Economic subjects | Management » Horváth-Koronváry - Thoughts on the tasks of 21st century management and leadership theory

MANAGEMENT AARMS Vol. 6, No 3 (2007) 339–347 Thoughts on the tasks of 21st century management and leadership theory LÁSZLÓ HORVÁTH, PÉTER KORONVÁRY Miklós Zrínyi National Defence University, Budapest, Hungary The 20th century was primarily the age of task-oriented, Taylorist managers. Although theorists had been preaching the necessity of a new type of thinking from the thirties, the effects of a series of historical events from World War 2 to the reunification of Europe led to a repeated conservation of Taylorism, even if in somewhat modernised forms. However, the social and economic changes resulting from the ongoing IT revolution have brought about radical shifts in the patterns of European societies. By now, they have made it inevitable that what the Old Continent needs is leaders – personalities who provide the necessary personal models to further various processes of democratisation so that our common aim can be reached: a democratic, knowledge-based, intercultural

society, where all have access to information, can give expression to their will, and request having more and more direct influence on forming their own future. Introduction Each society has to produce leaders. As in each and every period in history, a major task of 21st-century societies will be to ensure and improve the reproduction of leadership capacities from generation to generation. More effective, more efficient, more efficacious, more productive, more successful leadership, in higher and higher quantities, and in better and better quality – that is what modern societies need. Social reproduction of leadership, however, has become a crucial issue by now. We live in a type of society that needs more leaders than its antecedents. Democracy is “leadership-intensive” – the more democratic a society is, the more leaders it needs and the more leadership potential must be at avail to ensure continuous development and the extension of democracy to all possible spheres of life.

What’s more, with the spreading of multi-professional teams, networks and other lateral organisational forms, where leading is essentially a role given over from member to member from time to time to ensure the best possible match between leadership, situational factors and group features, it is also for “followers” indispensable to possess such capacities. The advantage of their possessing leadership know-how and capabilities is twofold – not only that it is easier to accept others’ leading if one knows Received: May 14, 2007 Address for correspondence: LÁSZLÓ HORVÁTH Miklós Zrínyi National Defence University P. O Box 15, H-1581 Budapest, Hungary E-mail: horvath.laszlo@zmnehu L. HORVÁTH, P KORONVÁRY: Management and leadership theory what they are expecting and why, but also when their turns come, they will have to be ready for action.1 We, management educators of the 21st century, have therefore an important task. We have to make sure that we do our job better

than previously and find ways to train not only more and more leaders, but also more and more effective ones. If we do not succeed, we will deserve what we shall definitely get – a bunch of incapable tyrants spoiling not only this century, but the next one as well. There is no democracy without practically everybody possessing leadership skills and knowledge. The key to a democratic future is to make leadership a common good – something that everybody can acquire and make use of.2 What is management and leadership theory all about? The Janus-faced image of what leaders do – the duality of a task-oriented management (with special interest in mostly back-office activities such as the planning, organising and controlling of processes) and a people-oriented leadership (reaching goals in the front line through personal example, individuals, teams, and the active utilisation of relationships) is rooted in the English language. “Managing” comes from the Latin “manus” (hand),

probably through an Italian word (maneggiare), and meant, originally, “handling/controlling a horse or horses”. Managing therefore implies that one succeeds by holding others back from doing what they want – it emphasises control. “Leading”, however, has a quite different implication. Originally, the Germanic word meant “to cause somebody to accompany you”.3 If you lead a horse, you make it go with you – you take the rein and make it follow you. You go ahead, you show the way You are at front – you take the lead. No wonder the two words have very different connotations When the Father of Management Studies, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) and his disciples worked out the theory, rules and techniques of efficient operation of industrial production flows, Scientific Management, the engineer-managers of his day 1 A positive side-effect of managerial, leadership and decision-making (MLD) know-how and capabilities spread throughout the organisation may be also a

smoothening of interface problems or even conflicts between its groups. “ conflicts between organisations or groups may appear not only because of the faults of personality and character – they are almost always fostered by the mutual dependencies of those involved. At the same time, available executive strategies and tactics targeting conflict resolution may also be limited.” (MEZEY Gyula, 2000, p. 144) The “impregnation” of the organisation with MLD know-how may be significant in conflict prevention as well as in their handling. 2 This may be a (partial) answer to a major question of modern democracy set by Karl POPPER in 1943: “How shall we organize our political institutions so that bad or incapable leaders may be hindered to make too much harm?” Popper (2001), p. 124 The question, of course, may be adapted to all types of organizations 3 See e.g wwwetymonlinecom and wwwdictionarycom for “manage”, “lead”, and related words 340 AARMS 6(3) (2007) L.

