Before we can dive into the subject of managerial styles – what they were and where they’ve come, we first need to distinguish what a management style is. A management style, to us, and therefore, to the rest of this paper, is defined as a set of expectations an individual has, as to how they are to use their leadership position to involve themselves and to involve other people in the achievement of results. Various aspects, such as value systems, technology, organizational design, and globalization, all affect the culture of an organization and come into play when determining what managerial style is best to use. As we move through the years, these components develop, resulting in the need for managerial styles to change too. If managerial styles are not developed along side with these aspects, the manager will be ineffective and fail. Management ideas inherently go through a process of distillation before they attain widespread usage and become famous in stature. This process generally takes into consideration five key attributes; a) It has to be timely, that is it must address the problems of the current age. b) It must be brought to the attention of the audience. c) It must refer to organizational requirements in a way that meets the individual needs and concerns of the managers themselves. d) It must meet the needs of potential users with essential ingredients. e) It must be verbally presentable in a capturing way. The process can be viewed much like a funnel as in Figure 1. Only a small number of management ideas make it through this filter and become mainstays in our society. It can be stated that there are approximately six management ideas that have successfully made it through this filter in the past 100 years. These ideas or concepts include bureaucracy, scientific management, administrative management, human relations management, neo-human relations management, and guru theory management. The many writers and t...
