Introduction
Founder Fredrick Taylor brought about scientific management and the first book was published in 1911. His work received wide acclaim as well as criticism. Although it is one hundred years ago since Taylor brought his ideas of management practice it is necessary to explore whether they still exist even after emergence of new theories of management.
The first part of this discussion will delve into the major principles and arguments fronted by Taylor in the concept of management. The second part is how the theory applies in the twenty first century, the organizations that are using this concept of management, and how it has affected their profitability and efficiency in production.
Finally, there are limitations of the concept of scientific management and the reasons why some organizations are ambivalent in putting it into work.
Tenets of scientific management
The first argument fronted by Taylor related to efficiency in production. Taylor observed that the workers in the production worked with a low efficiency. They did not work hard as they should rather they worked enough to satisfy the employer.
They only worked hard when there were incentives such as increase in salaries or wages. Scientific management called for a change in the way workers did their work. He advocated for workers to get payments as per their output (Taylor 1911). This did not augur well with the labour unions that felt that Taylor was advocating for enslavement of workers by the management.
This worker apathy during working hours was referred to as soldiering where workers worked but at their lowest rate of production for the longest hours. Scientific management advocated for breaks during work time to enhance efficiency (Kanigel 1997).
The employers on the other hand are also included in the tenets of the theory. The theory accused managers of hiring incompetent workers who were not skilled. Furthermore, the manager left most of the work to be done by the artisan.
Scientific management advocated for the managers to hire people who are skilled in the production operations of the organizations. Other than that, the mangers needed to train the existing workers on how to work efficiently. This is because efficiency in production is important in ensuring the organizations profitability (Kanigel 1997).
Taylor also called for separation of planning from production. Scientific management indicated that it was necessary to have separation of production tasks from those of planning. The planning role included activities such as making orders, preparing financial statements, predicting sales and trends in the market.
These are separate activities from those of production and different people from those who are in production should handle them (Hughes 2004).This is because in those days people who were in planning were also the ones in production. This overlapping of roles slowed efficiency.
Taylor advocated for managers to supervise labour closely to enhance efficiency in the production as he argued that unsupervised workers were not efficient (Meacham 2005). Scientific management advocates for supervisory managers and planning managers to be included in the management of an organization to promote efficiency through supervision.
The efficient supervisory advocated by Taylor involved scientific management of time through keeping of time records. Output records on the workers productivity showed if the worker was carrying goods from one location to the other and what the quantity of the goods carried was.
If the worker was to use a chine to produce a certain product how many products did the worker produce in one hour. This made it easier to track non-performing workers and if they did not improve their performance, sacking them was the only option. This caused uproar from labourers who felt that workers were being overworked.
Scientific management also called for a different means of compensation from the one, which was in existence. The means of compensation had the basis of time. However, Taylor called for payments based on the output (Taylor 1903).
This meant that the workers were no longer salaried or paid because they reported to work for the whole month but they received payments based on the number of outputs produced. They veered from the traditional way of compensation based on time rather than the output.
Taylor had also observed the aspects of employee motivation. Scientific management called for wages for workers as per their output. He noted that financial reasons were the greatest factors that motivated employees to high level of performance.
Taylor considered financial motivation as a great motivator for the employees to work hard. He also advocated for reward system to honour and acknowledge extraordinary performances in the process of production.
The other major issue fronted by this theory on scientific management and had a long lasting effect is that of automation. Automation refers to the use of machines to replace human beings. It is the absorption of technology and the necessary machineries capable of doing tasks previously performed by human beings.
Taylor advocated for the use of machineries to increase efficiency especially if the machines used were likely to result in lower costs of production.
In his time though, mechanization was not a plausible idea and it did not seem reasonable, as there was no real technologies that could predict that they could replace people with machines. Taylor called for organizations to take advantage of such technological advancement with full force (Morph 1983)
Relevance of scientific management in twenty first century
This part of the essay shall delve into the applications of scientific management in the twenty first century one hundred years after Taylor published his work. Though there have been other theories that have come about to describe the concept of management they are yet to drive the idea of scientific management into oblivion.
