At the time of these studies back in the 1920’s, Frederick Taylor’s scientific management was at peak influence stressing that organisations need to focus on standardisation, waste elimination and best practices.
Mayo’s work contributed to the human relations movement, this movement stresses the power of groups and social structures rather than just organisational structures and workflows; it also stresses the need to develop high quality leadership to bring coherence within the organisation.
Since Taylor and Mayo, contingency theory has emerged which stresses the need to be situational, that things aren’t stable, and we need to be adaptive. Then along came Peter’s with his emphasis on strategy execution and business excellence. Porter added that competitive advantage is what makes an organisation viable and provided the means to evaluate the five forces that act upon an organisation to threaten competitive advantage. Senge introduced the learning organisation as the means to facilitate continuous transformation and adaption with Drucker famously adding that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’.
Today we integrate all these different perspectives to think about an effective organisation as an organisation that has alignment of strategy and culture and is achieving results. These results we call EFFECTS, with these broad ranging in nature to take into account social, environment and other aims as well as the more traditional elements of strategic performance.
