Taylor's Scientific Management Principles in Current Organizational Management Practices

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

The second thing that I feel is an important guiding principle for organizational management is respect. Treating others with honesty, dignity, and respect is important for a manager as well as being sensitive to his or her employees, appreciating their value to the team as well as their diversity, experiences, knowledge perspective and ideas. A good manager will try to build their employees up and gain employee engagement. A friend of mine worked at a manufacturing company in Calhoun, Georgia and he had been with the company for ten years. The company was known for its high turn over and he soon got a new manager this took a sour turn because my friend no longer felt valued by the manager or the company and in turn, he gave little effort to his work and eventually found another job. Employee engagement and respect are the keys to keeping employees happy and motivated. Lastly, employees will do their best work when they feel respected, valued and part of the team. It is important for a manager to help build up their employees by helping them develop skills, welcoming new ideas,

Let’s begin by analyzing F. W. Taylor. Taylor’s scientific method can be summed up as a systematic study of relationships between people and tasks to increase efficiency (Jones and George 2015). There are four principles involved in this method: (1) Study the way workers perform their tasks, gather all the informal job knowledge that workers possess, and experiment with ways of improving the ways that tasks are performed. This step has the similar attributes of the organizing and controlling tasks discussed earlier in that the controlling task also involves evaluating the division of labor. (2) Codify the new methods of performing tasks into written rules and standard operating procedures. This step is very much about the organizing task. Although there are written rules, this aspect diverges from the leading

Scientific Management, or Taylorism, is a theory of management by F. W. Taylor that analysed how the highest economic efficiency, especially labour productivity, can be achieved, hence the greatest prosperity for both employers and employees. The four principles that he brought forward are the replacement of the ‘rule of thumb’ work method with a scientific way to study work, matching and training the most suitable person to do each particular job scientifically instead of leaving the workers to choose their own work and teach themselves, the provision of detailed instructions and standard operating procedures by the managers to workers to ensure “all of the work being done in accordance with the principles of the science” and the division of work between workers and managers, which managers are responsible for planning and supervising while workers are to complete the tasks they are assigned to.

The fundamental theory behind scientific management is breaking down each part of a job to its science (Taylor). In the Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor talks about pig iron handlers, shoveling and bricklaying as a few examples in which he implemented scientific management. He proposed four important elements that are essential to scientific management. In this example Taylor discusses the science of bricklaying. First management must develop the science of bricklaying with standard rules of each task. Every task is designed to be perfect and standardized. The second element is selection and training. This step is important because Taylor wants an employee who is “first class,” meaning that they are the best at what they do, follow instructions and will not refuse to listen or adopt the new methods that management is executing. The third element is teaching the first class employee the science of bricklaying broken down by management. At this stage management is instructing the employee what to do, how to do it, and the best way to do it. Management is there to help them and watch that they are doing it “their” way and not

What are the main features of Taylor’s approach to ‘Scientific Management” and what criticisms have been made of it? Do firms use scientific management today?

Taylor furthermore emphasized on this method as it reduced the time taken between each activity since each worker was limited to doing a precise task. Thus, the worker was able to complete the job in the least possible time and reduce wastage. Along with improved efficiency, Taylor used scientific management techniques to make sure proper utilization of resources is taking place and wastage is being kept to a minimum (Salimath and Jones, 2011, pp. 85-86).

Human resources are the most valuable assets of any organization, with the machines, materials and even the money; nothing gets done without man-power. In today’s business climate, businesses are faced with stiff internal and external competition. There are various human resource functions that give an organization a competitive edge, but most scholars argue that human resource functions becomes only operational when training has run through them all. This places training and development as an essential function in the survival of any organization. Increasingly, high performance organizations today are recognizing the need to use best training and development practices to enhance their competitive advantage.

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.

When I am appointed as a consultant by the Government to research and suggest improvements for the organization, I would put forward the following points that are mandatory to be changed and as mentioned in the question, I shall find and suggest measures to improve the company policy and rules as it is being criticized for “Taylorism”, which in it’s own way has pros and cons.

Jusko, J. (2012). How to Develop High-Potential Employees. Industry Week/IW, 261(9), 26-29. Retrieved from http://www.industryweek.com/

Scientific management was first developed by an American, Frederick Winslow Taylor in the1880s ~1910s and has evolved a lot since then. It is a theory or school of thoughts about process improvement and management. It aims at maximizing efficiency, productivity, output with least cost and minimizing wastes. It was criticized as inhuman by many organizational theorists. However, it is widely applied in manufacturing industry and service industry in both developing and developed countries nowadays. This article is to investigate the reasons why scientific

With those evocative words, Frederick W. Taylor had begun his highly influential book; “The Principles of Scientific Management” indicating his view regarding management practices. As one of the most influential management theorists, Taylor is widely acclaimed as the ‘father of scientific management’. Taylor had sought “the ‘one best way’ for a job to be done” (Robbins, Bergman, Stagg & Coulter, 2003, p.39). Northcraft and Neale (1990, p.41) state that “Scientific management took its

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.

The scientific management theory have an assumption that workers are lazy, not smart in analyzing tasks, only prefers simplified work and only works for money (Miller & Form, 1964). According to Taylor (2004), workers are unable figure out the most efficient way in doing work. Therefore, they are thought as replaceable working parts like a machine in the production line and can be trained to specialize in a certain procedure in the production. They are assumed to adopt the Protestant work ethic, working for long hours and not taking any breaks. Whenever a worker or a ‘part’ failed to perform its tasks, they