hierarchical, theory of organization, these principles of man-
agement had a kind of commonsense quality that was appealing to practicing pub-
lic administrators as well as to those studying the fi eld or preparing for practice.
Early criticisms of the principles said they were top-down, they were essentially
prescriptive, and they underemphasized natural forms of cooperation—but they
formed the core of the fi eld. From the 1930s to the 1950s, important modifi cations
and adaptations were made to the principles of scientifi c management. Chester
Barnard (1938) identifi ed and set out the acceptance theory of authority, which
argues that authority does not depend as much on persons of authority or on
persons having authority as it depends on the willingness of others to accept
or comply with directions or commands. In classic theory, it was argued that
policy, instructions, guidance, and authority fl owed down the hierarchy, and
communication (what we would now call feedback) fl owed up. Barnard demon-
strated that considerable power accumulated at the base of the hierarchy, and
that theories of eff ective management needed to be modifi ed to account for the
culture of work in an organization, the preferences and attitudes of the work-
ers, and the extent to which there was agreement between workers’ needs and
interests and management policy and direction. He described the “functions of
the executive” as having less to do with the formal principles of administration
and more to do with securing workers’ cooperation through eff ective communi-
cation, through workers’ participation in production decisions, and through a
demonstrated concern for workers’ interests. In a sense, then, authority is dele-
gated upward rather than directed downward.
Another modifi cation to the principles of scientifi c management came as the
result of the Hawthorne studies. Th ese describe the Hawthorne eff ect, which ex-
plains worker productivity as a function of observers’ attention rather than phys-
ical or contextual factors. Subsequent interpretations of the Hawthorne eff ect
suggest that mere attention by observers is too simplistic, and that workers saw in
the experiments altered forms of supervision that they preferred and that caused
productivity to increase (Greenwood and Wrege 1986). Th e Hawthorne experi-
ments and the work of Barnard introduced a human relations approach that for-
ever changed management theory. Classical principles of scientifi c management
and formal hierarchical structure were challenged by the human relations school
of management theory, a body of theory particularly infl uenced by Douglas
McGregor (1960). McGregor’s Th eory X and Th eory Y represented an especially
important change in management theory. Here are the competing assumptions of
Th eory X and Th eory Y: