History of Management Thought Revision

J. Hough and M. White, “Using Stories to Create Change: The Object Lesson of Frederick Taylor’s ‘Pig-Tale,’” Journal of Management 27 (2001): 585–601; E. Locke, “The Ideas of Frederick W. Taylor: An Evaluation,” Academy of Management Review 7 (1982): 14–24; F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911); C. Wrege and R. Hodgetts, “Frederick W. Taylor’s 1899 Pig Iron Observations: Examining Fact, Fiction, and Lessons for the New Millennium,” Academy of Management Journal 43 (2000): 1283–1291; D. Wren, The History of Management Thought, 5th ed. (New York: Wiley, 2005).

Lastly is labour selection and motivation. Taylor said that every task should be performed by a ‘first class man’ for a specific task. “First-class” men should be given “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”. (Rose 1978: 36) “First-class” man can be both born and trained. Workers should go for training and development courses

Taylor believed that managers should manage the organisation for example assign tasks to their workers and the workmen or women should perform these tasks. Also, having workers perform single or limited tasks eliminated the long training period required to train craftsmen, who were replaced with lesser paid but more productive unskilled workers. ‘all day long the management work almost side by side with the men, helping, encouraging, and smoothing the way for them, while in the past they stood on one side, gave the man but little help, and threw on to them almost the entire responsibility as to methods, implements, speed, and harmonious

The work that Frederick Taylor started was in response to the conditions in factories at the end of the 1800s. During this time work in factories was not particularly organised with each manager doing it ‘their own way’, usually by being extremely authoritarian

Frederick Taylor’s fundamental thoughts on scientific management dated back to early 1880s when he was employed at Midvale Steel Company and observed his coworkers “soldiering” at work. In the following two decades, he moved around different companies while developing his management theory

Frederick W. Taylor worked across the United States in the first 15 years of the 20th century looking to solve production problems (Owens & Valesky, 2011, p. 67). He was an engineer in steel manufacturing and studied developed what what is now known as the four principles of scientific management. These principles spell out what both managers and workers are to do. Two important principles include having the management set goals, plan, and supervise workers, and the workers perform the work, and that organizations should establish the standard where management “sets the objectives and the workers cooperate in achieving them” (p. 67). Taylor’s principles are still used today by some organizational leaders who fight the movement that management should work as a team with the workers (pp. 67-68). Taylor’s principles have led to things such as strict discipline, the idea that workers must focus on their task with little or no interaction with colleagues, and the idea of incentive

Scientific Management is also known as Taylorism. Fredrick Winslow Taylor wanted to divide the work process into small, simple and separate steps (Division of Labor). Division of Labor meant every worker only had one or two steps, this was created to boost productivity. Taylor also believed in Hierarchy, he wanted a clear chain of command that separated the managers from workers. He did this so managers would design work process and enforced how the work was performed and employees would simply follow directions. Taylor wanted to select and train high performing workers or first-class employees and match them to a job that best suited them. Taylor believed the most productive workers should be paid more. Employees who could not meet the new higher standard were fired.

Frederick Taylor was an engineer who ran experiments in the 1880’s on the common manufacturing process of his time. His goal was to increase the productivity of the workers. The experiments measured the time to perform different tasks. He created recommendations for the workplace that became business standards and were enforced in the workplace. Businesses used these as a measure of productivity and rewarded wages and other rewards on a basis of performance. These changes created a shift in the workplace and a demand for higher compliance became the norm. Taylor helped create the need for standards in the workplace.

Taylor imagined that workers would be able to make out the relationship between completion of more work in units and the economic rewards been increased. Taylors work as described by (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2004) depicts how theories were to take place at shop floor levels, then how facts were substituted for opinion and guess work. Henri Fayol, his fellow classical writer had a different perception which looked at organisation from top to bottom. The pace setters of classical theories had engineering background hence derived theories with scientific approach. (Buchanan and Huczunski, 2004). (Cole, 2004) talks about how the production environment under the classical theory in America had created difficulties, where labour force were skint, uneducated, and in quest of making economic fortunes. (Lemak, 2004) point out how the classical management has had

Frederick W. Taylor was ahead of his time for his concept of Scientific management. It was a revolutionary way of running a business, that swept all over the globe, and his ideas were applicable to many different industries. Substituting disorder and conflict for a new untested method of control, cooperation, and science. Taylor understood there were no incentives for working harder. Knowing this, he payed workers based on output, allowing workers to make more money on any given day. It seemed like everyone would enjoy and prosper under this system, but that was not the case. Workers liked the opportunity to make more money in this system but many of them resisted this new idea. Being under constant supervision made work much harder for them.

The next technique of individualized work, is based on Taylor’s conviction that personal ambition would supersede the desire for general welfare as an incentive to exertion (Whyte, 1969, p.5). This is almost in complete contradiction with businesses like McDonald’s, where the focus is on teamwork.

Frederick Taylor was the founder of Scientific management also known as Taylorism. He was the first who settled a reasonable approach, a coherent manner in which the factories should be organised. The best way for a worker to do their jobs according to Taylor was to provide proper tools and training, and to provide motivation for good performance. He introduced the concept of scientific management that influenced the management thought process in a considerable way.

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.

c. Thus the workers were urged to surpass their previous performance standards to earn more pay .Taylor called his plane the differential rate system.

The year 1911 saw Frederick Winslow Taylor publish a book titled ‘The principles of scientific management’ in which he aimed to prove that the scientific method could be used in producing profits for an organization through the improvement of an employee’s efficiency. During that decade, management practice was focused on initiative and incentives which gave autonomy to the workman. He thus argued that one half of the problem was up to management, and both the worker and manager needed to cooperate in order to produce the greatest prosperity.