Fundamentals of Supervision and Management
Your Instructor: Patricia Addesso
Lesson 1
Chapter 2
Managers and Organizations
Organizations need managers more than ever today. You may have heard, a few years ago, about organizations cutting out a lot of the layers of management they used to have. This was known for a while as being "lean and mean." Well, someone still has to do the work! So organizations found that they had to add some management back in, as their "lean and mean" organizations became starved.
Let's look for a moment at the history of management. The whole concept of "manager" is a fairly recent one, if you think about it. Think about the "good old days" of the early 1900s (well within the lifetime of some people alive today).
There were very few professional managers. There were individual people who worked their land, like the farmers. There were people who owned their own small businesses, like the general store. But it was only with the rise of large organizations that the whole idea of needing a non-owner with authority over other workers arose.
Scientific Management
The industrial revolution is credited with starting the movement toward professional management. As the 1800s gave way to the 1900s, factories started springing up as a result of industry and machinery being developed.

The first steps toward a science of management were called, aptly enough, "scientific management." The idea in the early 1900s was that there was probably one right way to do the work, efficiency would depend on identifying this way, and the assembly line was the most efficient way to utilize people.
Organizations were looked at as machines. People were treated as spare parts. The easier they were to train and replace, the better.
Think about the assembly line process. Work is broken down into its simplest components. Each person is only in charge of one