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James D. Mooney Quotes

1884–1957 United States

James David Mooney (18 February 1884 – 21 September 1957) was an American engineer and corporate executive at General Motors who played a role in international affairs in the 1930s and early 1940s. His career was disrupted when he was accused of Nazi sympathies in 1940.

United States
Business theorists
Businesspeople

Also known as: James Mooney, Mooney, James D.

Random James D. Mooney quote

19 quotes

Organization is as old as human society itself.

p. xiii. Cited in: Morgen Witzel (2003)

Organization is the form of every human association for the attainment of a common purpose.

The supreme coordinating authority must rest somewhere and in some form in every organization, else there could be no such thing as organized.

Failure to delegate causes managers to be crushed and fail under the weight of accumulated duties that they do not know and have not learned to delegate.

James D. Mooney (1931)

No advance in human knowledge will ever exclude the leader's need for the counsel of elemental human wisdom, and especially of collective wisdom, in the making of all important decisions.

The third and effectuating principle of the entire scalar process is Functional Definition.

The scalar process is the same form in organization which is sometimes called hierarchical. But in order to avoid all definitional ambiguities the term scalar is much to be preferred. A scale means a series of steps; hence, something graduated.

[Functionalism is] a distinction between kinds of duties.

In organization it means the graduation of duties, not according to differentiated functions, for this involves another and distinct principle of organization, but simply according to degrees of authority and corresponding responsibility.

In the practical sense the word principle may be applied to any underlying cause of more or less correlated facts in any particular field of investigation. The word principles, as applied to organization, is used by us strictly in the latter meaning.

The reason for the phenomenon we call organization is as fundamental as human life itself. It has its roots in the fact that man, in every fibre of his being, with the full force of every motive he has brought with him through the ages, is stamped indelibly as a social creature.

In every organization there must be some function that decides or determines the objective and the procedure necessary to its attainment... may be called the determinative... in secular government always known as the legislative.

As coordination is the all-inclusive principle of organization, it must have its own principle and foundation in Authority, or the supreme coordinating power. Always, in every form of organization, this supreme coordinating authority must rest somewhere, else there would be no directive for any truly coordinated effort. The term authority as here used need imply nothing of autocracy.

It is sufficient here to observe that the supreme coordinating authority must be anterior to leadership in logical order, for it is this coordinating force which makes the organization. Leadership, on the other hand, always presupposes the organization. There can be no leader without something to lead.

Management Mind in the Automobile Industry has always had a great contempt for politics. The point has been missed that although we, in the Automobile Industry have continually dismissed politics and government as quite unworthy of the attention of serious-minded men like ourselves, politics and government have been continually increasing their interest in the Automobile.

James D. Mooney (1933)

The staff function in organization means the service of advice or counsel, as distinguished from the function of authority or command. This service has three phases, which appear in a clearly integrated relationship. These phases ^ are the informative, the advisory, and the supervisory.

Although a separate function of some kind is implicit in the very existence of a separate department, there may be, especially in manufacturing procedure, certain general functions, appearing in some form of departments, which in turn may require organized supervision and correlation. Thus we have cross-functionalism.

Leadership is the form that authority assumes when it enters into process. As such it constitutes the determining principle of the entire scalar process, existing not only at the source, but projecting itself through its own action throughout the entire chain, until, through functional definition, it effectuates the formal coordination of the entire structure.

When a member of an organization is placed in a position with duties ill defined in their relation to other duties what happens? Naturally he attempts to make his own interpretation of those duties and, where he can, to impose this view on those about him. In this process he encounters others in similar cases, with friction and lack of coordination as the inevitable result.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: James D. Mooney (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.