Approaches to Managing Organizations

For as long as humans have been working together toward shared common goals, we’ve been trying to figure out how to organize ourselves to achieve success. Whether we’re talking about effective ways to build a castle, establish a town in the wilderness, or run a factory, preschool, or student government, it’s useful to learn the various approaches to managing organizations. Over the centuries, these approaches have changed quite dramatically, and the changes have had important implications for how people in organizations work together and communicate. In the following sections, we’ll take a quick trip through time to see how this evolution has played out, beginning with the classical management approach and moving on to the human relations, human resources, and systems approaches.