HORVÁTH, P KORONVÁRY: Management and leadership theory saw in it no more but what their own professional culture let them see – a new set of means for task-oriented control. Despite the fact that Taylor emphasised also the necessity of a proper understanding of the “human factor” in order to be able to ensure the worker’s full cooperation with the manager,4 it was task orientation that determined the thinking of his followers. His French counterpart, Henri Fayol (1841–1925), the founder of the discipline of Industrial (i.e, Business) and General Administration, gave it a try to sum up how much more “administration” is than just the creation and maintenance of optimal production processes. He tried to communicate, in his writings and speeches, messages identifying basic values and norms of management and leadership practice to his contemporary fellow-engineers that are more than relevant – even crucial! – for today’s leaders. They are the following:

Management/leaderhip is “the art of handling people”. Management/leadership (Fr. administration) is a discipline: it can be researched, it has observable rules to detect and identify, describe and expose, that can be taught at schools and universities – and it should be taught as widely as possible, as all are either leaders or followers, so people badly need it The discipline of “administration industrielle et générale” should in part be about the leader – his personality and character, and his actions constituting the general management process (leadership and management theory). “General” here means that sets of management activities (= management functions: planning and forecasting, organising, commanding, coordinating, controlling) are essentially the same in each and every professional sub-system of the organisation (manufacturing, sales, accounting, financing, personnel management, etc.), therefore managers should apply them irrespective of the type of

organisation function they are heading. Successful running and development of an organisation has to follow certain principles and rules. Their studying, detection and disclosure is also a task of the discipline of “administration” (organisation theory). The harmonisation of internal activities of the functional departments (i.e the coordination of organisation functions), the “government” (Fr.: gouvernement) of the company is a major task of top management and therefore the fourth area of interest for the new discipline. 4 Or with his often-used expression: “intimate, friendly cooperation between the management and the men”. His work, The Principles of Scientific Management (TAYLOR, 1911b, http://www.gutenbergorg/etext/6435) shows clearly how much weight he laid upon it. AARMS 6(3) (2007) 341 L. HORVÁTH, P KORONVÁRY: Management and leadership theory When Fayol’s thoughts had reached England, the Brits translated the French term “administration” with

“management”.5 The connotations of the words, however, do not perfectly match. While Fayol’s ideas successfully balanced between a definition of “administration” as “the art of treating people”6 and the perspective of organisational leadership, the “administrator” for him being the responsible top decision-maker who supervised and directed (“governed”) the unit, company or institution he headed, the English word added new, unwanted, sometimes even misleading undertones to the text. Let us emphasise here that Fayol did recognise the importance of individuals and personality. His list of ideal leadership qualities as well as the “principles of administration” that defend the employees against the dehumanising effects of the centralised bureaucratic organisations (e.g the principles of unity of command, remuneration, equity and initiative) prove that Fayol throughout his work keeps his “humanistic” perspective. Despite all this, his “eléments

d’administration” – containing both leadership functions (e.g “commandement” or “coordination”) and management activities (e.g “prévoyance”, “organisation”, or “contrôle”) – was taken as a process model for managerial tasks and actions by his British (and, after World War 2, American) followers. No wonder still today it is the management functions of planning, organising and control that constitute the simplest variation of the management process model.7 Fayol’s modern interpretations in most cases overemphasised “management” and forget about “leadership”. When, however, modern research began to focus on leading, leaders and leadership again mostly from after World War 2, they applied – due to the fact that the question itself emerged in the armed forces in the course of the war – the term “lead (leader, leading, leadership, etc.)” used by and in the military to denote the people-centred side of commanding. This is probably the point

where management and leadership theory gets anchored in a schizophrenic state of duality, not being able to offer a fully acceptable solution to resolve it. As the problem is rather linguistic (semantic) than theoretical, therefore it appears only in the Anglo-American literature, its translations and interpretation, it is unnecessary to try and make the manager-leader dichotomy clear and well-defined. Whatever we call the person heading a group – manager, leader, decision-taker, director, officer, minister or president – we shall mean the individual who, in possession of certain characteristic features of personality, skills 5 For their reasons, see Urwick’s Preface to the 1949 English translation (FAYOL, H. General and industrial management. London Pitman Publishing Company, 1949) 6 Henri FAYOL, “Administration industrielle et générale”, Discours prononces à la seance de clôture du Congres international des mines et de la métallurgie le 21 juin 1900. In: FAYOL (1984),

