It has had a wide and far-reaching impact and laid the foundation for today's management theory. Unfortunately, the introduction of Barnard in China management books was often too brief, which made us not know enough about this master. People sometimes doubt Barnard's title of "father of modern management theory" because similar laurels are often awarded to Drucker. This doubt comes from two vague intervals: one is the ambiguity of the concept of the times, and the other is the ambiguity of the concept of academic theory. Generally speaking, the time division of management can be divided into three periods, namely classical management, modern management and contemporary management. According to the representative schools of these three periods, some people call them scientific management period, behavioral science period and system management period. Barnard is the representative of the second period (that is, the behavioral science period), and Drucker is the representative of the third period (that is, the system management period). In Chinese, the distinction between "modern" and "contemporary" is not strict, and sometimes it is often confused. Theoretically, Barnard's contribution is mainly theoretical, especially the innovation of organizational theory. Drucker's contribution is mainly management art and culture, especially his insight into management practice. Therefore, Barnard is the "father of modern management theory" and Drucker is the "father of modern management". There are certain differences between them.
A reserved master
1886 is a special year in management. This year, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME, founded in 1880) held its annual meeting in Chicago. Taylor, known as the father of scientific management, joined the organization at this annual meeting. Henry is at the annual meeting? r？ Tang submitted the article "Engineer as an Economist", proposing for the first time that technical issues and management issues should be studied together, and calling on ASME to become a platform for studying management issues.
Therefore, some scholars believe that 1886 is a landmark year for the birth of management science. It was in this year that Barnard was born in an ordinary worker's family in Massachusetts, USA. Barnard was born with some hereditary physical defects and high myopia, so he could not participate in baseball, which Americans are keen on, and even rarely participated in golf, which was not too laborious. In addition, when he lost his mother at the age of five, he developed the behavior habit of being independent, reserved and keeping a distance from group activities. His greatest hobby is reading, and his philosophical abstraction fascinated him, which had a great influence on his later career. His pastime and hobby is music, which made him achieve extraordinary achievements on the piano later. Some researchers believe that Barnard is a typical individualist and even has some autistic tendencies in his adolescence. Although he later felt the great strength of the organization at AT&T Company and his thoughts changed greatly, his unconscious habits in his youth still showed from time to time. For his "unsociable", people who praise him call him a scholar-type manager; Gentle, it is said that he has some aristocratic temperament; For those who don't like him, accuse him of being inaccessible or even heartless. For example, when he meets an acquaintance in the street, he often doesn't say hello or even nod. You happen to eat in the same restaurant. Don't expect him to recognize you if you don't take the initiative.
/kloc-when he was 0/5 years old, Barnard suddenly dropped out of school with excellent academic performance, claiming that his grandfather, the blacksmith, could provide him with everything given by the school. Only from this point, we can see some connotations in Barnard's character. After dropping out of school, he got a job in Piano tuner. During his three-month apprenticeship, his weekly salary was only $3. During this period, he taught himself Greek. 1904, due to his conversion to Jesus Christ, the encouragement of religious belief and the help of the congregational priest, he turned to the school again to seek formal education, and finally passed the entrance examination of Hermon Mountain School with a high score of 98 points. However, leaving the workplace and family has put him under great mental pressure and made him fidgety. Fortunately, Monsanto School, as a religious school, has its own pasture, orchard and workshop, which provides students from poor families with opportunities to work and study. At that time, the effective way to treat mental weakness was physical labor. Therefore, Barnard did not attend classes in the first semester, and worked on the school ranch, piling hay, driving wagons and plowing land. Labor restored Barnard's body and rebuilt his self-confidence. 1906, Barnard was admitted to Harvard University, majoring in economics. Like many American students, he completed his studies through work-study programs, and engaged in a variety of part-time jobs in his spare time, including helping students print papers, playing in orchestras, tuning the piano and so on. But he didn't relax at all. He studied many languages at Harvard and was proficient in German, French and Italian. In addition, he studied economics and political science under the famous scholars taussig A.L. Lovell respectively. However, because he gave up natural science and mathematics in the preparatory stage, he could not take the natural science examination required by the school and could not get the required credits, and finally missed the bachelor's degree.
