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4 principles of scientific management
Importance of scientific management
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Frederick Winslow Taylor considered the founding father of the science of business management. He surmised that management is a science, knowledge calculated by experts who have no opinions, but instead use neutral, objective, and universal standards to obtain information. He analyzed the job using scientific management, he found the best method to perform said job. Scientific Management goal is to increase productivity by increasing efficiency and wages of employees. This is done by creating time and motion studies to establish performance standard measures. These performance standards encompassed the use of time, cost, and quality of work, leading to uniformity of work. This resulted in the efficiency of the workers being compared with each other.
Next the selection of employees by using the Scientific Selection Procedures is used. It provides Scientific Training and Development to the employees. This consists of having a co-operation between management and employees (mental revolution), using a fix Performance Standards for each job, and having Differential Piece-Rate System for wages. The Differential Piece-Rate System goal was to improve the inefficient worker in order to increase pay, and to maintain or improve the efficient employees’ production capacity.
Then, Taylor theory established the functional foremanship which consists of two groups of supervisors (Akrani):
• At the Planning Level or Office Level (4 supervisors) o Time and Cost Clerk - prepares the standard time for completing the work and cost of doing that work, o Route Clerk - determines the way each product has to travel from a raw-material to a finished product, o Discipline Clerk - discipline and absenteeism problems in the organization, o Instruction C...
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...ing robotic functions and dealing with unrealistic productivity expectations. Based on these theories I must support Mayo’s theory because he considers the morality of employees. After all, how much of an employee’s sense of identity and well-being does a business have a right to control for its purposes? One of the reasons employees are so stressed is that they react according to their emotions and culture. He created a transparent view to address this issue, noting that employee need to be treated with respect and needs met by management for mutual benefit. Plus, provided concrete evidence to support Follet's theory that: the lack of attention to human relationships was the major flaw in most management theories (Rieger, 1995, p 1). I also believe Mayo theories will continue to be redesigned because it deals with and values the human relation aspect in business.
Taylorism is a system that was designed in the late 19th century, not only to maximise managerial control, but to also expand the levels of efficiency throughout workplaces. With this being said, productivity levels increased and fair wage distribution was the main result. However, with other, more recent theories and systems, such as Maslow and Herzburg’s theories, these helped to focus on the satisfaction and motivation of the workers rather than the concern of managerial control and empowerment. Fredrick W. Taylor ended up developing 4 main principles to help increase the work efficiency and productivity in workplaces; these will be discussed later on. Other theories relating to this include, Fayol, Follett, Management Science Theory as well as Organisational-Environmental Theory. All theories listed have an influence on the way businesses work effectively and put their skills to action. This essay will highlight how Taylorism was designed to maximise managerial control and increase productivity, furthermore, showing how more recent theories were developed to focus on empowering employees and to extend the use of organisational resources.
Based on research so far in this essay, it seems that the whole reason behind Frederick Taylor’s theory is that he tends to aim for making the most of his employees, to work to their highest standards for a successful company. When we look at the Ryanair case study on Management, D. Boddy pg 23 we can see that one of the key points is that the staff must turn an aircraft round between the flights in a matter of 25 minutes, which has a positive effect on increasing revenue. However, this leaves the employees under pressure, but this also tells us that the Ryanair organisation makes the most out of their employees, just like Frederick Taylor’s theory. Getting these tasks completed by the employees is all in the manager’s responsibility, Ryanair regulates their staff so that the managers are held responsible for providing the strategies for the employees as mentioned in the case study on Management, D. Boddy pg 23.
Fordism and Scientific Management are terms used to describe management that had application to practical situations with extremely dramatic effects. Fordism takes its name from the mass production units of Henry Ford, and is identified by an involved technical division of labour within companies and their production units. Other characteristics of Fordism include strong hierarchical control, with workers in a production line often restricted to the one single task, usually specialised and unskilled. Scientific management, on the other hand, "originated" through Fredrick Winslow Taylor in 1911, and in very basic terms described the one best way work could be done and that the best way to improve output was to improve the techniques or methods used by the workers. (Robbins p.38)
Management Theorists such as F.W Taylor created the concept of scientific management, which is made up of six key aspects including observation, experiment, standardisation, selection and training, payment by results and co-operation. Despite some facets of his theory becoming outdated, scientific management can still be seen in the some way in current business structures. For example within Virgin, despite its reputation for having a relaxed working environment, some aspects of scientific management are used. Such as the selection and training and payment by results, with certain employees being offered rewards for showing ambition to set up their own businesses and showing signs of creative thinking.
Frederick Taylor and Henri Fayol are both considered classical contributors to management theory. Both were developing and expression their viewpoints at similar time period with the aim of “raising standard of management in industry” (Brodie,1967, p7) in a period were very few publications and theories on management. While both theories were developed with the same influencing factors such as war, social struggles and industrial revolution (Urwick. 1951, p7) each developed quite different management theories. Frederick Taylor is considered the Father of Scientific management and he developed scientific principles of management, focusing on the individual,...
