Criticism of Fayol's Principle
The contributions of Henry Fayol were criticized as hereunder.
(1) The principles of unity of command and unity of direction are redundant in modern private organizations. Most of the private organizations after the announcement of liberalization, privatization and globalization are dynamic in order to meet the customer's needs before the customers identify or realize them.
(2) the dynamic organizations are team- based, loosely structured, flat organizations and they change their structures based on strategy etc. Orders and commands flow through different directions in teams and loosely structured organizations. Similarly, direction also flows through various directions in modern organizations. Thus, these two principles are not applicable in modern organizations.
(3) the principle of scalar chain is also not applicable in modern organizations as the information requests for carrying out the work flow in different lines.
(4) Many modern organizations implemented business process reengineering and enterprise resource planning, these two techniques are based on team work and need the employees with multiple skill sets as the team members are required to carry out multiple activities. As such, the principles of division of labor and specialization are not applicable to those organization which implemented BPRE and ERP.
(5) Fayola's principles indicate that organizations are a closed system. But most of the organizations today are open systems. As such, Fayola's principles are not applicable to the
organizations based on open systems.
(6) Fayola's principle like unity of command, unity of direction, division of labor, specialization and span of management are applicable to tall and mechanistic organizations. Mechanistic organizations are insensitive to employees' social and psychological needs. Further, they do not use the employees skills to the maximum extent.