After leaving Harvard, Barnard plans to start his career in a bar. While looking for a job, he wrote to an uncle of the telephone company for help, and his uncle asked him and AT & amp； T) chief statistician Walter S. Gifford. From then on, Barnard began his unique career. Barnard's initial work was mainly to use his foreign language advantages to translate and study telephone charging systems in different countries. Just as he is & entering; T, a giant in the communications industry, is experiencing jaw-dropping growth, and the company's president Theodore? Weil created an unprecedented telephone monopoly enterprise covering the whole United States by means of large-scale mergers and acquisitions. Because the postal service in the United States has always been state-owned, there is a lot of discussion about the private communication industry. It is generally believed that since the telephone is a public information service facility, it should be state-run like the postal service. A debate about private and state-owned enterprises is in full swing, and Europe has begun to try the state-owned and state-owned models of communication industry (including telephone, telegraph and postal service). Barnard uses various European languages to find and study the price and cost data of the European telecommunications market. With detailed information and rigorous argumentation, he explained that private telecommunications can provide better services for the people, superior to state-owned telecommunications in price and service quality, thus providing AT & amp； T's survival laid the foundation. This achievement made Barnard appreciated by the top management of the company, and also made the federal and state governments see his talent in telecom price control. Therefore, he was quickly appointed as the commercial engineer of the company and was hired as the technical consultant of the state government toll collection agency. During the First World War, he was seconded to the National Defense Commission, responsible for formulating the telephone service price system to ensure the efficiency of the national economy.
After World War I, Barnard worked in & Reuse t. 1922 was promoted to vice president of Pennsylvania Bell Company, and was soon promoted to president. 1927，at & amp； T established a subsidiary, Bell Company of New Jersey, and appointed Barnard as the president. Here, Barnard chose a beautiful 20-story building as his headquarters. The facade of the building is decorated with Greek and Roman art sculptures, and the interior style combines classical elegance with modern glory. In the quiet and solemn office, Barnard has almost no specific affairs, and there are deputies to handle all kinds of work of the company for him. He has enough time to think. Because of this, he is particularly reserved and arrogant. The accumulation and thinking in this position enabled him to complete the classic work in the history of management-the function of an executive. It is this book that established Barnard as a master.
At&T Company. Senior staff of the company are not encouraged to hold public office, and this kind of social service is regarded as an important measure to shape the company image. Therefore, Barnard had various social part-time jobs, especially during the Great Depression in 1930s and World War II, Barnard's main energy was spent on social and public affairs. However, Barnard was not satisfied with the operation of Bell Company. His reserve and conceit make him conservative in management. When other brother companies have widely started to use automatic dial-up phones, he thinks that automatic exchanges are only cost-effective in big cities through accurate calculations. So his company insists on using manual wiring. Perhaps, in his mind, he felt that the friendly answering sound of the operator was much better than the cold machine dialing sound. 1947, the operator's strike made his company pay a huge price, and the company's financial situation began to decline. Soon after, due to the need to improve his business, Barnard left Bell forever at Gifford's suggestion and went to work for the Rockefeller Foundation. Some scholars believe that it is Barnard's profound understanding of organizational cooperation and cohesion that makes him forget the proper position of profit objectives and corporate management, or that he is an idealist rather than a practitioner.
In any case, Barnard was not very successful as CEO. However, the contribution as a theorist is extraordinary. In 1930s, Barnard often gave lectures in universities, the most famous of which was his eight lectures at the invitation of Harvard President Lovel-The Function of Managers was written on the basis of these speeches. According to the data, it is not easy to listen to Barnard's speech. As a master of music, Barnard's speech is not as beautiful and concise as music. He often "tortures the audience" with some obscure language and lengthy words. You have to frown and think hard to taste the true meaning of his speech. Some people even ridiculed him and used such language just to make people feel the mystery and mystery of the theory involved in the speech. According to himself, only about 50 people listened to his speech, and more than half of them were acquaintances. In a book review, the author used martial arts novels as a metaphor for management thoughts. It seems that Barnard's theory is a bit like the boring Yijin Sutra, but in reality, most people still like the "sword method to ward off evil spirits". Andrews said in the introduction of the 30th anniversary edition of The Function of Managers: "Nobody talks about Barnard behind his back. Even for the organization he leads, he is somewhat detached. He is reserved, solemn, noble and somewhat awesome. He is not a tutor who makes students passionately recall or develop his theory. His colleagues and successors at Bell Telephone Company in New Jersey don't consider him a corporate or sectarian hero. "The completely original arguments of Barnard's works are scattered throughout the book. Although the author has made a detailed exposition, only by reading his own original work repeatedly can he fully grasp it. The most obvious defects of his book are the abstraction of expression, the scarcity and plainness of examples and the obscurity of style. " (See the Chinese translation of "The Function of Managers") It is such a formidable figure, and such a difficult book has left an immortal reputation in the history of management. Strictly speaking, Barnard's life's monograph is just The Function of Managers. Although he also wrote many papers and published Organization and Management in the 1940s, the latter book was only his collection of essays, which only supplemented, deepened and expanded some aspects of his thoughts, and could not be regarded as a real monograph.
