We explain who Henry Fayol was, what his contributions to administration theory were and what the so-called “Fayolism” consists of.
Henry Fayol is considered the father of management.
Who was Henry Fayol?
Henry Fayol He was a French engineer, businessman and administrator, known for having developed the Classical Theory of Administration, also known as “Fayolism”. Therefore, he is considered the father of modern management methods, that is, one of the founders of business administration along with the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915).
Fayol’s theory revolutionized the way we understand business organization, based on a systemic and comprehensive view of the different parts of a company. Fayol’s merit was in understanding the different spheres of the organization as organized and interdependent clients, based on three essential aspects: the division of labor, the application of the administrative process and the technical criteria that this last implies.
These ideas appeared in his book Industrial and General Administration 1916, and were essential to the development of a scientific understanding of management. Much of the terminology created by Fayol continues to be used today.
Birth and youth of Henry Fayol
Henry Fayol was born on July 29, 1841 in the city of Constantinople or Istanbul.then capital of the Ottoman Empire. He was the son of a middle-class French couple, and his father was an engineer by profession and part of the team that built a bridge over the Golden Horn.
When he was six years old, Fayol’s family returned to France, where the boy began his formal studies: first at the Lycée de Lyon and then at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne, from which he graduated at the age of nineteen as a Mine engineer.
Fayol’s first job was in Commentry, in the Auvergne region of France, as an engineer and apprentice manager at the Commentry-Fourchambault-Decazeville mining company, which extracted and processed iron and coal. There he trained with the engineer Stéphane Christophe Mony (1800-1884), whom he later replaced in the management of the Commentry mine..
The experience in the mines was crucial for Fayol. Not only because it was his first managerial opportunity in a company, but because he was able to devote himself to studying its main problems: fires in the mines and the subsidence of the mining soils, and to propose solutions and alternatives. These new ideas and perspectives could be applied from 1888, when Fayol was promoted to general director of the company..
The company’s management improved considerably thanks to Fayol’s changes in the division of labour and the formation of work teams. Under his leadership, the Commentry-Fourchambautl company expanded its operations to the mines of Bressac and Joudreville in eastern France.
On the other hand, in 1875 Fayol met Adelade Celeste Marie Saule, who was his wife until her death in 1899 and with whom he had three children: Marie, Madeleine and Henry.
The publications of Henry Fayol
Fayol’s administrative ideas were popularized with his Industrial and general administration from 1916.
Around 1870, Fayol made his first publications, which revolved around the mining theme.. They were scientific articles on specific topics, such as the spontaneous heating of coal, the formation of coal deposits and plant fossils. These articles were the result of Fayol’s first successful mining experiences, and some were presented at the Paris Congress of the Mining Industrial Society, held in 1878.
After his promotion to general manager of the Commentry mining company in 1888, Fayol faced even greater challenges. The company was almost three years behind in paying dividends to its shareholders and bankruptcy was not ruled out.
Fayol then proposed to the administrative board a rescue plan that, in 30 years, led the company to become one of the largest industrial companies in Europe..
Fayol’s plans relied on the departmentalization and coordination of the company’s global tasks, identifying the main functions to assign them to the appropriate responsible departments. Fayol also added new coal deposits and opted for an economy of scale, putting into practice the successful ideas that he later put forward in his most important publication: Industrial and general administration (1916).
In this play, Fayol proposed a flexible and versatile concept of administration, which in his view should be implemented throughout society.For Fayol, the study of administration methods was the only guarantee of greater efficiency in organizations: managers had to have their functions well defined and work teams had to know their limits and possibilities well.
In his 1916 book, therefore, Fayol proposed his general theory of administration, the foundation of which lay in the correct management and organization of workers.. Furthermore, he highlighted the importance of forecasting and planning. In many respects, Fayol’s theory coincided with the Principles of scientific management published in 1911 by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), whom Fayol considered a pioneer and visionary of business organization.
