Management and Organisation Behaviour

Work organisation is the way to organise the work and workforce. From the very beginning, when the scale of production remained small, most of the products were produced in several family workshops. The goods were sold in a marketplace or sold to a trader who collected all the goods from villages. Before the first revolution started, factories were formed; the skill workers in workshops, i. e. the males were recruited to be workforces in factories. The scale of production was enlarged as well as the profit, but not the productivity.

Until 1776, division of labour was first introduced by Adam Smith in his THE WEALTH OF NATIONS; and it became the most famous and influential statement at his period. Adam took example of pin factory: "A pin maker with his utmost industry, make one pine in a day, and certainly could not make twenty... but it is divided into a number of branches... one man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cut it, a fourth point points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct... those tem people ... could make among them upwards of forty thousand pins in a days...

" Division of labour was widely applied in practical; productivity in manufactories was increased dramatically. It also turned individual working into coordinating work, which is more efficient and effective in manufacturer massive production. In 1910s, F. W. Taylor enhanced Adam's division of labour in Shop Management, but he also introduced a new theory- division of management. Taylor created the Functional Foreman and with it a rdivision of management- a planner, a inspector, a gang boss, a speed boss, a repair boss, a time clerk, a route clerk, a disciplinarian.

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Division of management restricted the control of time and motion and therefore productivity. In Taylor experiment on mining factory, the productivity was increased by 200%. However, lack of humanist is always the downside of scientific management. High rate of labour turnover sometimes became a constant factor lag the productivity behind; so scientific theory is not a long-term solution for a company who is willing to expand. Human relation school was established at mid 1920s, sociological factor was first brought in management, and more attention was introduced to social dimension of work.

The most significant achievement is Elton Mayo's Hawthorn effect: "It was the third stage of the investigation, which was to observe a group performing a task in nature setting... The result confirmed the importance of informal social groupings in determining levels of output... and it led to a full realisation and understanding of the informal group as an outlet for aspirations of the worker... " ---- Writers on Organizations, Pugh . D . S & Hickson, D. J. , 152-155

The group dynamic was then recognised as having positive effects upon productivity, and therefore the form of work organisation began to change from individual working to team working. As the size of organisations grows, diseconomies of scale i. e. problem of coordination and communication often occur. Thus the way of organising the work became more and more complicated. There are two forms of dividing work: horizontally and vertically. Horizontal dividing is described as "management divides work into smaller task, with people or departments specialising on one or more of these.

" in Management an Introduction. "Horizontal specialisation" is a modern approach of division of labour, but rather than working individually, the tasks are set to different departments i. e. large groups. The significant advantage is time saving, the same amount of task but using less time to finish it. Vertical dividing is the cause of hierarchical structure within an organisation, and it is also a continuity of horizontal dividing. When the tasks are divided to different department, the managers of each department are responsible for the aspect of work.

However, they are the brain of the work, the main job of manager is to plan the overall direction of the department and monitor the operation processes. The supervisors who are in p of the control of each manager are responsible of achieving the work, which is the 'hand'. Modern approach of vertical form of organising the work is to delegate the task directly to shop floor employees without passing thought mid class managers or supervisors. All in all, there are no fixed definitions for management and work organisation, because they vary from time to time.

One other reason why we cannot judge the most appropriate convention of those two terms, it is because the need of organisations are not the same they might be similar but they will somehow have their unique characteristics, therefore to performance the best, the way of managing and organising the work adopt by business will definitely be differed from other. With the change in technology and life style, new rules or structure of management or work organisation might emerge and thus modified its original definition.

Hence, management and work organisation cannot be defined particularly. Appendix 1. Mullins, L. J. (1987), Management and Organisation Behaviour, The bath Press, Avon 2. Pugh, D. S. & Hickson, D. J. (1989), Writers on Organisation, England 3. Cole, G. A. (1993), Management Theory and Practice, Guernsey, Channel Islands 4. Boddy, D. & Paton, R. (1998), Management An Introduction, Gosport, Hampshire 5. Shafritz, J. & Steve nott, . J (1991), Classics of Organization Theory, Belmont, California Lu Shang

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