Fayol’s Principles of Management

What Fayol’s principles of management are

Fayol’s principles of management (مبادئ فايول), also known as Fayol’s 14 principles, are fourteen principles for organising management attributed to the French engineer and manager Henri Fayol (1841 to 1925). Secondary summaries connect them with his book “Administration industrielle et générale”, published in 1916, and with an English translation titled “General and Industrial Management”, published in 1949. The same summaries mention an earlier English translation, from 1930.

The summaries describe the fourteen as guiding principles of management. They are not laws that apply to every organisation, they are not the result of a field test that we are reporting, and they are not a description of what organisations in Saudi Arabia do.

Where do the principles come from?

We checked the bibliographic records of five works in Crossref. Those records establish that the works exist. They say nothing about what the works contain.

• Wren. The article “Henri Fayol: learning from experience” in Journal of Management History, volume 1, issue 3, 1995, pages 5 to 12, and the article “Henri Fayol as strategist: a nineteenth century corporate turnaround” in Management Decision, volume 39, issue 6, 2001, pages 475 to 487.
• Wren, Bedeian and Breeze. The article “The foundations of Henri Fayol’s administrative theory” in Management Decision, volume 40, issue 9, 2002, pages 906 to 918.
• Yoo, Lemak and Choi. The article “Principles of management and competitive strategies: using Fayol to implement Porter” in Journal of Management History, volume 12, issue 4, 2006, pages 352 to 368.
• A book review. An item titled “General and Industrial Management” in The Academy of Management Review, volume 11, issue 2, 1986, page 454. Its record carries the names of Fayol and of Carter.

Neither the 1916 book nor its English translations of 1930 and 1949 are recorded in Crossref, so their dates rest on the summaries alone. The summaries also disagree on the year the book came out, giving either 1916 or 1917. We do not name the place where the French text was first published, because we have not verified it.

We have not read the text of any of the recorded works, so we quote no phrase and report no finding from them. Everything we say about the principles comes from secondary summaries, and what the recorded articles themselves say about the principles is unknown to us. Our description of each principle is a summary in our own words of what those summaries report. The summaries do not agree on the names of the principles, since the names vary from one translation to another, and the labels we give each principle are our choice of wording.

What are Fayol’s fourteen principles?

The summaries give fourteen principles, in an order that varies between sources:

• Division of work: Work is distributed across specialisations instead of each person doing everything.
• Authority and responsibility: The right to give an order goes together with accountability for its result.
• Discipline: Respect for the agreements in place between the organisation and the people who work in it.
• Unity of command: An employee receives orders from one superior for any one piece of work.
• Unity of direction: One plan and one head for a group of activities that share one objective.
• Subordination of individual interest to the general interest: The interest of the organisation comes before the interest of an individual, or of a single team, within it.
• Remuneration: Pay that is described as fair and that satisfies both the organisation and its employees.
• Centralisation: The degree to which decisions are concentrated at the top, a degree that differs from one organisation to another.
• Scalar chain: The line of superiors from the top of the organisation to its lowest level, along which orders and communications travel.
• Order: Every person and every thing has an arranged place in the organisation.
• Equity: Employees are treated fairly, with kindliness.
• Stability of tenure of personnel: Unnecessary employee turnover is avoided.
• Initiative: An employee is given the chance to draw up a plan and to carry it out.
• Esprit de corps: The members of a team are cohesive and work in harmony.

Some summaries report that Fayol did not regard the list as closed, and we have not checked that report against his text. The principles remain broadly worded. Deciding what “fair pay”, “kindliness” and “cohesion” mean in a particular organisation requires criteria that the organisation sets for itself.

The same holds for equity, discipline and remuneration as a group. Each needs an operational definition from the organisation that applies it, and nothing in the list does that work in the organisation’s place.

What were Fayol’s management activities?

The summaries state that Fayol divided management into five activities: forecasting and planning, organising, commanding, coordinating and controlling. They present the fourteen principles as tools for carrying out those five activities.

We have not traced how the five activities passed into the versions found in management textbooks today, so we do not say which of them were dropped or what was added. The principles also date back to 1916, as the summaries give it. We have not verified that the working environment Fayol described resembles the environment of organisations today.