However, the book "The Functions of Managers" is enough to create a new era of management. This book won him a great reputation and made him the founder and the first head of the school of social systems. Although there are various criticisms from different aspects, experts who are keen on theoretical thinking and human nature discussion give him high praise. Many famous professors of Harvard University, such as Lawrence J Henderson, homans, Elton Mayo and Philip cabot, spoke highly of this book and the philosophical connotation of Barnard's thought, and invited him to participate in the forum of industrial associations of the National Research Council of the United States. Fritz J. Roethlisberger, who co-chaired Hawthorne experiment with Mayo, admitted that his views on organization were deeply influenced by Barnard. H.A.Simon, the master of decision-making, confessed his inheritance relationship with Barnard ideologically. Because of Barnard's outstanding contribution to organizational theory, he finally won seven honorary doctorates, which may be enough to make up for the "mental trauma" he suffered when he failed to get a bachelor's degree.
Cooperative system theory
Research management must start with research organization. Influenced by classical economics, Barnard's previous organizational theory focused on professional division of labor and structural efficiency, and paid insufficient attention to people in the organization. From Hawthorne's experiment, management began to pay attention to human behavior and put forward the concept of "informal organization". However, the theme of Hawthorne's experiment is interpersonal social relations and psychological feelings, while formal organization is neglected. The defects of this organizational theory were not fundamentally improved until Barnard's time. Barnard believes that cooperation is a basic and important prerequisite for the normal operation of the whole society. Various social organizations, whether political, military, religious, corporate or academic, are a collaborative system. Moreover, the collaborative system is a dynamic process, and its operating environment and components are constantly changing, so the collaborative system is also in constant development and change. The stability and durability of cooperative system depend on the effectiveness and high energy rate of cooperative system.
The so-called "effective" means that the cooperative behavior has achieved the objective purpose pursued; The so-called "energy rate" means that there is no bad negative impact when achieving the goal. Only "efficiency" can maintain the survival of the organization, while "ability rate" can make people have the will to cooperate. This mainly depends on two interrelated and interdependent processes: one is the interaction and interaction between the whole cooperation system and the environment; The second is the process of achievement creation and distribution to meet individual needs. "Man" is the main body of the collaborative system, and human nature has an important influence on the effectiveness and energy efficiency of the collaborative system.
Barnard's management thought is based on his theory of human nature and makes a new exploration of human nature from the perspective of social psychology. Before him, the dominant theory of human nature was the hypothesis of "economic man", which emphasized that people were dominated by self-interest motives or driven by external forces and easily regarded people as passive management objects. Barnard believes that man is alive and has the ability to adjust and maintain internal balance. No matter how great changes have taken place inside and outside the human body, he can continue to survive. Moreover, people also have the ability to sum up experience, and can adjust themselves in time according to experience to adapt to various environmental changes. In addition, human organisms can only exercise their functions if they are connected with other organisms. There is mutual "experience" (that is, contact) and adaptation between various creatures. Barnard called these mutual experiences and adaptations "social factors" and this relationship "social relations". A person's personality characteristics may be more obvious in the process of interacting with others and comparing with each other. Of course, everyone has different experiences and characteristics, but everyone is usually concerned about the role and status of individuals in social relations, especially when it comes to the relationship between individuals and organizations. Therefore, people should be a combination of material, biological and social factors, not just a passive management object.
