Mary Parker Follet (1868-1933) made notable contributions to administrative thinking, where she is located in the branch known as the School of Human Relations, by setting her sights on the participation of workers in the organization and on common goals with the executives or what has been called Participatory Management.
According to Daft (p.45), Mrs. Follet studied philosophy and political science, cultivating many disciplines, including social psychology and management. She exposed the importance of common superordinate goals to reduce conflict in companies. Her work had great acceptance among businessmen of her time, but specialists did not give it due importance. Her ideas contrast with those of scientific management and today regain their usefulness for managers facing rapid changes in a global environment. In leadership stresses the importance of people over engineering techniques. She gave a concise warning "don't get attached to your projects" and analyzed the dynamics of the interaction between managers and company. She addressed very current problems: ethics,.the power and the way to lead so that employees do their best. The work of Chester Barnard and others opened up new areas of theoretical study thanks to the concepts of empowerment, of facilitating rather than controlling employees, and of allowing them to act on the authority of the situation. Follet and Barnard were the first proponents of a more humanistic theory, which prioritized knowledge of behavior, needs and attitudes in the workplace, as well as social interactions and group processes.Follet and Barnard were the first proponents of a more humanistic theory, which prioritized knowledge of behavior, needs and attitudes in the workplace, as well as social interactions and group processes.Follet and Barnard were the first proponents of a more humanistic theory, which prioritized knowledge of behavior, needs and attitudes in the workplace, as well as social interactions and group processes.
Maqueda explains (p.77) that we owe to Mary Parker Follet the formulation of the principle of integration to make the interests of the group and the individual coincide. As Dimitri Wiss (1998) emphasizes, “She has been to this day the most forgotten author among the most important and precocious authors of management”. In the texts of Mary Parker Follet we can find most of the modern ideas that can be grouped under the term of participatory management: decentralized decisions, integrating role of groups, competition authority, hierarchical control replaced by trust and communication, « logic of responsibility rather than logic of obedience.
According to Jones and George (p.55), Follet stated that if workers have the relevant knowledge then they should be in control of the work process and managers should behave as instructors and facilitators, not as watchmen or supervisors. He also proposed cross-functional functions, that is, that members of different departments collaborate in multidisciplinary teams to fulfill the projects. With these postulates, Follet was ahead of the current empowerment and self-directed teams.
Mrs. Follet succeeded in bridging the gap between Taylor's mechanistic approach and the contemporary approach that emphasizes human behavior. It is to her that it is owed, more than anyone else, to unite scientific management with a group or systems approach to solving administrative problems.
She was convinced that no person could feel complete unless they were part of a group and that humans grew through their relationships with other members of the organizations. In fact, she claimed that administration was "the art of doing things through people." She started from Taylor's premise that workers and bosses shared a common goal as members of the same organization, but she believed that the artificial difference between managers and subordinates obscured their natural association. It is for this reason that their "power with" rather than "power over" forms the basis for participatory management.
He firmly believed in group strength, in which individuals could combine their various talents to achieve something greater. Furthermore, his "holistic" control model took into account not only individuals and groups, but also the consequences of environmental factors such as politics, economics, and biology.
His model was an important antecedent to the concept that management means more than what happens in any given organization, it explicitly included the organization's environment in its broader series of relationships, some within the organization and others beyond its own. borders.
The following video summarizes, in a very correct way, the contributions to the administration of Mrs. Follet:
Bibliography
- Daft, Richard L. Administration. Cengage Learning Editors, 2004. Jones, Gareth R. and George, Jennifer M. Contemporary Administration, 6th Ed. McGraw Hill, 2006. Maqueda Lafuente, Javier. Strategic direction and planning notebooks. Editions Díaz de Santos, 1996.