pp 173ff 7 Such lists are well-attested throughout the history of management theory; see e.g: STAEHLE, W H, Management (Vahlen, 1989), p. 22 and p 65 A good summary of the critique of proactive management process models can be found in WATSON, T. J, In Search of Management (Thomson Business Press, 1994), pp 36ff 342 AARMS 6(3) (2007) L. HORVÁTH, P KORONVÁRY: Management and leadership theory and capabilities, know-how and education, behaviour and relationships, is responsible, among others, for ensuring in a certain organisation that: operational processes are well-organised; people belonging to the organisation may continuously develop and enrich in personality, finding the necessary positive models in the behaviour of their superiors to follow, and the challenges to face and overcome in the course of their daily work which may motivate and exercise them helping their personal as well as professional development; also, they should be able to find in the organisation a vision

of the future that they accept, internalise and participate in its formation and realisation so that it can show them the way taking the organisation and the individual closer and closer to their purpose, objectives, aims and goals; the organisation may get richer and richer in colours and variety, capacities and capabilities, cultures and values, knowledge, leadership, relationships, and all that human diversity that makes people and organisations creative and innovative, so that they can get the right ideas, make, take, and execute the right decisions on time in all parts of the organisation.8 Managing, leading, decision-making are but three of the possible (major) aspects to view leadership – instead of “management (and leadership) theory”, therefore, we shall use the abbreviation MLD (theory) wherever we find it necessary to emphasise the unity of this triad. MLD is a discipline – and, as all disciplines, it follows a systemic approach that ensures researchability and

teachability. MLD theory is the system of all those sets of knowledge that help leaders in their work. Therefore, MLD can be defined as the system of knowledge sets commencing from the philosophical-epistemological foundations of thinking that, in the course of studying organisations, groups or individuals, compiles and builds together data, information and knowledge originating from various sources (field/primary or desk/secondary research) so that it constructs various “knowledges” (strategic principles, tactical rules, simple and complex models, thinking tools, etc.) facilitating the work and decision-making of the practising manager responsible for the success of organisation (group, individual) as well as the effective and efficient functioning of societal reproduction processes of leadership. The MLD researchers and “users” – that is, practising managers and students preparing for a management career – will, as a matter of fact, identify all data, 8 THOMAS, D. A, R J

ELY (1996): Making difference matter: A new paradigm for managing diversity.”Harvard Business Review, September-October, pp 79–90 AARMS 6(3) (2007) 343 L. HORVÁTH, P KORONVÁRY: Management and leadership theory information, or knowledge that seems helpful or useful for the manager(-to-be) to solve (future) problems and tasks as a part of MLD, irrespective of its origin, widening the term so that it covers also neighbouring areas like social philosophy, systems theory, or organisation theory. It is therefore worth distinguishing between: theories dealing directly with leaders, their personality, actions, functions and roles (leadership theory); knowledges relating to organisations, their types, operations, development, dynamics and problems, even if the handling of such topics may also keep the manager/leader in focus (theory of organisations); theories concerning various philosophical (e.g: ethical, logical, epistemological, systemic, etc.) aspects of management and

leadership, organisations, their roles and interrelationships in the society (philosophy of management). Figure 1. A two-dimensional model of the management discipline 344 AARMS 6(3) (2007) L. HORVÁTH, P KORONVÁRY: Management and leadership theory Knowledge in this three-level hierarchy constitutes the “science of management”. The practising leader, having acquired and structured the set of information necessary for managerial work in a similar way, will be able to sense, assess, store and use it from various (individual, group, organisational, environmental, societal, etc.) aspects However, (s)he will find it useful only and exclusively if: the set of knowledge and information is organised in a well-structured and practical way around the leader, his/her personality, objectives and tasks, it gives answers and recipes for the leader’s questions, as well as those raised in various constellations generated by his/her internal (organisational) and external (societal,

cultural, etc.) environment, it offers tools and methods to analyse and solve arising problems, it helps with planning, organising, forming, standardising, maintaining, automating and controlling actions and processes involved in organisational operations and projects, individual and group development, organisational learning, power acquisition and delegation, the creation and management of an innovative organisation, etc. And the manager is critical. That is all right, as it is a lot more that depends on him/her than one would think at the first glance. If you try to visualise the relationship of a leader and the organisation with the help of the above model, the leader (his/her personality, example, and style) will be the axle and the whole organisation will build around it. In three dimensions, with some movement added, the image would probably resemble that of a spinning top (Figure 2). This classical toy may serve as an effective metaphor to show some of the crucial features of

