Scientific Management- Fredrick Taylor

Scientific Management – Frederick Taylor 1

Scientific Management- Fredrick Taylor

Employee management techniques and procedures are central to the effectiveness of a business. Every business must find a way to complete the tasks necessary for it provide its goods and services to the marketplace. Because a business is unable to act unless all of its employees, from interns to the chief executive officer, act as a single team to achieve the goals the business has established, it is essential for a business to determine how it can affect these employees to have them produce the results the business needs. Today many management techniques and theories tend to center on the personality or character of employees and how best to affect people based on their psychology or personalities. For example, some theories center on the motivations that can drive a person to take action, others on how persons react to different management styles.

At the time of the industrial revolution, however, there was a belief that laborers and managers were different classes of people. The thought was that people should be treated differently based on their social status. Management techniques were not concerned with “who” an employee was. Instead, management techniques were more concerned with assuring managers had order and control over employees, similar to the way a parent has over a child. While the goal was the same as it is today, to achieve company goals, the belief was that labor had no role to play other than to follow orders. There was no thought or expectation that a laborer could have any knowledge or character that the employer may benefit from.

At that time it was the role of management to train or convert a person into what the company needed. When management though of employee or labor training, what it thought about was not training that would benefit the person the employee was. Instead, training was thought to be geared to improving the production of the employee for the benefit of the employee (Berdayes). The management style that was developed in this society, which remains one whose principles are still relevant today, was “Scientific Management”. It was a style geared to determining the best methods management could require employees to follow so that work was done most efficiently and productively (Berdayes). In fact, Taylor once indicated that managers/employer had to understand that, “It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom someone else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency.” This statement clearly indicates the view that any man could be trained to simply follow a procedure and that would lead to great results. However, to fully understand scientific management it is important to understand the mind of the man from whom it originated: Frederick Winslow Taylor (Roper).

Frederick Winslow Taylor was a member of the middle or upper middle classes of his time (Guru). He was born in 1856 into a family of Quakers, who believed in “plain living,” (Guru). His father was an attorney and Taylor graduated with a degree in industrial engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey (Guru). As can be expected, based on this resume, Taylor was a part of management. In fact, while he worked his way through school, his jobs were those of a skilled worker, not a laborer (Guru). He worked in a metal products factory as a machinist where he eventually became a foreman (Guru). Then, he was promoted into the role of a research director and “finally achieved the position of chief engineer.” (Guru).

The fact that Taylor was born into a family headed by an attorney and his ability to attend college, even though he worked, seems to attest to the fact that he was from the higher classes of the time. Student loans and programs by the government were not available at the time to assure that students could afford an education if their families were unable to pay for them. Taylor’s jobs, although he worked as a machinist for years, also indicate that he was never a laborer on an assembly line or a member of that class of workers that was lowest in the society of the time. Taylor’s views, therefore, can be seen to more closely aligned to those of managers and employers than to labor.

A person’s view point is greatly shaped by their upbringing and life experiences. Taylors is almost empty of any contact with, or connection to, an average laborer. Society at the time of Taylor’s life was very different from the democratic and accepting society of today.

NEED MATERIAL ABOUT SOCIETAL VIEWS OF PEOPLE, STATUS IN EARY INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND MANAGEMENT VIEW OF LABOR DURING TIME. MORE ABOUT CULTURE, LIVING CONDITIONS, LABOR LIFESTYLE, ETC.

It is in this society that the theory of scientific management developed. Taylor was convinced that efficiency and productivity could be obtained through the use of study of motion and the use of that work to develop efficient production methods (Salvendy). As Taylor argued, the techniques of science, so respected in society, could be applied to labor (Salvendy). This would permit the discovery of the most productive means of building a product or completing a process in the production of that product (Salvendy). Taylor believed people needed to be observed to understand the movements involved in their work (Salvendy). These individual movements then could be further broken down to help identify the procedures necessary to accomplish them (Salvendy). In the end, Taylor would develop a production method, similar to the way machines are now designed, that would produce the most units in the least amount of time (Berdayes; Guru). Workers were instructed on exactly how to accomplish a task and were not to deviate from the procedures designed by Taylor (Salvendy).

Taylor’s scientific management was a great success during Taylor’s lifetime (Schacter). Because the term “scientific” was associated with the work, and as Taylor devised human body diagrams to “prove” how its movements were the most efficient, the theory gained great respect and generated great debate (Berdayes). One commentator argued that scientific management was a process in which “the person’s activity is thereby reduced to repeating a fractional operation at the tempo of the machine. At the extreme of this approach the person is simply subsumed as one more mechanized component of production with precisely specifiable fuel, cooling, and other operational requirements,” (Berdayes). Throughout the study the laborer in scientific management was reduced to a laboratory animal that was observed in its environment and after the study was reduced to a machine part in how they were required to work. The method was not loved by all or praised by all, regardless of its success.

It has been said that Taylor’s methods were driven only for the benefit of management, but Taylor did not feel this way (Schachter). In fact, Taylor actually wanted to help labor and his scientific theory was an effort to assist labor (Schacter). He believed that through scientific management labor would have a proven way to show management that they were acting as best as they could, hence avoiding any arbitrary actions by managers (Schacter). Taylor’s insistence on the use of written instructions, training, and incentive payments to workers can also be said to signify his belief in the fact that scientific management was a benefit to both employees and management (Guru). Unfortunately, however, that is not how Taylor’s work is remembered today, even though his work is still a part of current management studies (Schacter).

NEED MORE STUDIES ON MODERN VIEW OF TAYLOR AND ON CURRENT MANAGEMENT THEORIES TO ANALYZE USE AND DEVELOPMENT TAYLOR ALONG WITH CURRENT THEORIES.

References

Berdayes, V. (2002). Traditional Management Theory as Panoptic Discourse: Language and the Constitution of Somatic Flows. Culture and Organization, Vol. 8(1), pp. 35–49.

Guros on Managing People. (NA). Fredrick Winslow Taylor: (1856-1915).

Roper, M. (2001). Masculinity and the Biographical Meanings of Management Theory: Lyndall Urwick and the Making of Scientific Management in Inter-war Britain. Gender, Work and Organization, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2001.

Salvendy, G. (2004). Classification of Human Motions. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomic Science, March–April 2004, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 169–178.

Schachter, H. L. (1989). Frederick Taylor and the Public Administration Community: A Reevaluation. (Albany: State University of New York Press).