Fred Fiedler
Born in Vienna, Austria in 1922
Emigrated to the U.S. in 1938 and received
a master’s degree in I/O Psychology and a
PhD in Clinical Psychology at the
University of Chicago.
In the late 1940’s, the emphasis in
leadership research shifted from traits and
personality characteristics of leaders to
leadership styles and behaviors. In 1967,
Fiedler introduced his Theory of
Leadership Effectiveness. This was the first leadership theory to measure the
interaction between the leader’s personality and the leader’s situational control in
predicting leadership performance. It proposes that the success of a leader depends on
the interaction between characteristics of the situation and characteristics of the leader.
Douglas McGregor
1906-1964
McGregor developed the Theory X and Theory Y of
management styles. Theory X believes that workers
hate work and need to be directed and controlled to get the job
done. McGregor believed an environment for employees should
be created to motivate them through authoritative direction and
control. Theory Y assumes that if the job is satisfying, the worker
will direct himself to get the work done. The Theory Y
motivational environment is one of integration and self-control.
Victor Vroom
Born in Montreal, Canada in 1932
Vroom is best known for his work on the Expectancy Theory of
Motivation, which attempts to explain why individuals choose to
follow certain courses of action in organizations, particularly in
decision-making and leadership.
Expectancy (E): “Is performance of this job attainable?”
Instrumentality (I): “What’s the probability that, if I do a
good job, that there will be some kind of outcome in it for
me?”
Valence (V): “Is the outcome I get of any value to me?”
Motivation = V x (E x I)
Vroom’s theory suggests that the individual will consider the outcomes associated with various levels of
performance (from an entire spectrum of performance possibilities) and elect to pursue the level that generates
the greatest reward for him or her.
William Edwards Deming
1900-1993
In 1950, Deming was invited to Japan by the Union of Japanese Scientists
and Engineers (JUSE) to improve quality control and revitalize the post
WWII economy. He consulted and taught top management in Japan’s
Industry and business sectors from 1950-1965. His teachers and
applications in Japan on management theory and methods of statisticalquality-control served as the impetus for one of his greatest contributions –
Total Quality Management (TQM).
TQM is the enhancement of quality and productivity in organizations. It
suggests “doing it right the first time” thus eliminating defects and material waste. The idea behind
TQM is to think of manufacturing as a system, not bits and pieces. The three principles of TQM are
teamwork, quality, and proactive philosophies of management and process improvement.
Deming was also known for his 7 Deadly Diseases (or waste), which detailed boundaries
encountered by companies that impede change.
William Lowe
Bryan
Bryan stressed the importance of
studying concrete activities and
functions as they appear in daily life.
Bryan coined the term “industrial
psychology” by accident during a 1903
presidential address to the APA. When
writing his speech, he meant to write
of the need for more research in
individual psychology, but wrote industrial psychology by mistake. He
did not catch his mistake when speaking and thus the term was born.
James Cattell
Born in Pennsylvania in 1860
Cattell had a strong interest in the
variability of human performance.
He founded Psychological Review and
Popular Science and co-founded the
APA.
Cattell also established the Psychology Corporation, created to
promote psychology’s usefulness in industry. The consulting firm
is still operating today, under the name of Pearson Assessment in
San Antonio, TX.
Morris Viteles
Born in 1898 in Russia
Viteles is credited as a pioneer in internationalizing
industrial psychology and is claimed to be the most
influential in the perpetuation of the term industrial
psychology after WWI.
Viteles has been called a living advocate of the
scientist-practitioner model: he successfully held both
a full-time professorship at University of Pennsylvania and a staff position at
Philadelphia Electric Company as Director of Personnel Research and Training.
Viteles used dual roles to show the effective interaction of science and
profession and of research and practice.
David McClelland
Born in Mt. Vernon, NY in 1917
McClelland made contributions to the field of I/O
psychology through personnel recruitment,
training, and motivation theories. He is best known
for conceptualizing the Theory of Needs in 1961,
which states that motivation of an individual can
result from three dominant needs: need for
achievement, affiliation, and power. All three
needs are present in each individual and are shaped
and acquired over time. Training can be used to modify a needs profile,
nevertheless, one need is always the dominant one. McClelland was convinced
that individuals with the need for achievement are the best leaders, and developed
training programs for business people that were designed to increase their
achievement motivation.