the role of the manager in the organisation: Figure 2. Spinning top AARMS 6(3) (2007) 345 L. HORVÁTH, P KORONVÁRY: Management and leadership theory 1. Its axle is a well-fixed, straight, well-lathed steel rod, the spinning top will whirl beautifully, even if its body is battered a bit, bruised or even broken; similarly, if its management functions well, smaller or bigger defects of the organisation will probably not be able to dangerously hinder its operations. 2. In case, however, the axle is of soft material, bowed, or poorly fetched, the spinning top will not function; with other words, if management malfunctions, the symptoms will be perceived enlarged (even exaggerated!) everywhere in the organisation. 3. Continuous movement and change ensures balance It is therefore the dysfunctions of the management and/or the manager that is the final cause behind organisational problems. If they have to be eliminated, the correction has to start on the top. Brushing up a bit the

advice given by the Chinese philosopher Confucius, if you want order in your organisation, make order in your team; and if you want order in your team, make order in yourself. Conclusion Summing it up, the discipline of management is based on the philosophicalepistemological foundation of systems approach, similarly to all other modern social, human and natural sciences. Its subject is the manager, his/her activities and their arenas: the manager’s psyche and personality, the team and/or organisation lead, and its relevant environments, with regard to the practical, theoretical, and philosophical interrelationships. Its objective is to train and develop present and future managers to fit them for their tasks, making them able to reach “managerial excellence”. Therefore the focus is usually kept on the manager. The main leadership roles of managers (building and maintaining relationships, handling information, deciding and risk-taking) and their managerial tasks (planning,

organising, directing, controlling) as well as various phenomena of organisational life and the interactions between the organisation and its environments may be studied and analysed from the perspective of the individuals, the groups (teams), or of the whole organisation. This is one of the reasons why the discipline of management is so varied, interesting, provoking and challenging. References ARGYRIS, Chris, Increasing Leadership Effectiveness (Wiley, 1976) DRUCKER, Peter, Innováció és vállalkozás az elméletben és a gyakorlatban (Park, 1993) DRUCKER, Peter, The Practice of Management (Harper and Row, 1954) DRUCKER, Peter, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (Heinemann, 1973) FAYOL, Henri, Ipari és általános vezetés (Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1984) 346 AARMS 6(3) (2007) L. HORVÁTH, P KORONVÁRY: Management and leadership theory FAYOL, Henri, Industrial and General Management (Pitman, 1949) LIKERT, Rensis, New Patterns of Management

(McGraw-Hill, 1961) LIKERT, Rensis, The Human Organization (McGraw-Hill, 1967) LIKERT, Rensis and LIKERT, Jane G., New Ways of Managing Conflict (McGraw-Hill, 1976) KÓSA, Sándor, “A vezetési és irányítási rendszer (C2 system) alapjai” In: Kard és toll; Válogatás a hadtudomány doktoranduszainak tanulmányaiból (HM OTK 2003/2) 69–74. o MEZEY, Gyula, Szervezés a közigazgatásban (ZMNE, 2000) MULLINS, L. J, Management and Organisational Behaviour (Pitman, 1993, 3 kiadás) PINTÉR, István, Katonai vezetés és szervezés elmélet (ZMNE, 2000) PETERS, Thomas J. and WATERMAN, Robert H, In: Search of Excellence; Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (Warner Books, 1982) PETERS, Tom and AUSTIN, Nancy, A Passion for Leadership; The Leadership Difference (Random House, 1985) POPPER, Karl R., A nyitott társadalom és ellenségei [The Open Society and Its Enemies] (Balassi, 2001) SEEBAUER, Imre, “A magyar katonai vezetés fejlesztése a kultúrák keresztez

désében” In: KÓTHAY, J. et al, Az általános rendszerelmélet (rendszertan) alapjai és fejl désének szakaszai (ZMNE, 2000) 283 ff. o STAEHLE, Wolfgang H., Management (Vahlen, 1989) TAYLOR, Frederick W., The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) http://wwwgutenbergorg/etext/6435 TAYLOR, Frederick W., Shop Management (1911) http://wwwgutenbergorg/dirs/etext04/shpmg10txt TAYLOR, Frederick W., Üzemvezetés; A tudományos vezetés alapjai (Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1983) THOMAS, D. A and R J ELY, “Making difference matter: A new paradigm for managing diversity” Harvard Business Review 1996, September–October pp. 79–90 TOFFLER, Alvin, A harmadik hullám (Typotex, 2001) WATSON, Tony J., In: Search of Management; Culture, Chaos and Control in Managerial Work (Thomson Business Press, 1994) AARMS 6(3) (2007) 347