ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the early to modern organizational and leadership theorists and their views about organizations and how to best lead them. Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henri Fayol, Max Weber, Mary Parker Follett, Elton Mayo, Chester Barnard, Herbert Simon, and others would contribute to an increasingly complex and sophisticated understanding of organizations. A mechanical engineer by training, Frederick Winslow Taylor became a top engineering consultant to American business and industry. The chapter contains several ideas that help aspiring school leaders begin to build the conceptual framework to enact this role successfully: the organization as an interacting system of many parts; the organization as a human enterprise; the need for leaders to develop people and task-oriented skills. The situational approach to leadership theory stresses the importance of contextual factors. Leadership theory and research soared in the mid- to late-twentieth century with their focus, variably, on leadership traits, behaviors, and situational influences.