Everyone has his own free will and certain choices, and then he must choose and set certain goals according to his own ideals and act according to his own goals. But people can only realize their own personal will and exercise their right to choose under certain environmental conditions. Once individuals cooperate, they will have various relationships with other members of the cooperative system and the cooperative system itself, such as the relationship between individuals, the relationship between individuals and the collective, the influence of the cooperative system on individuals, the relationship between personal motivation and the purpose of the cooperative system, and so on. In Barnard's view, if individuals want to establish cooperative relations with others, they must deal with relevant social factors, which is the most basic condition for the establishment of cooperative system. Specifically, these social factors include five aspects:
(1) Interaction between individuals in a collaborative system. When an individual participates in a cooperative system, he is in an environment of mutual contact with other participants, which will inevitably lead to the interaction between individuals. These factors act on the relevant individuals, affect their spirit and feelings together with other factors, and then have an impact on personal behavior, which may force personal motivation to change. If these changes develop in a direction that is beneficial to the cooperative system, they will become the resources of the cooperative system; On the other hand, it becomes an obstacle or restriction to the cooperation system.
(2) Interaction between individuals and collectives. As a unit (also called "social unit"), the collective represents a social behavior system and interacts with everyone in the collective as a whole. In this sense, various factors contained in the collective relationship combine with other factors and play a role in individual psychology. In this way, the collective influences the individual to change some psychology and motives that he would not have changed. When the direction of these changes is conducive to the cooperative system, the collective becomes a resource; On the contrary, it will become a constraint.
(3) Individuals affected by the collaborative system. This is mainly manifested in two aspects: first, the collective takes special actions to guide individuals into the cooperative system; Second, the collective controls the actions of individuals in the system. The former is essentially a direct appeal to personal will, a temptation or coercion; The latter is completely within a behavioral system and serves as a function of the relationship between individuals.
(4) the effectiveness of social purpose and cooperation. This category itself is the product of cooperative behavior and a basic element of cooperative system. Once an individual participates in collaboration, its purpose usually changes greatly in nature and variety. If the purpose of cooperation is achieved, we say that cooperation is effective. As for the specific degree of effectiveness, it is judged from the perspective of cooperation rather than from the perspective of individuals.
(5) Personal motivation and cooperation ability. The sum of individual motivations constitutes the motivation of the whole cooperative system. The energy rate of cooperative system is determined by the satisfaction of individual motivation. If a person thinks that his contribution to the collaborative system is incompetent, he will stop making contributions. If his contribution is indispensable to the cooperative system, then his personal incompetence rate will become the incompetence rate of the cooperative system, which will lead to the inability of the cooperative system to survive, and then affect all members. Therefore, in this case, the energy rate of the cooperative system depends on the energy rate of the marginal contribution, or on the marginal contributor.
Barnard's theoretical contribution lies in his detailed analysis from the simplest human cooperation, revealing the essence of organization and its most universal laws. In a sense, his research method is a bit like Marx's method of analyzing the essence of capitalism from the perspective of commodities. On this basis, Barnard defines an organization as "a system that consciously coordinates the activities and strengths of more than two people". This definition later became the most famous and influential organizational definition.
Organizational balance theory
The core of Barnard's social system theory is organizational balance theory. He believes that an organization is a system that consciously coordinates people's activities or strength. The establishment of an organization requires three conditions: ① people who can exchange information with each other; ② These people are willing to make contributions; (3) achieve common goals. This means that an organization has three elements, namely, willingness to cooperate, common goals and information exchange. The balance of the organization is the basic requirement for the maintenance and development of the organization.
He emphasized: "The existence of an organization depends on the maintenance of the balance of the collaborative system. This balance is internal to the organization at the beginning and is the ratio between various elements, but ultimately and basically it is the balance between the collaborative system and its entire external environment. " Fundamentally speaking, the internal balance of an organization refers to the balance between the incentives provided by the organization and the sacrifices made by people for the organization. Once the "inducement-sacrifice" is unbalanced, it will affect the development of the organization-if the former prevails, it will lead to the inefficiency of the organization; If the latter prevails, it will affect the survival of the organization. It is not difficult to see that this essentially requires the mutual forces among the elements within the organization-the willingness to cooperate, common goals and information exchange should be equal to each other, so as to ensure the healthy development of the whole cooperation system. If an organization wants to exist for a long time, it must provide effective incentives to its members and possible contributors in time to stimulate or motivate the willingness of relevant personnel to cooperate. Barnard believes that the self-interest motivation of self-preservation and self-satisfaction is an important force to stimulate individual willingness to cooperate. If an organization wants to exist and maintain for a long time, it must satisfy individual motives unless it can change them. Incentives are the most basic elements to satisfy these motives, and improper incentives will lead to organizational disintegration, alienation of purpose or failure of cooperation.