Elton Mayo
1880-1949
He was most involved in worker’s
productivity and morale, cooperation within
work groups, leadership styles, individual needs and
community structure, stress and counseling, and processes
of social assimilation. His most famous study was the
Hawthorne Project that took place at the Western Electric
Hawthorne Works in Chicago from 1927-1932. He is also
recognized for opening a new view of social sciences in an
industrial setting, which influence the direction of research
in social science in Britain and North America. Mayo’s view
consisted of changing management from a scientific
perspective to a humanistic approach. This was achieved by
determining rises in productivity to be caused by listening to
employees and not viewing them as appendages to
machinery. He was also credited for discovering that
psychological and sociological factors decisively affect
worker performance. He spent over 20 years as a professor
of Industrial Research at the Harvard business school and
was regarded by many as the father of Industrial Sociology.
Kurt Zadex
Lewin
1890-1947
After he immigrated to the United
States in 1933, he worked at
Cornell University and for the
Child Welfare Research Station at
the University of Iowa. While at
Iowa, Lewin characterized
organizational management styles
and cultures in terms of
leadership climates defined as being Authoritarian, Democratic, or
Laissez-faire.
In the study, groups of schoolchildren were assigned to one of three
groups with an authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire leader.
The children were then led in an arts and crafts project. Lewin then
observed the behavior of the children in response to the different
styles of leadership.
Authoritarian leaders make decisions independently with little or no
input from the rest of the group. Lewin found that decision-making
was less creative under authoritarian leadership. Democratic leaders
offer guidance to group members, but they also participate in the
group and allow input from other group members. In Lewin’s study,
children in this group were less productive than the members of the
authoritarian group, but their contributions were of a much higher
quality. Laissez-faire leaders offer little or no guidance to group
members and leave decision making up to group members. Lewin
found that children under Laissez-faire leadership were the least
productive of all three groups.
In 1946, he set up a workshop for the Conneticut State Interracial
Commission to combat religious and racial prejudices. This
workshop laid the foundation for sensitivity training.
Lewin also developed the principle of Force Field Analysis, which is
one of the most influential developments in the field of social
science. Lewin also presented an equation for behavior ( B = f(P,E))
that suggested that neither nature or nuture alone can account for
individuals’ behavior, but rather that both interact to shape each
person and behavior.
Frank and
Lillian Gilbreth
Married in 1904
Frank was a brick-layer, and
became interested in finding ways to make brick-laying faster and
easier. The pair pioneered time-in-motion studies. They used
photographs of work motions to try and come up with the best way to
perform a task. From that, they outlined a set of 18 hand positions that
are used in the workforce, which they called therblig.
Walter V. Bingham
1880-1952
Bingham helped create Army Alpha and Beta tests as an Army
psychologist during WWI. On a team headed by Robert M.
Yerkes, Bingham helped design group intelligence tests to identify men who
were particularly well-suited for special assignments and officers’ training
schools. During WWII, he helped design a series of aptitude tests as Chairman
of the Army National Research Council on Classification of Military Personnel.
These tests served several purposes, including sifting new arrivals into a few
broad groups with respect to their ability to learn quickly; selecting men for
training as officers; simplifying officer-efficiency reporting; improving
standardized occupational interviews and tests of proficiency in a trade; and
testing of aptitudes for work which calls for mechanical ingenuity or other
special talents.
Frederick Winslow
Taylor
1856-1915
Taylor is credited as the Father of Scientific Management, a
theory that analyzes and synthesizes workflow processes,
improving labor and productivity. Scientific management made
tasks very specific and created precise procedures developed after careful study of an
individual at a certain position. Taylor emphasized the importance of taking breaks, and
found that when breaks were taken, productivity increased.
Taylor helped move management theory from early time and motion studies into a
more quality-oriented approach. He initiated the examination of best practices, now
called benchmarking. Additionally, he decomposed tasks into their constituent
elements, now called business process re-design or business process re-engineering.
Taylor also eliminated activities that did not add value, now called work out.