Re-Thinking Management: Insights from Western Classical Humanism

How Organizations can Develop Solidarity in the Workplace? A Case Study

“…With the previous manager, the kind of leadership that was promoted, was relying on the principal-agent theory. That is consistent with what is usually prescribed in the bank sector (van Staveren 2020), even if this kind of management does not allow good managerial practices and many authors have shown this for many years (Domingo and Melé 2022). The bank's employees can be perceived as a community of persons.…”

“…The thousand ways of representing diversity can help us understand it, use it or learn how to behave with it, but one can never fully know the entirety of a person (Mounier, 1952). This conception of wholeness of the person and human dignity is really different from a resource conception of human being that usually find in management (Domingo and Melé 2022). This way of understanding the person is not only for the manager of this bank branch, it includes the other members of this organization.…”

“…During this phase, researchers use multiple sources of scientific writings and write in the third person to encourage this distancing. Moreover, using literature from various fields (for example, management, HRM, sociology, psychology, philosophy) helps get beyond a reductionist view of human beings (Domingo and Melé 2022) to try to understand their complexities (Morin 2008).…”

“…Humanistic management is far from individualism (Schlag & Melé, 2020). However, mainstream business literature is based on the standard homo oeconomicus assumption of individualist agents (Arjoon et al 2018;Domingo and Melé 2022). According to Hayek (1946), the word "individualism" is presented in English in a translation of a book by De Tocqueville (1864) in which the author highlights the distinction between individualism and egoism.…”

“…This humanistic management vision seems to be interesting for the future at work. Even if humanistic management is not a new idea (Follett, Mayo or Drucker wrote on that since many years), management is still influenced by Taylorism and individualism (Domingo and Melé 2022). And these latter do not allow human flourishing (Hinchliffe 2004;Holland 2020).…”