Custom essays on Chester Barnard

Barnard’s main book “The Functioning of the Executive” is a revised and expanded version of the summary of lectures read in November and December 1937 at Boston’s Lowell Institute. According to Chester Barnard the invitation to read lectures became a stimulus for him for the reasonable representation of administration hypotheses. It is cited in a book “Organization theory: from Chester Barnard to the present and beyond” (1995) that:
The Functions of the Executive” is a scholarly book that
has had a significant and lasting influence on the study of
organizations. Noteworthy, in this connection, is the fact
that Barnard saw the job as just beginning. He remarked, in
his closing chapter, on the unrealized (and even
unrecognized) need for a science of organization. (p.3)
His book “Organization and Management” published in 1948, is a compilation of major theoretical and practical conclusions on the results of social and management activities over the past decade. In this work he touched the topic of labor relations, leadership, managers’ training, status systems and role of the state.
Barnard’s pubic activity started in 1917 with the work in the Council of military industries and continued throughout his life. During the Second World War, Chester Barnard served as a President of the United Service Organizations, a nonprofit organization that provided free services to the U.S. forces. After the war, Chester Barnard helped the U.S. State Department to prepare a report on the international controlled use of nuclear energy. Past experience allowed him to become the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and then the newly created National Science Foundation. [3]
Chester Barnard was a man who tried to keep in a secret his private life and his religious beliefs, musical tastes and personal relationships, although the death of his only daughter Frances, followed in June 1951, affected him greatly. Evaluation of Barnard’s activity varies widely: on the one hand, he was respected as a great and humane person, on the other hand, especially lately, he is regarded as an arrogant and frightening people single person” in spite of the respect for his deep knowledge, intellect and an impressive appearance. [5]
– The main contribution.
Chester Barnard’s theoris are quite complex, but they can highlight some key themes that illustrate his fruitful influence on the development of management science. His main goal was to create a comprehensive theory based on cooperative behavior in formal organizations, and the theme of “cooperation” has a central role in his work. He defined the organization as a system of coordinated actions the aim f which was to give individuals the ability to achieve such results they had never achieve alone. [4]
So the following management functions were: (1) the determination of organization’s goals, taking into account the changing requirements of internal and external environment (including physical, biological and social factors), and the formation of organization’s values and its internal culture, (2) the establishment of the communication system, i.e. the hierarchical and accountable structures and systems for information transmission – both in the vertical direction, and between all individuals and subdivisions, and (3) the designing of the appropriate set of incentives to attract and retain the personnel, as well as for its commitment to a common goal. [2]
Organization is a dynamic social system, in which both can occur formal and informal processes. Organization must be efficient from the viewpoint of both general and individual problems. These two aspects are mutually complementary. Chester Barnard understood clearly that during the negotiations between administration and staff it was necessary to achieve a balance in the questions of man-hours and compensation correlation. His theory stressed the importance of non-monetary forms of remuneration, as well as more traditional incentives to attract, retain and motivate the staff. He defined all managers as the “administrators”, but especially all managers that formed the administrative team. C. Barnard put an emphasis on the importance of having leaders and drew a distinction between the authority conditioned by the status and the power, specified by the force of personality. [1]
– The followers.
Chester Barnard being the pioneer in his science had a lot of followers, who tried to examine, criticize, develop his ideas, build their own ones on the base of his fundamental works. [3]
So many of his ideas (including the idea of restrained rationality) were successfully developed first by Herbert Simon, and then by D. March, R. Cyert and many other scientists. [3]
Both opponents and supporters of Chester Barnard often criticized him for his heavy and abstract manner of presentation of his ideas and for the insufficient number of cited specific examples. From the point of view of his work’s content most of the expressed reproaches concerned not the selected arguments, but the digression from some important issues such as strategy formulation, the role of organization’s committee of directors, the practical aspects of the problems of leadership and employee participation in management. [3]
W. Scott believed that Chester Barnard laid the foundation of “administrative state” by means of which the political system had acquired corporate ethics and corporate management style in which everything “controlled”, regardless of the possibility to assess the ultimate result, is acknowledged to be effective. At the same time W. Scott admits Barnard’s inability to realize that his high expectations of human decency among the highest leaders, bearers of management ideas do not always correspond to reality. [3]
3. Summary
So Chester Barnard’s ability to achieve a balance between theoretical arguments and reminiscences about the practical achievements in his fundamental works as well as the ability to show that scientific research and real management activity do not hinder each other, but also promote the progress, are the qualities that continue to evoke our sincere admiration.
4. Conclusions
Chester Barnard’s ideas about the role of management in large organizations took the lead over the time in many ways. It is hard to imagine how the scientific literature about governance problems can develop without original and insightful conclusions in his book “The Function of the Executive” and expressed in it holistic view on the problems of organization and interconnection between formal and informal systems. Chester Barnard was the first scientist who paid a lot of attention to the role of top management of a large organization and raised the question of why it existed. He not only mastered the achievements of the contemporary scientists in “classical theory”, “scientific management” or “theory of human relations”, but also provided them with further development. His practical experience supplemented and supported by facts his theoretical studies and ensured the recognition of his ideas by scientists and working managers.
All this reflects the way in which the researcher had achieved a sustainable balance between “hard” and “soft” approach to the organization, between the science of management and the art of organizational activity and explains the reasons for creating his own metaphor which depicts the management process of the organization as a symphony, art and skill of its execution.

References
1. Jay P. Chandran, Ph.D. The relevance of Chester Barnard for today’s manager. Retrieved March 9,2010
2. VectorStudy.com. (2008). Chester Barnard. Management Gurus.
3. Williamson, Oliver E. (1995). Organization theory: from Chester Barnard to the present and beyond. Oxford University Press US.
4. Wolf, William B. (1974). The Basic Barnard: An Introduction to Chester I. Barnard and His Theories of Organization and Management. Cornell University Press, NY.
5. Wolf, William B., Barnard Chester I. (1973) Conversations with Chester I. Barnard. Cornell University Press, NY.