Taylor's Theory In The Workplace

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In the 1880’s, Fredrick Windsor Taylor had a theory in the workplace that focused on improving economic efficiency within a business and labour productivity. Taylorism or scientific management is a theory “that sought to determine scientifically the best methods for performing any task, and for selecting, training and motivating workers” (Stoner and Freeman, 1992). Taylor’s theory was most notably used for Henry Ford’s assembly line, where in 1913 this set the benchmark for mass production methods around the world (Ford.co.uk, 2016). Taylors theory has evolved over time, whereby most of his values in this school of thought is integral for certain businesses and even industries succeed, such as car manufacturing, clothing lines and even financial …show more content…

This management method meant workers would become more specialised in their tasks, meaning just focusing on one task would allow them to produce products at a faster pace while either maintaining or improving the overall quality of the product. The benefits of using scientific management includes lower production costs, better quality products and less skilled labour needed. Over time, scientific management has had some resistance from many internal and external factors. As trade unions gathered information about collective bargaining and began to strengthen in numbers, the theory had to evolve into something new in order to survive, which leads onto Elton Mayo’s theory based off of the Hawthorne experiments of employees productivity under certain working conditions. As long as industrial society endures, we shall never lose again the insight that human work can be studied systematically (Nelson,Jr., …show more content…

There have been more recent theories that have derived from Taylorism, such as Abraham Maslow’s theory of hierarchy of needs or Douglas McGregor’s theory X theory Y motivational theory. The major difference in Taylorism and other theories is taking human emotion and human needs into account when trying to produce output. Taylor’s ideas reflected a simple model of worker motivation that equated humans to machines, a means of production that responded to financial reward as the primary inducement to work (Wilton, 2010). Although Taylorism mainly had a focus on profits in the short run, “treating workers like machine like forms which eventually argued to result in negative performance in the long run” (Uddin and Hossain,

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