Monday, December 9, 2013

13.1 THE SKILLS YOU NEED TO BE A GREAT BOSS: Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management

(SHORT NOTES FROM TEAM MANAGEMENT:
Historical Management Theories at http://www.mindtools.com)
 
People have been managing work for hundreds of years.  The formal management ideas can be traced to the 1700s.  Most significant developments in management theory emerged in the 20th century.

One of the earliest of these theorists was Frederick Winslow Taylor.  He started the Scientific Management movement.  He and his associates were the first to study the work process scientifically.  They studied how work was performed, and they looked at how this affected worker productivity.  Taylor's philosophy focused on the belief that making people work as hard as they could was not as efficient as optimizing the way the work was done.

In 1909, he proposed that by optimizing and simplifying jobs, productivity would increase.  He also advanced the idea that workers and managers needed to cooperate with one another.  Taylor believed that all workers were motivated by money, so he promoted the idea of "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work", where, if a worker didn't achieve enough in a day, he didn't deserve to be paid as much as another worker who was highly productive.

With a background in mechanical engineering, Taylor was very interested in efficiency.  He applied the scientific method to study the optimal way to do any type of workplace task.  He found that by calculating the time needed for the various elements of a task, he could develop the "best" way to complete that task.  These "time and motion" studies led Taylor to conclude that certain people could work more efficiently than others.  Taking what he learned from these workplace experiments, Taylor developed four principles of scientific management.  These principles are also known simply as "Taylorism":
1.    Use the scientific method to study work and determine the most efficient way to perform specific tasks.
2.   Match workers to their jobs based on capability and motivation, and train them to work at maximum efficiency.
3.   Monitor worker performance, and provide instructions and supervision
4.   Allocate the work between managers and workers.
·        managers spend their time planning and training
·        allowing workers to perform their tasks efficiently

Taylorism promotes the idea that there is "one right way" to do something.  Taylorism breaks tasks down into tiny steps, and focuses on how each person can do his or her specific series of steps best.  Taylorism separates manual from mental work.

Scientific management in its pure form focuses too much on the mechanics, and fails to value the people side of work, whereby motivation and workplace satisfaction are key elements in an efficient and productive organization.


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