Therefore, providing appropriate incentives has become an important task for management. In order for the incentive to be effective, the net satisfaction it provides to individuals must be greater than the satisfaction provided by other factors. Barnard divided the inducement into objective inducement and subjective inducement. Objective inducement refers to those factors that exist objectively and can be directly observed; Subjective motivation refers to those attractive factors that change people's mental state in order to obtain the required efforts. Barnard believes that the method of providing incentives plays a very important role in determining the effectiveness of incentives. Barnard divides objective incentives into two categories: one is special incentives that can be given to someone specifically, which is called special incentives; One is general, impersonal, and can't be given to a specific person, which is called general induction. Barnard analyzed eight objective incentives that organizations may provide, including four special incentives and four general incentives. Special incentives include material incentives, personal non-material opportunities, good material conditions and ideal interests. Material inducement refers to the inducement to accept employment such as service remuneration, sacrifice compensation, money, goods or material conditions provided to individuals. Personal intangible opportunities include showing superiority, prestige, personal power, gaining a dominant position and so on. This is often much more effective than material rewards.
Good material conditions at work are well known, which is bound to have a strong attraction to relevant personnel. Ideal interests include the ability of an organization to satisfy personal motives about ideals (usually immaterial), the future or altruism. These ideals include: pride in one's skills, feeling suitable for oneself, altruistic service to family and others, loyalty to patriotic organizations, aesthetic feeling and religious feelings. It even includes satisfying motives and opportunities for hatred and revenge. The role of general incentives is similar to that of special incentives, but it is not clearly provided to specific individuals. Usually, people can feel its importance only on certain occasions. General inducements include social coordination, habitual working conditions, habitual working methods and attitudes, greater opportunities for participation, and conditions for exchange of thoughts and feelings. Objective incentives can provide people with enough attraction, but organizations may not be able to provide enough objective incentives. At this time, they can only take persuasion, that is, subjective incentives, to change people's desires and attitudes as much as possible, otherwise the organization will be difficult to survive and maintain. Barnard divided this persuasion into three ways: first, it caused a state of compulsion. Coercion refers to dismissal, expulsion and other means of exclusion. By taking compulsory measures, the organization can not only exclude relevant members who do not meet the requirements of the organization, but also make others make sacrifices for the organization. This may be what people usually call "setting an example for monkeys", so that monkeys can reassess their net income. Second, the opportunity for rationalization. In fact, this method is to reasonably explain the conditions provided by the organization for its members or the tasks that members are required to complete, so as to require members to meet the established conditions and complete the tasks assigned by the organization. It usually uses propaganda.
From its scope, it can be divided into two categories: first, general rationalization, that is, social rationalization of the whole organization, which is often the case with religious organizations and political organizations; The second is special rationalization, that is, trying to persuade individuals or groups to obey the requirements of the organization, making people feel that they should make sacrifices for the organization. Third, the indoctrination of motivation. In fact, this way fundamentally persuades people to make sacrifices for the organization, which Barnard thinks is one of the most important persuasion methods. Motivation of encouraging indoctrination is also very common in real life. Its specific ways can be divided into formal and informal. The formal way is the values recognized by educational propaganda organizations, such as patriotism education and religious education; The informal way is to advocate and seduce a certain spirit in a casual way, mainly by means of aphorisms, hints, imitation, competitions and so on. , mainly affecting and regulating personal motivation. Barnard also studied the "economy" of incentives. The "economy" here is an economy in a broad sense, which refers to the net income of a behavior. It is a concept similar to "net profit". The economy of incentive refers to the difference between the contribution provided by the organization and the contribution provided by the organization. Obviously, for organizations, the bigger the incentive economy, the better.
