I found this Harvard Business Review Blog article written by Rita McGrath to be very readable, and especially intriguing.
Almost everyone would agree that the concept of management has evolved since the industrial revolution from “organization as machine” with efficiency of execution being the end goal. And most of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s are fairly comfortable with the concept of management as expertise. We’ve studied all the management theories in business school and have learned that management is a specialty in its own right (why else would I have gotten a master’s degree in management?). That’s the viewpoint I’ve seen most prevalent in my working lifetime. The concept of emotional intelligence seems to have developed out of the “expertise” movement in my view, but maybe it is a bridge to the next notion that the future of management is that managers are there to create a “network” or a “community” for the employees. That is a new idea (at least it is new for me), yet it makes a lot of sense and is worth exploring.
Enjoy the article and let me know what you think. http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/07/managements-three-eras-a-brief-history/