Scientific Management: Pros and Cons

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.

Scientific management or "Taylorism" is an approach to job design, developed by Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) during the Second World War. With the industrial revolution came a fast growing pool of people, seeking jobs, that required a new approach of management. Scientific management was the first management theory, applied internationally. It believes in the rational use of resources for utmost output, hence motivating workers to earn more money. Taylor believed that the incompetence of managers was the major obstacle on the way of productivity increase of human labour. Consequently, this idea led to the need of change of management principles. On the base of research, involving analysing controlled experiments under various working

The 14 principles of management founded by Mr Henri Fayol can be used to manage organizations and are useful tools for forecasting, planning, process management, organization management, decision-making, coordination and control.

Frederick Winslow Talyor developed a theory called the Scientific Management. It is a theory of management that analyse and improve work process, aiming to increase labour productivity. Scientific management methods are used to optimize productivity and simplifying the jobs so that workers could be trained to perform their task in one “best” way.

Frederick Taylor developed scientific management theory was developed in 1917, and was often referred to as “Taylorism". Taylors theory had four basic principles. They were to find the best way

The productivity under Taylor’s method dramatically increased and costs of the manufactured goods were reduced by 1/10 to 1/20 of the previous manufactured cost. These changes allowed more people to purchase the goods [6]. It looks like the scientific management theory was the perfect solutions to the problems in organizations in the 20th century. But is scientific management appropriate in a modern world? The next section will look at pros and cons of this theory and the use of scientific management in today’s organizations.

In his book, Out of the Crisis, he presents 14 key principles for management to follow to improve the success of any business or any organization. His principles are below: (Deming, 1987)

Scientific management or Taylorism refers to a school of thought on how organizations should be run, created in the early 20th century by Frederick Taylor. Taylor created Taylorism in an attempt to increase and improve efficiency in firms. There were five keys components in his theory:

In todays modern era of business, with its exploding technological advances, easier access to materials and a much more skilled and specialized labor force the ideology behind using scientific management is fast becoming as dated a method as the industries that still heavily rely upon its principles to function efficiently. Considering that the fundamental principles of scientific management consist of breaking down manufacturing into its constituent parts allowing unskilled, simple minded, untrained workers to do any one of the multiple tasks that produce a product. This method functions in a manner that maximizes laborers potential and thus company profits by using an assembly line type system. Under this system only management however

This is demonstrated mainly in the fast­food industry where there is a list of methods to

He developed 14 management principles. Those principles are made as the guidelines for managers to perform managerial activities efficiently and appropriately.

Taylor suggested that “no one can be found who will deny that in the case of any single individual, the greatest prosperity can exist only when that individual has reached his highest state of efficiency; that is, when he is turning out his largest daily output.” (Taylor & Jones, 1911) There is a widespread variety of opinions regarding Taylor’s theory of Scientific Management, as it is debatable whether the technique accounts for the workers own interests within the working environment, and the effects of the technique as a whole whilst enforcing the rigorous scientifically designed working methods to gain maximum efficiency and productivity.

Scientific management (also called Taylorism, the Taylor system, or the Classical Perspective) is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflow processes, improving labor productivity. The core ideas of the theory were developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s, and were first published in his monographs, Shop Management (1905) and The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).[1] Taylor believed that decisions based upon tradition and rules of thumb should be replaced by precise procedures developed after careful study of an individual at work.

Ford’s scientific management theory is a system about production, consumption and based on Taylorist principles, it introduced a new

Through the years, Fayol began to develop what he considered to be the 14 most important principles of management. Essentially, these explained how managers should organize and interact with staff.