Barnard discussed three representative organizations with different purposes, namely, industrial organizations, political organizations and religious organizations.
(1) Incentive economy of industrial organizations. For the convenience of analysis, Barnard assumes that industrial organizations do not need capital, that human resources directly combine with the physical environment to produce products, and that the incentives it pays to contributors are material incentives, which come from the material products produced by the organization. Obviously, the minimum condition for an organization to survive is that the material products it produces must be enough to pay for these material incentives, otherwise it will eventually disintegrate because it can't make ends meet. Specifically, it mainly depends on the following four factors: the difficulty of the environment, the effectiveness of organizational efforts, the internal energy rate of the organization, and the number of incentives. Obviously, the first three determine the income of the organization, and the fourth person also depends on the comprehensive strength of the first three. The finiteness of the first three determines that the payment of incentives cannot be arbitrary. In other words, it is impossible for an organization to provide enough material incentives to fully meet the needs of the other party to attract potential contributors. At this time, it is necessary to turn to non-material incentives. In industrial organizations, non-material incentives are often accompanied by material factors. Non-material incentives are often in conflict with each other. For example, the improvement of one person's prestige means the decline of others' prestige. At this time, the organization can only seek the best combination point and find the most effective incentive combination among these possible incentives (whether material or immaterial).
(2) The incentive economy of political organizations. Political organizations usually do not engage in direct material production, and their basic motives are ideal kindness and social satisfaction, which means that they must provide these incentives for their contributors. However, in Barnard's view, these incentives are relatively "low-level" incentives. "Obviously, every big political organization must use some' low-level' incentives. The most important of these are personal prestige and material rewards. " Due to the characteristics of political organizations, if we want to provide material incentives, we can only seek material sources from members, such as rent, membership fees or direct payment. Obviously, the material resources obtained in this way will be very limited, and it is likely to cause people's disgust. Therefore, political organizations must also weigh all kinds of incentives and find the best combination point. But there is another way for political organizations, that is, they often use persuasion to increase their attractiveness, but this way will also produce a lot of material contributions. For political organizations that are already stretched in terms of material resources, it may be more important to consider "economy".
(3) Incentive economy of religious organizations. The basic inducement of religious organizations comes from strong belief and loyalty to the organization, that is, it is based on the spiritual satisfaction of its members. Therefore, the main inducement is the ideal kindness and the exchange of thoughts and feelings with "believers" Therefore, the most important task of religious organizations is to convince people. Of course, this does not rule out the use of material incentives. Most typically, the missionary and persuasion work of religious organizations itself also consumes a considerable amount of material resources. Therefore, religious organizations need to carefully weigh all kinds of incentives and find the best combination of incentives in order to reveal their appeal to members. To sum up, when determining incentives, various organizations should first pay attention to their "economic" nature, otherwise even if there are incentives, they will disintegrate because they can't make ends meet; Secondly, in the choice of incentive methods, we should try our best to avoid conflicts among various incentive methods, and choose the best combination of incentive methods according to their respective characteristics to make it most convincing. The basic starting point of Barnard's theory of organizational balance is the motivation of individuals to participate in organizations. Individuals make sacrifices for organizations, and organizations provide incentives for individuals. All activities of organization and management revolve around the balance of sacrifice and encouragement. All the operating mechanisms and behavior rules in an organization come from this organizational balance. Based on the theory of organizational balance, the organization written by scholars really becomes an organization composed of people. In the past, Weber's deviation of lacking human factors and Mayo's deviation of attaching importance to people but not seeing formal organizations in organizational theory were fundamentally corrected by Barnard. This is the significance of Barnard's theory, and it is this theory of organizational balance that became the starting point of Simon's theory of organizational behavior (decision-making theory) with great influence later.
Authoritative acceptance theory
Scholars who study organizations, without exception, will notice the authority of organizations. However, what is the essence of authority is a matter of opinion. Weber particularly emphasized the role of authority and analyzed the essence of authority from top to bottom. Barnard, on the other hand, believes that authority comes from the acceptance of subordinates from the perspective of information transmission, and thus puts forward the famous authority acceptance theory, and then analyzes and demonstrates that there is no doubt in the organization