Rational Goal Model

Rational Goal Model

The rational goal model, which Frederick Taylor (1856–1915) introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, stresses the importance of managerial external control that results from the exercise of director and producer role responsibilities in order to employ humans and other tools to engineer optimal productivity (Taylor 1911). Performance effectiveness is achieved through setting goals, speeding productivity, and increasing profits faster than external competitors can and by using time-and-motion studies, financial incentives, and technological power to maximize output.

Three of Taylor's followers—Henry Gantt (1861–1919) and Frank (1868–1924) and Lillian (1878–1972) Gilbreth—expanded the rational goal approach by using new engineering techniques (time and motion studies) that enhanced the ability of technological experts to expand productivity. Time and motion studies provided detailed information about job activities such as grasping, searching, transporting, or assembling and the time it took to complete them in order to measure normal and superior productivity standards.

The strength of this model is that it accounts for managers' providing structure and initiating action. The exclusive and extreme emphasis on the rational goal model, however, imposes fast-paced, robotlike movements on people that were impossible to sustain, and this neglect of individual psychosocial needs in the pursuit of economic returns tends to result in offended individuals and destroy cohesion at the organizational level.

At the microeconomic and geopolitical levels the rational goal model of management was advanced indirectly by Alfred Marshall (1842—1924) and James Burnham (1905—1987), respectively. Marshall was a neoclassical economist who explained how the price and output of a good are determined by both supply and demand curves, such as the price and output of new automobiles that are determined by the demand of the buyers and the supply from the manufacturers, that are like scissor blades that intersect at an optimal point of equilibrium. It is at this point of equilibrium that buyers, sellers, and/or managers could and should rationally optimize their utility values by clearing the external market (see Figure 1).

Burnham's later neoconservative geopolitical works argue that because of the unceasing desire for power among an oligarchy of managerial elites from the three major global "super-states," the struggle for external political control of the world requires a decisive victory by strong-willed U.S. political leadership that exercises an aggressive geopolitical strategy by using all the offensive resources at its disposal. The perceived overreliance on the rational goal model at the microeconomic and geopolitical levels to secure external global control has led to the expected results of offended stakeholders and has destroyed cohesion at those extraorganizational levels as well.