Fayol has identified 14 principles of management prescribing certain actions, conditions or concepts. These are used even today in managing education and are described as follows:
(i) Division of Work based on task specialization should be practised. Jobs should be broken down into snail parts and grouped in a manner that permits individuals to work only on a limited aspect. For example, the total teaching activity can be divided into subjects and distributed to Physics teacher. Geography teacher, English teacher and so on.
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(ii) Authority should be clearly delineated so that responsibilities of each worker are known and their relationships to other workers, above, across or below the hierarchical chain are clear. For example, the teacher is responsible to the supervisor/head of the department/vice-principal who in turn is responsible to the principal/director and all three have separate sets of responsibilities.
(iii) Discipline should be established in the sense that administrators and teachers have a right to expect deference and obedience from subordinates.
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(iv) Unity of Command should be practised as a mechanism for clearly delineating authority relationships. An employee should receive direction from and in return be accountable to only one superior. This principle is cited against team-teaching in that the traditional authority structure of the teacher and students becomes vague and students are not sure to whom they ‘belong’.
(v) Unity of Direction whereby each objective should be accompanied by a specific plan for achievement of a specific group of people who would be accountable for achieving that objective, for example, institutional plan leading to yearly plans followed by unit plan and lesson plans.
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(vi) Subordination of Individual Interests in favour of those of the organization and of the work group should be encouraged.
(vii) Remuneration should be fair and routinized so that unreasonable overpayment are avoided. For example, the standard salary schedule is preferable over merit pay.
(viii) Centralization of decision-making should be practised to permit proper co-ordination, with judicious decentralization accompanied by proper controls when needed.
(ix) Scalar Chain as a mechanism for defining the line of command and flow of communication from the highest to the lowest rank should be practised.
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(x) Material and Social Order should be there to ensure that everything and everyone is in the proper place.
(xi) Equity should be practised so that justice governs administrative action.
(xii) Stability of tenure of personnel is desirable and should be sought.
(xiii) Initiative should be encouraged at all levels of the organization.
(xiv) Esprit de Corps in the form of harmony and unity of workers should be encouraged.
In conclusion, it may be said that scientific management theories provide administrators with a rational model from which to work.
The rational model assumes that the educational administrator is capable of identifying objectives, arranging work and instructing subordinates accordingly, supervising in a manner that ensures that work will be done properly and evaluating performance against original objectives.
Employee motivation is also handled under the assumption that persons are primarily motivated by economic and other extrinsic incentives. Applications of scientific management are prevalent in educational institutions.