Q.Which of the following best describes the nature of principles of management as being formed after repeated observation and testing rather than being handed down as fixed laws? (A) Universal applicability
(B) Formed by practice and experimentation
(C) General guidelines
(D) Cause and effect relationship

Principles of management are not decreed by any single authority — they emerge gradually as managers and management thinkers observe real organisations, test different approaches, and record what actually works.

This is exactly how Taylor's and Fayol's own principles came about — through years of close observation and testing on the shop floor and in top-level administration respectively, not by decree.

The characteristic being described — that principles of management are derived after repeated real-world observation and testing, rather than announced as fixed laws from the start — is the "formed by practice and experimentation" characteristic.

Option-by-option analysis:

(A) Universal applicability is incorrect here — that characteristic is about a principle being usable across many types of organisations, not about how the principle came to be formed.

(B) Formed by practice and experimentation is correct. Taylor's four principles and techniques, for example, grew out of years of direct, careful observation of workers on the factory floor and repeated experimentation with different work methods before he stated them as general principles. Fayol likewise distilled his fourteen principles from his own long practical experience running a large mining and metallurgical company. Neither set of principles was invented in the abstract — both were extracted from real managerial practice.

(C) General guidelines is incorrect — that characteristic describes the flexible, non-rigid nature of how a principle is applied, not the process by which it was originally developed.

(D) Cause and effect relationship is incorrect — that characteristic describes what a principle expresses (that a given managerial action tends to produce a given result), not how the principle itself was arrived at.

Students often confuse "formed by practice and experimentation" (how a principle came to exist) with "general guidelines" (how flexibly a principle is applied once it exists) — read the question carefully to see which stage of a principle's life it is asking about.