Key Contributors to the Administrative Management Approach

The administrative management approach is one of the foundational schools of thought in public administration, offering a structured way to understand how organizations function and how managers can make them more efficient. Unlike the scientific management school that zoomed in on the individual worker and shop-floor tasks, the administrative approach looked at the organization as a whole – its structure, its chain of command, and the functions of those at the top. This movement was shaped by a handful of remarkable thinkers whose ideas still echo in classrooms, government offices, and corporate boardrooms today.

The intellectual backdrop of the administrative management approach 🔗

To appreciate what these thinkers achieved, it helps to understand the problem they were trying to solve. In the early twentieth century, organisations were growing rapidly in size and complexity. Factories, railways, government departments, and commercial firms were all expanding, and there were very few formal frameworks to explain how such entities should be managed. Early thinkers stepped in to develop practical frameworks for leadership, coordination, and control precisely because this gap existed.

What united these writers was a strong belief in structure. They argued that an organisation could not function without a clearly defined structure, and that such a structure was the device through which human beings were assigned tasks and related to each other. Because they placed such weight on structure, these thinkers are sometimes called the structuralists. They also shared the conviction that administration could be developed from an art into a science by systematically processing the experience of administrators into general principles.

Henri Fayol and the fourteen principles of administration 🔗

If one person deserves the title of founder of the administrative management approach, it is Henri Fayol (1841-1925), a French mining engineer who later served as the managing director of a large mining company. Fayol’s ideas emerged not from a library but from decades of running a complex industrial enterprise. He distilled this experience into his 1916 book Administration Industrielle et Générale, later translated into English as General and Industrial Management.

Fayol’s thinking marked a shift. His primary concern was the administrative apparatus itself – the functions of administration – and he believed in a strict, tree-like chain of command with unity of command as one of his central mottoes. Where Frederick Taylor focused on the task and the worker, Fayol focused on the manager and the organisation.

The fourteen principles 🔗

Fayol’s most famous contribution is his set of fourteen principles of administration. These are not rigid laws but flexible guidelines meant to help managers bring order and efficiency to their organisations. In brief, they are: division of work, which encourages specialisation to improve productivity and skill; authority and responsibility, the right to give orders paired with accountability for outcomes; discipline, or respect for agreements and rules; unity of command, under which an employee should receive orders from only one superior; unity of direction, meaning one head and one plan for activities with the same objective; subordination of individual interest to the general interest; remuneration, which should be fair to both employer and employee; centralisation, the appropriate concentration of decision-making authority; scalar chain, the clear line of authority from top to bottom; order, a place for everything and everyone in that place; equity, fairness in dealing with personnel; stability of tenure of personnel, which reduces costly turnover; initiative, encouraging employees to act on their own plans; and esprit de corps, building team spirit and unity.

The five functions of a manager 🔗

Alongside these principles, Fayol also identified the activities that make up the work of a manager. He set out five primary functions of management that go hand in hand with the principles and help managers understand the big picture of how they should spend their time. These are planning, organising, commanding, coordinating, and controlling – a formulation so influential that it still appears, in slightly modified form, in textbooks written a century later. For this reason, Fayol is widely regarded as the father of modern management.

Mooney and Reiley: coordination as the first principle 🔗

Across the Atlantic, two American executives picked up Fayol’s ideas and pushed them further. James D. Mooney, a corporate executive and engineer, and Alan C. Reiley, his colleague at General Motors, produced their pioneering work Onward Industry in 1931, later revised and reissued as The Principles of Organization in 1939.

Mooney and Reiley believed that organisational structure should be governed by universal principles. They argued that the orderly correlation of these principles would lead to efficient application in every area of collective human effort. Their most distinctive contribution was to place coordination at the very top of the list of organising principles.

The coordinative principle 🔗

Mooney argued that coordination is the fundamental element of any human organisation, illustrating the point with the labour of two individuals trying to move a stone and calling coordination the first principle of organisation. Wherever even two people combine their efforts toward a common purpose, he said, the need for coordination is already implicit. All organisational activities must therefore work together harmoniously toward shared objectives.

The scalar and functional principles 🔗

Mooney and Reiley added two more principles to coordination. The scalar principle refers to the graded chain of authority and responsibility that runs vertically through an organisation, similar to Fayol’s scalar chain. The functional principle distinguishes between different types of duties based on the nature of the work.

Within the functional principle, they identified three basic functions that every job involves. The determinative function deals with setting goals. The application function involves acting purposively to achieve those goals. The interpretative function covers decision-making. They argued that management must be aware of all three so as to discharge them whenever the situation demands.

Mooney and Reiley also made an important distinction between line and staff functions – the line carrying out the scalar chain of command, and the staff providing advice and expertise to the line. This distinction is still alive in almost every government department and corporate hierarchy today.

