This research examines The Art of Managing People by Phillip L. Hunsaker and Anthony J. Alessandra. The research will discuss the ideas in the work and then go into detail about how those ideas are articulated, with a view toward evaluating whether and to what extent this book, originally published in 1980, continues to have relevance for workplace behavior and manager and worker satisfaction.
What must be acknowledged by anyone who opens The Art of Managing People is what it does not do, which is present a densely argued, theory-driven historiography of American management methods. From first to last, the text is action oriented, not oblivious of theory but not overly concerned to analyze theory for its own sake. The assertion of a dynamic approach (p. xi) to management sets the stage for a concept of management that will be open, as far as possible, to new information, in an "ever changing and evolving" workplace. The book is aimed at the new manager or at a manager who might be looking for ways to reinvigorate a possibly demoralized staff. There are very few footnotes and parenthetical references. Instead, the text is very much in the vein of a how-to book or magazine that provides background information and prescriptive to-dos, crediting experts from whom prescriptions have been derived in chapter-by-chapter reference lists. The authors' task appears to have been to make a straightforward commercial success out of a business book. The content of that effort is a text that aims to show managers how to read and manipulate groups of people in the service of an organization's project or product, and with an eye on continuous goodwill and organizational stability throughout the process.
The subtitle of the first chapter, "Constructive Manipulation," might have served as the title of the entire work, were it not that the word manipulation has a pejorative connotation. The authors note that lead, motivate, manage "or some other poli...