Business

Frederick Taylor (1917) developed scientific management theory (often called "Taylorism") at the beginning of this century. His theory had four basic principles: 1) find the one "best way" to perform each task, 2) carefully match each worker to each task, 3) closely supervise workers, and use reward and punishment as motivators, and 4) the task of management is planning and control.

Amazingly, productivity rapidly raised in the first 24 hours. The study concluded that for maximum productivity, the best worker had to be chosen to perform that task and had to be provided with training for efficient work. Every worker and his output had to be closely monitored and he had to be rewarded for greater productivity. Taylor also wanted to reduce conflicts between managers and workers by convincing them that they would benefit mutually from a rise in productivity, as this would favour society and the organisation as a whole.

This paper analyzes five great management theorists: F. W. Taylor, Max Weber, Mary Parker Follett, and Douglas McGregor. Each theorist will be compared by four management functions: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling as detailed in the textbook: The Essentials of Contemporary Management-Sixth Edition from Gareth Jones and Jennifer M. George. We begin by discussing commerce prior the industrial revolution and then we define the key management functions, followed by an examination of each theorist, applying a template of analysis and critique.

Taylors Method was known as the Time & Motion Studies. Time was the least amount of time it took to perform each task and even each part of each task, whereas motion was where the fewest numbers of motions required for each small task. Taylor wanted employees to work as if they were machines. From Taylor’s Theory to Taylorism the outcomes were that it boosted in productivity by 200% to 400%. More work was also accomplished with fewer people meant more profit for companies from Taylorism and the final outcome was that more consistent products were of higher quality (Frederick Taylor Scientific Management). In Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ‘The Principles of Scientific Management 1910, he states that ‘under the old

Firstly, according to Rose, M. (1978), Taylor believes that the root of inefficiency is the slacking and soldiering of workers. And irrational and incompetent of managers. He further explained the idea of inefficacy by stating ‘managers are incompetent is because of the growth in scale and technical complexity of industry’. In order to dealt with the slackness of worker, the worker should be closely control and supervise by inspector. This ensures that no one will shirk during work and the chance of worker making mistakes are minimized. Hence worker will produce the maximum effort which leads to increase in productivity. Taylorism also suggested the use of hierarchy organization structure which means separating the decision maker, usually the managers and the people who receive orders from the managers and implement it. This is because he believes that people with no management skills will not be able to make a right decision and hence may leads to a waste of resources. Besides supervision, Taylor asserted that managers should apply their professional knowledge on managing their worker and plan the work. For example, calculating the

It was this which caused the increase in productivity and which demonstrated that the workers could not be regarded as mere parts in the organizational machine. Thus was born the notion of the ‘Hawthorne Effect’, a staple part not just of organization theory but of social science as a whole. The other study I want to mention was that conducted in the bank wiring room. Here, a small group of male workers were engaged in producing electrical components. It emerged that the group set informal norms around production levels so that, rather than produce their maximum output (which would earn them a bonus) the workers performed sub-optimally. These norms were enforced by a mixture of peer pressure (including physical sanction) and an unofficial ‘gang leader’. This suggested that workers were not solely motivated by economic

Roethlisberger described “the Hawthorne effect” as the phenomenon in which subjects in behavioral studies change their performance in response to being observed. While there is a factor of increased productivity arising from closer monitoring of staff (whether workers in a factory of staff in an office or other environment), over a sustained time (outside of an empirical study, such as carried out at the Hawthorne Plant), this cannot be achieved without a strong management policy of engagement and strong communications channels and policies within an organisation.

Fredrick Taylor made an observation of men at work which led him to develop what is known as Taylorism management theory. He theorized that workers were inefficient because they tend to ration their workload less than

Taylor's own name for his approach was scientific management. This sort of task-oriented optimization of work tasks is nearly ubiquitous today in industry, and has made most industrial work menial, repetitive, tedious and depressing; this can be noted, for instance, in assembly lines and fast-food restaurants. Ford's arguments began from his observation that, in general, workers forced to perform repetitive tasks work at the slowest rate that goes unpunished. This slow rate of work (which he called "soldiering", but might nowadays be termed by those in charge as "loafing" or "malingering" or by those on the assembly line as "getting through the day"), he opined, was based on the observation that, when paid the same amount, workers will tend to do the amount of work the slowest among them does: this reflects the idea that workers have a vested interest in their own well-being, and do not benefit from working above the defined rate of work when it will not increase their compensation. He therefore proposed that the work practice that had been developed in most work environments was crafted, intentionally or unintentionally, to be very inefficient in its execution. From this he posited that there was one best method for performing a particular task, and that if it were taught to workers, their productivity would go up.

According to Elton Mayo and F.J.Reothlisberger, the reason for the increased production, regardless of the alternating conditions in some of the studies (wages, illumination, breaks, etc...) was due to the workers feelings; that they were the source of attention, which was defined by them as the Hawthorne effect (Khai 2010).

their work and then motivating them to act accordingly, the plant turned around its performance.

Taylor brought a breakthrough in management by his experiments which focused on the analysis of individual tasks and the rationalization of labor to increase the productivity of the workforce. He tested this at the Bethlehem Iron where he increased production over 350% and reduced workers by 70% by increasing the shovel size. Hence, he advocated rationalization to create thriving organizations. He argued that problems such as low productivity, soldiering, high-turnover and conflicts in relationships of workers and managers caused a great amount of loss in productivity and therefore resulted in mismanagement and a loss of efficiency. As a solution, he proposed his theory of Scientific Management. His theory had four basic principles: finding the one "best way" to perform each task, carefully matching each worker to

In 1911, the Frederick Winslow Taylor 's theory of scientific management describes the one best way to done a job. Taylor was working in the steel industry as a mechanical engineer in Pennsylvania. He was regularly amazed by workers inefficiencies, were they uses enormously dissimilar technique to do same work. Workers frequently taking jobs easily and Taylor believes worker taking more time as it can be done in less time. That time almost there was no standards and workers get placed even they don’t have the ability to do that task. Taylor set quick fix by applying a scientific method to shop floor job. In that Taylor spent more than twenty years for following the one best way.

Stage one of the experiment aimed at examining the effect of changes in working arrangements upon productivity (Gale 2004). During this stage five girls were transferred from the factory floor to a special test room where their output of relays was recorded for over two years, during which a large number of alterations were made to their working conditions (Carey 1967). One of the changes made was to the illumination values in the factory environment. When the light was cut down to .06 of a foot candle the girls maintained their efficiency (Carey 1967). They found that only extremely low illumination caused decreases in levels of production (Broches 2008). According to Carey (1967) the conclusion came as a great “éclaircissement” as the founding’s were quite different from what they had expected. The results identified the importance of social satisfactions at work and researches were puzzled to observe that productivity continued to rise regardless of the changes made to the physical working environment. At the end of the two years the results found that the girls output had increased by about 30 percent (Carey 1967) and physicians indicated improved workers health and a decrease in absenteeism (Broches 2008). Due to the steady increase in output the investigators took into

When Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 he was the first theorist to study organizational behaviour in depth. When working as a shop superintendent at the Midvale Steel Company he noticed that workers used different and mostly inefficient work methods (Buchanan & Huczynski 2017,).  Taylor (1919) stated that "The principal objective of management should be to secure maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee". From this, Taylor embarked