Gulick and Urwick: the POSDCORB era 🔗

The ideas of Fayol, Mooney, and Reiley found their most ambitious synthesis in the work of Luther Gulick (1892-1993), an American political scientist, and Lyndall Urwick, a British management consultant. In 1937, they co-edited a landmark volume titled Papers on the Science of Administration, published by the Institute of Public Administration at Columbia University. The collection brought together essays by Fayol, Mooney, Mary Parker Follett, Henry Dennison, and others, making it a consolidated statement of classical administrative thought.

Gulick’s own chapter, “Notes on the Theory of Organization,” is perhaps the most cited document in the history of public administration. It was prepared during his time on the Brownlow Committee, which was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to reorganise the executive branch of the United States government.

The POSDCORB acronym 🔗

Gulick is best remembered for coining the acronym POSDCORB to describe the functions of a chief executive. Gulick asked what the work of a chief executive actually is, and answered with POSDCORB, designed to draw attention to the various functional elements of that work. The seven letters stand for:

Planning – working out in broad outline the things that need to be done and the methods for doing them. Organising – establishing the formal structure of authority through which work is arranged, defined, and coordinated. Staffing – the entire personnel function of recruiting, training, and maintaining favourable conditions of work. Directing – the continuous task of making decisions, embodying them in orders, and leading the enterprise. Coordinating – the all-important duty of interrelating the various parts of the work. Reporting – keeping those to whom the executive is responsible informed through records, research, and inspection. Budgeting – the fiscal planning, accounting, and control of finances.

Gulick’s bases of departmentalisation 🔗

Gulick also contributed the famous question of how work should be divided among departments. He argued that organisations could be departmentalised in four ways: by purpose (such as education or public health), by process (such as accounting or engineering), by persons or things dealt with (such as tribal welfare or veterans’ affairs), and by place (such as a regional or state office). Each basis has its strengths and trade-offs, and the choice among them remains a live issue in the design of government departments.

Urwick’s contribution 🔗

Urwick, an Englishman with a background in the British Army and management consulting, brought a systematising impulse to the group. He worked hard to reconcile the ideas of Fayol, Taylor, and Mooney into a unified theory of administration. His emphasis on span of control – the idea that there is a limit to the number of subordinates a single manager can effectively supervise – became a cornerstone of organisational design and was later defended in depth in his 1956 essay on the manager’s span of control.

What these thinkers shared 🔗

Reading across Fayol, Mooney, Reiley, Gulick, and Urwick, certain common threads stand out. They all believed that administration could be studied scientifically and that generalisable principles could be derived from the accumulated experience of administrators. They all treated the organisation as a formal structure and gave relatively little attention to the informal human relationships within it. They all saw coordination through hierarchy as the spine of any organisation. And they all assumed that the principles they articulated were universal, applying equally to a mining company, a government ministry, or an army.

This universality was later challenged. Scholars such as Herbert Simon, Robert Dahl, and Dwight Waldo published influential critiques in 1946 and 1947, arguing that the so-called principles were often contradictory and oversimplified the reality of administration. Simon famously described them as “proverbs” rather than scientific laws. Even so, the vocabulary and frameworks invented by the administrative school continue to shape how public administration is taught and practised.

Why these ideas still matter 🔗

For students preparing for civil services examinations or studying public administration at any level, these thinkers are more than historical figures. The organisation of central ministries, state secretariats, and district administrations still reflects Fayol’s scalar chain, Mooney’s coordinative principle, and Gulick’s POSDCORB functions. When the Cabinet Secretariat coordinates between ministries, when a district collector exercises line authority over subordinate officers, when a Secretary prepares a budget for parliamentary approval, the ghosts of these theorists are in the room.

Their limitations are equally instructive. The rigid, top-down structures they championed struggle with the complexity, flexibility, and citizen-centric orientation demanded by modern governance. Newer schools – human relations, systems theory, public choice, new public management – have all emerged in part as responses to the gaps in the administrative management approach. But those later schools did not replace the classical thinkers so much as refine them. The scaffolding built by Fayol, Mooney, Reiley, Gulick, and Urwick still stands, even when newer floors are added on top.

What do you think? In an age of flat organisations, remote work, and agile teams, is the hierarchical model championed by these thinkers still fit for purpose, or do we need a fundamentally new vocabulary for public administration? And if you had to retain only one idea from the administrative management approach, would it be Fayol’s unity of command, Mooney’s coordinative principle, or Gulick’s POSDCORB – and why?

References

1. https://www.toolshero.com/management/14-principles-of-management/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayolism
3. https://www.mindtools.com/asjiu77/henri-fayols-principles-of-management/
4. https://testbook.com/question-answer/according-to-james-d-mooney-the-first-princ–62efbfb027bf26e64f5181f7
5. https://www.routledge.com/Papers-on-the-Science-of-Administration/Gulick-Urwick/p/book/9780415279864
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSDCORB