Mary Parker Follett

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Mary Parker Follett was an American economist, known also as the "mother of the modern management". She was renowned for emphasizing collaboration and personnel management in businesses. Follett's guidelines for managing a team to achieve organizational success still hold true today. Small enterprises can still benefit from Follett's management theory. (Peek, 2022)

Organizational behavior theory was revolutionized by Mary Parker Follett using psychology and human relations inside industrial management. Follett was a management consultant, author, lecturer, and social worker who gave personal counsel to President Theodore Roosevelt. (Peek, 2022)

Mary Parker Follet, who is praised in management theory and psychology for her holistic, humanistic approach to presenting the issues, is typically portrayed as a psychologist in management textbooks and is forgotten in political science, despite the fact that it was in this field that she carried out the first research, focusing among other things on organizational power issues. (Kaczmarek, 2017)

Early in the 20th century, Mary Parker Follett developed the philosophical and theoretical foundation for a direct democracy. Follett viewed democracy holistically, moving beyond the symbolic acts and procedures of representative government to the actual exercise of democracy. For Follett, direct democracy required citizens to be willing, accountable, and capable of acting on their own to tackle difficult problems. Through individual and group actions that revitalize society as a whole, direct democracy increases the authority and capacity of citizens and society as a whole for self-regulation. ( Nelson, 2017)

Publications

Mary Parker Follett is an author of several books, articles and speeches. The most famous publications are:

  • The New State (1918)
  • Creative Experience (1924)
  • Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett (1942)
  • Community is a Proces (1919)
  • The Speaker of the House of Representatives (1896) (Stout, Love, Patalon, 2015)

Biography

Quincy, Massachusetts, was the place of birth of Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933). She attended the Thayer Academy in Braintree where she received a lot of her ideas from the lecturers. She attended the Society for Collegiate Instruction (later Radcliffe College), a Harvard University associate, with money left over by her father. (Nelson, 2017) Over the years 1888-1898 Mary Parker Follett was a student of the University of Cambridge and then moved to study at Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women in Cambridge, one of the departments of Harvard University, in which she graduated in field of political science and economy. (Korombel, Grabiec, 2016)

Early in her 30s after returning to Boston, Follett stunned many of her friends and coworkers by deciding against a career in academia and instead pursuing social work. She would spend the next 25 years to this sector, working in community initiatives and joining the Roxbury Neighborhood House team. (Nelson, 2017)

Functions performed by Mary Parker Follett

Mary Parker Follett performed functions of:

  • president of the organization of the City Committee of the Wider Use of School Buildings (1908)
  • vice-president of the National Association of Cultural Houses (1917-1921)
  • lecturer in industrial management at Oxford University (1926)
  • Consultant of the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization in Geneva (1928)
  • lecturer at the London School of Economics (1933)

Management issues by Follett

Mary Parker Follett's primary areas of expertise were :

  • The notion of power and authority
  • The notion of responsibility
  • The law of situation and the need of workers to participate in management
  • Constructive conflits
  • Coordination rules

Mary Parker Follett thought of power as having the power to set things off, acting out when the situation calls for it, or making changes. The remark unequivocally demonstrates that power is a personal, indivisible trait that each person possesses rather than something that is exercised over them. Mary Parker Follett emphasized the need to move away from dominant power, which is power over others, and aim to exercise power common, which is power exercised along with other people, both in theory and in reality.

Follett also defined the concept of authority, which she regarded as "having formal power, legally owing to the performers of particular activities, belonging to a post, and consequently possessing such authority that can be delegated coupled with specific functions."

Mary Parker Follett identified responsibility with the authority of the position, as a result of which "people should be responsible not to someone, but rather for something." The process of determining each employee's responsibility and how to manage it is both crucial and moderately challenging. Follett indicated that it was then necessary to distinguish between collective responsibility and cumulative responsibility. Responsibility is collective, because certain the number of people is responsible for achieving the same goal. It is cumulative as it starts at the lowest levels and develops into a model company-wide.

Mary Parker Follett formulated the Law of situation in which she pointed that orders should consist of the decisions made by those who give and take them. She said multiple times that partnership between the superiors and subordinates is beneficial due to the fact that the more someone is forced to do something, the more the person will feel the resistance towards that action instead of doing it.

Constructive conflicts that arise in organizations should be handled as natural occurrences that cannot be avoided, but rather, should be used skillfully. That is why there is such a significant potential difference that would be advantageous to all parties involved in the conflict. Follett divided conflict resolution into three categories based on years of research: dominance, compromise, and integration. She believed that the last approach is the most advantageous for the company.

Through her research and experience, Mary Parker Follett has drawn the following conclusions: cooperation between all organizational levels is essential, and the activities of those who work "with each other" should be coordinated. She developed the idea of coordination. In her view, it is a tool for collective planning and should operate in accordance with four fundamental principles:

  1. should be based on direct contacts with people,
  2. should be carried out from the beginning of the implementation of a given project,
  3. should take into account all factors influencing the situation,
  4. it should be continuous.

References

Author: Kacper Szymski

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