The founding father of scientific management theory is Fredrick Winslow Taylor. He was an American mechanical engineer and an inventor. Modern management theorist Edward Deming credited Taylor for his contributions while Joseph Juran criticized his work for extracting more work from workers. However a careful reading of Taylor’s work will disclose that he placed workers interest as high as the employer’s in his studies. Before the principles of management are discussed it is very important to understand the causes which led Taylor to derive the four principles of management. The three causes are as follows:
There are several theories that examine an organization and it’s approach to managing work in an effort to develop efficiency and increase production. Two classical approaches to management are Taylor’s scientific management theory and Weber's bureaucratic management theory. Both men are considered pioneers of in the study of management.
The concept of scientific management is based on the idea that work could be studied to increase efficiency, and specialization. Economist Adam Smith changed the way the world looked at the economy and organization. In his essay, “Of the Division of Labour,” Smith emphasizes the importance of specialization, and how division of labor leads to specialization. He states that this would allow a worker to be more productive and efficient (Shafritz, Ott, & Jang, 2011, p. 41-45). Frederick Taylor introduced the principles of scientific management, which stated that management is a science, workers should be scientifically selected and trained scientifically, and both management and workers should work together.
Frederick Taylor thought that changes in the work process and/or rules would advance efficiency and productivity. He originated the scientific management approach in public administration. It was based on the idea that work processes should be observed via experiments which would greatly improve productivity. It would do so by doing away with the rule of thumb work methods and replacing them with the results of actual timed observations (14). The application of the scientific approach to management methods would lead to optimizing task time by simplifying the job. It would mean observing work processes to find the one best way to perform each job (15). Once the best way was discovered, all employees were to use it. The simplification of the job would improve task time. This method would lead to increased productivity, higher wag...
Scientific Management theory arose from the need to increase productivity in the U.S.A. especially, where skilled labor was in short supply at the beginning of the twentieth century. The only way to expand productivity was to raise the efficiency of workers.
Hawthorne Studies have been subjected to many criticisms. Yet, the evolvement of many of the management theories today would not have come about without the experiments done by Elton Mayo. This essay will cover the various aspects of management that has been refined through the findings of the tests conducted and how improvements were made to aid in the development of organisational behaviour. It will also discuss the various studies and will show how these theories implement Hawthorne studies as the foundation and the basis of the human relations movement. It will also investigate the criticisms that arise within it.
Scientific management is a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows. Its main objective was improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management. Its development began with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s within the manufacturing industries. Its peak of influence came in the 1910s; by the 1920s, it was still influential but had begun an era of competition and syncretism with opposing or complementary ideas. Although scientific management as a distinct theory or school of thought was obsolete by the 1930s, most of its themes are still important parts of industrial engineering and management today.
The first phase was aimed at measuring the demographic details such as the age , marital status, education level, job experience and the salary amounts. The employee development was then measured through seven items which were derived from various articles. On a five-point scale, ranging from 1 to 5, (where 1= strongly disagree) and (5= strongly agree). Job rotation is operationalized as the perceptions of interests in these developments as well as the competences acquired from the job rotation. In another phase, job rotation was evaluated with 18 items retrieved from the past publications where all of the 18 items were consequently measured with a five-point scale similar to the one that was used for the employee development. In total, there were 25 items in the questionnaire and using the five-point Likert Scale. Just as the thumb rule stipulates, 1:5 ratio for every item, there should be 5 respondents (Schyns, & Von Collani, 2002). Therefore, since there were a total of 25 items the number of the workers that were given the questionnaire was 125. The study mainly dwelled on the past research and was tailored in relation to the objectives of the research question. Consequently, the study utilized the Statistical Package for Social Science
This paper describes on one of the famous management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor, who introduced to society about the scientific management theories. This method was established a hundred years ago in 1911 early stage by Taylor in his work place. This article critically discusses about Taylor’s early stage, background, education, and his contribution to management theory, practice and society.
To start with, the Human Relations Movement firstly emphasises the importance of the working environment for employees as a socialised natural group in which social aspects for both employees and managers take precedence over functional organisational structures. Elton Mayo, who was called “the founder of both the Human Relations Movement and of industrial sociology” (Pugh & Hickson, 1989, P.152), had the basic idea that “workers had strong social needs which they tried to satisfy through membership of informal social groups at work place” (Nicholson, 1998, p.215). Opposing the classical perspectives of management principles of the Scientific Management and Bureaucracy, Mayo claimed that scientifically clarified rules, strict work procedure and incentive money payments were not the only stimulus to inspire workers and that they were “less factors in determining output than were group standards, sentiments and security” (Robbins, Millett & Waters-Marsh, 2004, p.815-816) after he proceeded an experiment, called the ‘Hawthorne Experiment’. According to the Hawthorne Studies, employees were motivated to work harder and efficiently when managers provided a more comfortable and informal working environment taking into account individual satisfaction and their personal needs rather than manipulating employees by way of higher remuneration. Mayo demonstrated that an organisation could not generate much beneficial output if managers “treat workers simply as economic individuals wanting to maximise pay and minimise effort” (cited Nicholson, 1998, p.215). As a result, “managers would no longer consider the issue of organisation design without including the effects on work groups and employee attitudes” (Robbins & Barnwell, 2006, p.47). They now see their jobs as dealing with human beings rather than simply with work.