Management Theoris

The Many Theories of Management

For hundreds of years there has been a mystery on how managers can receive the best performance from their employees. Many "management experts" have based their careers on developing, researching, and testing the theories related to management. To properly define management a person needs to look at the origin of the word which is manage. Manage is defined as "to exercise executive, administrative, and supervisory direction of a business." (Merriam-Webster) Now when you look at the definition of management it is more specific to the business world. That definition is "the conducting or supervising of something (as a business)." (Merriam-Webster) When I think of what makes a great manager or even just an effective manager I look at how they control, problem solve, monitor, plan, organize, and budget for their employees and the company.

The purpose of this paper is to asses the various views on theories of management, their effectiveness or lack thereof and the experiences I've had in my career.

Three Theories on Management

Although there are over 250 different theories on management I have narrowed my research down to three. This will extremely difficult because there are so many different and exciting theories to explore but for the benefit of time I can only use three. The three theories that I have chosen are, Theory X, Theory Y, and Path-Goal Theory. I feel like these theories are known and widely used by many managers. Although they are known they are also each others opposites. I will begin by assessing each theory, comparing them, evaluating their effectiveness and then express my experiences with them.

Theory X

In The Human Side of Enterprise, written by Douglas McGregor, McGregor proposed two theories by which to view employee motivation. (NetMBA) McGregor came up with the names Theory X and Theory Y. The two theories are built the same foundation of management which is that the role of managers is to assemble the factors of production, including people, for the economic benefit of the firm (NetMBA) but, beyond this they are completely different.

Theory X makes these assumptions about the average person:

Dislikes work and attempts to avoid it

Has