Fayol’s classical administration, known as Fayolismis distinguished from Taylor’s Scientific Administration, known as Taylorism. Both administrative theories were key to the emergence of modern administration theory, but they present important differences regarding their approach: Fayolism focuses more on the general structure, while Taylorism focuses on the method and tools.
Fayol continued to publish in the following years: in 1921 appeared The administrative theory of the State and in 1923 The awakening of the public spiritHis great work, however, remained his 1916 book.
“Fayolism”
The success of Fayol’s efforts in the Commentry-Fourchambault mining company constituted the greatest support for the ideas expressed in his work. Industrial and general administration. His method was considered a complement, or even an alternative, to Taylorism..
The Fayolist perspective, thus, understood business administration as the sum of different key areas of any organization, which are:
- The technical areain charge of production, manufacturing or transformation.
- The commercial arearesponsible for purchases, sales and exchanges.
- The financial areain charge of obtaining and managing capital.
- The security arearesponsible for the protection of the organization’s personnel and assets.
- The accounting arearesponsible for inventories, statistics and accounting balances.
Likewise, Fayol understood the administrative exercise as the pursuit of five fundamental objectives:
- Planningthat is, the forecasting of future needs and opportunities.
- The organizationthat is, the disposition of resources in a strategic way.
- Drivingthat is, the direction and support of the production process.
- The coordinationthat is, the synchronization of the process and the adaptation to the problems encountered.
- The controlthat is, the collection and processing of information obtained from the study of the process itself.
On the other hand, Fayol proposed fourteen guiding principles of administration:
- The principle of division of laborwhich establishes the possibility of increasing the productivity of a company by better managing the same amount of resources.
- The principle of authoritywhich determines the two aspects that make up authority within the organization: the authority that comes with the position and that which comes with experience, merits and qualities.
- The principle of disciplinewhich establishes the set of desirable and undesirable attitudes of a worker in an organization.
- The principle of unity of commandwhich states that every employee must have a trained boss to provide instructions.
- The principle of unity of directionwhich establishes the need to have a specific plan and someone responsible for its execution for each unit of the organization involved.
- The principle of subordination of particular interests under the common interestaccording to which the wishes of a worker or a manager should never take precedence over those of the rest of the organization.
- The principle of fair remuneration of staffwhich establishes the need to remunerate each employee in a correct and acceptable manner in light of the work they perform.
- The principle of centralizationaccording to which a central decision-making body is needed in every organization.
- The principle of hierarchical orderingwhich establishes a pyramidal hierarchy in the organizational structure, according to which positions and responsibilities are established.
- The principle of order in the managed setaccording to which each employee must occupy a position with an assigned responsibility, and each position and responsibility must have the appropriate employee.
- The principle of equal justicewhich establishes the need for friendly but firm treatment between employers and employees, which encourages both diligence and collaboration.
- The principle of stability and loyalty of collaboratorsaccording to which an employee must invest enough time in a position to adapt to it, in addition to having the necessary skills to perform it.
- The beginning of the spirit of solidaritywhich determines the need for a harmonious and cooperative environment among employees for greater company efficiency.
- The principle of the initiative of all those responsibleaccording to which active and proactive participation in the organization should be encouraged.
The main differences between Fayolism and Taylorism have to do with the perspective from which the organization is approached. While Taylor focused his theories on the improvement of productive activity from a material, technical and procedural point of view, Fayol aimed rather at a holistic conception of the company, in which communication between individuals and the social dynamics between them is just as important.
On the other hand, Fayolism was more concerned than Taylorism with the well-being or individual situation of workers, which represented a step forward in more humane conceptions of industrial work..
The death of Henry Fayol
Henry Fayol worked all his life in the same French mining company.
In 1918, at the age of 77, Fayol retired from the mining company where he had worked all his life. He died on November 19, 1925, at the age of 84.. For his administrative vision and his contributions to science…