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The And Human Relations Approach

Satisfactory Essays

The development of society over the past few centuries primarily resulted from the Industrial Revolution that took place from the 18th and the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution essentially resulted in the utilisation of large scale manufacturing and production, which meant that the management of large workforces (labour) became more and more important to economic success. As a result, two management approaches emerged: the school of Scientific Management (pioneered by Frederick Taylor) and the Human Relations approach (developed by Elton Mayo). The emergence of Scientific Management (SM) is what drove the Industrial Revolution (IR). At the time, there was a desire and need to improve productive output and SM addressed this by …show more content…

Whilst devising these instructions, the managers had to ensure that the tasks were designed so that productivity is maximised and the workers didn’t fall back on their inefficient ‘rules of thumb’ processes (UK Essays, 2013). In order to maximise efficiency and output, the managers focussed on efficiency: little breaks were provided, there was little communication between workers and the only form of remuneration was the wage. The managers were entrusted to make sure that the workers focussed solely on the task at hand – this meant that managers didn’t have ‘any personal connection with them’ (Caldari, 2007). The principle behind this was that the workers would do anything as long as you paid them enough because under SM, there was no sense of worker welfare – it was maximum output at all times at all costs. If the managers took into account their welfare and started to sympathise for them, then output would not be maximised according to Scientific Management. From the lack of consideration of the social factors in a workplace by the Scientific Management style, the Human Relations (HR) approach was born. Human Relations was considered to be the opposite to Scientific Management. It attempted to acknowledge and account for the what SM ignored: “A business organisation is basically a social system. It is

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