Essay on Annotated Bibliographies; Henri Fayol's Work Relevance

Henri Fayol was an Engineer and French industrialist. He recognizes the management principles rather than personal traits. Fayol was the first to identify management as a continuous process of evaluation. Fayol developed five management functions. These functions are roles performed by all managers which includes planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling. Additionally, he recognizes fourteen principles that should guide management of organizations.

While the subject of management has proven a popular topic, especially during the last 25 years, the subject is certainly not exclusive to latter part of the 20th century (Donkin, 1998). Henri Fayol, a turn-of-the-century French mining engineer and eventual management executive is often credited with becoming one of the first to develop and write about the now popular topic.

Henry Fayol has come to be recognized as the founding father of the classical management theory during the XX and XXI century. His theories, which are very famous all around the world, have been over the years the framework in the development of what is known as modern management. According to Van (2011) “Fayol gained world-wide fame for his 14 general principles of management. He distinguished six general activities for industrial enterprises: technical, commercial, financial, security, accounting and managerial. He defined five functions of management for the management component and these are still seen as relevant to organizations today”. Despite the fact that Fayol’s theories about management and administration ware born early 1900s, nowadays many directors and managers relay on such concepts to drive their organization towards success.

Most successful organisations in recent times have some if not all of Fayol 's fourteen principles, for example; in the 1920 's Alfred P.Sloan the executive head of general motors reorganised the company into semi-autonomous divisions, corporations undergoing reorganisation still apply "classical organisation" principles – very much in line with Fayol 's recommendations.5

Henry Fayol was working in France at a mining company as an engineer who later became the director of the company when it employed more than 1,000 people. He came up with the theory of management functions from his observations and experience while working in the company. He also established and published 14 important principles of management. However, Henry Mintzberg dismissed Fayol’s management functions claiming that managers nowadays apply little planning or not at all, hence, their work is unpredictable (Bateman, 2012). Mintzberg came up with three broad categories of managerial roles. These two theories are seen as competing views where one seems to be the base of the other.

The management theory of Henri Fayol includes 14 principles of management. From these principles, Fayol concluded that management should interact with personnel in five basic ways in order to control and plan production. In my opinion, I really respect Mr. Fayol in being an innovator as he had really no way of looking at past management principles and decided he would create his own based on the experiences and moral values of his self.

Henri Fayol’s theory was almost a century old and was originally written in French. Further review on several journal articles has led to an overview background of Fayol’s working life which provided the foundation that conceptualized his theory. According to Wren (2001), Fayol was appointed as the Director in a mining company, Decazeville, where he succeeded to turnaround the company to become profitable. Fayol was the first person to classify the functions of a manager’s job. Fayol (1949; as cited in Wren, 2001) identified five key functions in managerial works.as planning, organising, command, coordination and control. Planning consists of any managerial work that involves setting goals and coordinating actions to

Through the years, Fayol began to develop what he considered to be the 14 most important principles of management. Essentially, these explained how managers should organize and interact with staff.

He argued that management was a universal process that consisting of functions, which he termed planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. Fayol believed that all managers performed these functions and that the functions distinguished management as a separate discipline of study apart from accounting, finance, and production. [2] Fayol also presented fourteen principles of management, which included; the division of work, authority and responsibility, unity of command and direction, centralization, subordinate initiative, team spirit/espirit de corps, initiative, stability of personnel, order, equity, discipline, unity of direction, remuneration/ fair compensation, scalar chain/chain of command.

Henri Fayol: Henri Fayol was administrative management’s most articulate spokesperson. A French industrialist, Fayol was unknown to U.S. managers and scholars until his most important work, General and Industrial Management, was translated into English in 1930. 16 Drawing on his own managerial experience, he attempted to systematize the practice of management to provide guidance and direction to other managers. Fayol also was the first to identify the specific managerial functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. He believed that these functions accurately reflect the core of the management process. Most contemporary management books still use this framework, and practicing managers agree that these

Throughout this essay I will be looking at the management structure Henry Fayol had discovered from his research and how it is still present today and how it has affected our perspective on how we believe managers operate. Moreover, I will analyse Fayol’s work and look at what other theorists such as Mintzberg have said concerning what effective management is. Also I will look at the Human Relations theorists and see how they play an important role in management and how they differ from the theory of classical theorists. Taking this into account I will then give my views on what I think is important to managing effectively and what I believe is true management and compromise all the information to help me conduct my

During the operation of management, structured people in one organisation coordinate with each other to accomplish common goals. To ensure the process is efficient with scare resources, different scholars advance different interpretations, such as Classical Theorists and Human Relations Theorists. The most famous point of view in Classical Theorists is to manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to co-ordinate and to control, which is advanced by Fayol. It must be admitted that an increasing number of people are concerned about the usability of the Classical Theorists. However, whether it is suitable and widespread in daily management has caused heated debate. From my perspective, Fayol’s standpoint is certainly universal in organisations and management today and I will discuss this in the following paragraphs.

Henri Fayol was one of the most influential contributors to modern concepts of management. His career began as a mining engineer, later moving into research geology for Comambault. The company was struggling however, Fayol turned the operation round. Upon retiring he published his works – a comprehensive theory of administration.

The management and organisations discipline considers Henry Fayol (1841 – 1925) to be one of the early practitioners of management who recognised principles and theories of management. Indeed, current students, teachers and practitioners find Fayol’s management principles to be of interest. This is especially the case since numerous management authors (Bose, 2013: Lamond, 2005: Lewis, 2007) have the common belief that Fayol’s effort founded the elementary framework and principles for management theory currently being applied. Fayol dedicated a lot of time to endorsing the theory of administration and throughout this time argued that all business activities precipitate undertakings which are classified into six groups: financial, commercial, technical, accounting security, and management (Lamond, 2005). While focusing on the management aspect, Fayol considered it to be a systematic arrangement and integration of the financial, accounting, production, and sales functions of the organisation. Hence, the purpose of Fayol’s management theory was a way of establishing management as a different aspect from other technical activities, however, important to the integration of various organisational activities in order to realise a common objective. In that respect, Parker & Ritson, 2005 posit that Fayol’s management principles offered and continue to offer an overall management outlook for practising managers as well as an instructional manual for academicians in the management discipline. The objective of this report is to therefore critically discuss Fayol’s perspectives through an analysis of these views as well as other

The purpose of this academic essay is to compare and contrast two management theorists in their individual fields of work and further more discuss how these theorists made contributions to the field of management. The author of this academic essay plans to use parameters to discuss their findings through books, journal articles and credible online resources. The theorists the author plans to discuss are Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henri Fayol.