How Fayol’s principles differ from nearby concepts

• Choosing the structure of an organisation: Decisions about how work is divided, who reports to whom, where decisions are taken and how many rules are written down are set out in our definition of Organisational Design. Fayol’s list is a set of principles from a single author, and it can serve as a set of questions about those decisions. We do not know that it offers a method for carrying out design.
• The number of subordinates per manager: How many people report to one manager is a question answered by a number, and our glossary covers it under Span of Control. The list we summarised contains no principle with that title, and we have not searched Fayol’s text for any discussion of numbers.
• Where the right to decide sits: The centralisation principle in the list concerns the degree to which decisions are concentrated at the top. A right to decide that rests at lower levels under a fixed written rule is a matter of Decentralized Management, whose definition describes graded levels and not two states.
• Passing on the right to decide while responsibility stays: The authority and responsibility principle ties an order to accountability for it. Between a manager and an employee, the practical form of tying authority to accountability is the subject of Delegation, and connecting the authority and responsibility principle to that term is our reading.
• How much is written down: The order principle concerns the place of each person and each thing. How many procedures and decision rules an organisation writes down, and what it documents, falls under Formalization, since an organisation may keep everything in its place without many documents.
• Why pay differs between employees: The remuneration principle mentions fair pay in general terms. Whether a difference in pay between two employees comes from reasons connected with the work is the question taken up by Pay Equity.

A hypothetical example: who gives orders to a team of eight?

Suppose a branch of 8 employees whose coordinator logged every instruction that reached them in one week, 40 instructions in all. Of these, 28 came from their direct manager and 12 from a second manager in the organisation. The direct manager’s share is 28 ÷ 40 = 70%, the second manager’s share is 12 ÷ 40 = 30%, and each employee received an average of 40 ÷ 8 = 5 instructions in the week.

The log then showed that 5 of the 8 employees received instructions from both managers, which is 5 ÷ 8 = 62.5%. It also showed that 3 of the 12 instructions from the second manager clashed with instructions from the direct manager, which is 3 ÷ 12 = 25% of the second manager’s instructions. In the language of Fayol’s principles, instructions that reach one employee from two managers raise questions of Unity of Command, chiefly whom an employee turns to when two instructions clash.

The figures and the branch are hypothetical, set out for illustration, and they represent no organisation and no study. They do not show that the clash harmed the work, nor that the second manager was wrong, since the second manager might have had a reason connected with the work. The list, as we summarised it, names no acceptable ratio. The example leads to two questions instead: which instructions could have gone through the direct manager, and which needed the two managers to agree in advance?

In some structures an employee reports along two lines of authority at the same time, as in a Matrix Organization. How unity of command applies in structures of that kind is a question we leave open.

How Fayol’s principles are misread

• Treating the principles as laws: The summaries present them as principles that guide, and how they are applied depends on the circumstances of the organisation.
• Taking the list as complete: The summaries report that it is not exhaustive, and it would not be sound to measure every management behaviour against it.
• Treating the principles as proven by testing: We have not seen any test of them. A claim that they succeed or fail in a particular organisation needs that organisation’s own data.
• Treating the scalar chain as a wall: The principle describes the line of authority, and the summaries do not say that communication between levels is forbidden.

What is the role of HR?

HR can use the principles as a list of questions when reviewing job descriptions and structure. To whom does each employee report? Who holds the right to give orders on each task? Where does the right to make a final decision stop? What is the written criterion for fair pay? Organisational decisions stay with those who hold them in management, and we think HR’s part in them comes from what it knows about jobs and about the reporting lines that exist in practice.

What does the evidence allow us to conclude?

We do not conclude that applying any one of these principles raises performance or satisfaction, nor that departing from one harms an organisation. We have not read Fayol’s book or the articles recorded in Crossref. In the sources we reviewed, we found no Saudi study that we rely on concerning these principles in Saudi organisations. So we attribute no effect and no figure to any source.

In our view, the principles are better treated as a language for asking questions about reporting lines, authority and order, and any arrangement is better judged by what is observed in the organisation. Did each employee know who directs them, and were the limits of each manager’s authority clear? What is decided after that depends on the task, the team and the nature of the work.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.