This is because there are instances where many aspects of management and efficiency in organizations receive direction from the idea of scientific management. The following are some of the areas where scientific management is seemingly obvious (Sheldon 1925).
The first one relates to the idea of scientific hiring of employees. The field of human resource management attributed to Taylor acknowledged that human labour is a resource that requires development into machine like performance. The scientific hiring of labourers is nowadays systematic.
It is composed of a well-researched job analysis used to develop job descriptions for employees. These job descriptions are made up of the employer’s expectations and the amount of output expected from the labourer. It also states the rewards that will accrue to the labourer as a result of his or her work.
There has never been time when employers are looking for people with skills like in the twenty first century. Even Starbucks is employing graduates from Harvard because there is need for skilled labourers (Myers 2001).
Scientific management has also resulted to in house job trainings. Internships are the order of today in today’s employment procedures. Many of the organizations opt to train their workers irrespective of the colleges they came from.
This in house training is the brainchild of scientific management concept. This is because it prepared the worker to give the expected results. Companies like IBM and Microsoft are some of the companies that have full-fledged in house training programs (Myers 2001).
Division of labour is now common that every organization and factories nowadays do not have production department alone. They have other departments to take care of other components of business such as human resource that deals with hiring and firing of workers (Bell 2011).
It also deals with the separation of activities advocated by Taylors’ concepts that are now prevalent. This has increased efficiency and profitability of organizations.
The other manifest application of scientific management in the twenty first century is that of automation or mechanization, in his time the concept was weird and not many organizations assimilated it into practice. Then, human beings did most of the work such as paper work.
Things have really changed and machines nowadays do most of the work. Technology has permeated every facade of business and production activities.
Production of modern day products relies heavily on the use of machines and the machine technology integration is at a very high rate such that even machines are becoming obsolete. The automation that Taylor called for is now more evident than ever (Morph 1983).
The computer has replaced the data entry clerks; it has seen off the office typists, the file clerk is no longer needed in the office. The cleaner is no longer needed because all of their work has been taken over by machines.
The system of rewarding employees with high pays in an environment with high concentration of skilled workers is one of the concepts that have received a wide acclaim in the modern day world. Workers nowadays do not prefer time consuming or time based jobs rather they prefer output based kind of work where the payments depend on the amount of output.
More companies are employing labourers on contract bases because of this development such that when the period of work is over the worker is free to leave and the employer without any obligations to pay the worker for non-output hours (Tsukamoto 2007).
The mechanization of workers is a concept of Taylor, which has been adopted by many businesses especially franchises. These franchises operate on scientific predictions of sales performance. They thereby have a set of roles and tasks, which the employees have to handle.
Some of these companies with great profit turnovers such as the MacDonald have successfully used the concept of mechanization of labour to increase efficiency. They have specified routine roles and a certain level of output expected from every employee. This results to predictable output and increased profitability (Meacham 2005).
Critic
Taylor has also received a wide critic from various quarters for a number of reasons. The labourers especially criticized Taylor’s concept of mechanization that tended to equate labour with machines. They also abhorred the fact that the concept of mechanization meant that they had to work more than they were doing (Hughes 2004).
The other issue that has come under sharp criticism is that of the reward system. Psychologists argue that money is not the only source of motivation and other factors such as praise and recognition go a long way in motivating workers to high levels of performance (Mullins 2004).
This has seen concepts such as company wards and ceremonies getting acclaim all over the world and brushing aside scientific management.
The concept of automation in organization regarded as fiction, has seen millions of people losing their jobs all over the world. Although it has gained wide acceptance in management it has received hate in equal measure from employees who have lost their jobs (Morph 1983).
Although Taylor had high regard for human beings, some quarters see him as obsessed with a low opinion of non-intellectual workers who he described as oxen and that they should be guided and supervised to higher levels of performance.
This concept did not augur well with many of the labourers and it resulted into massive strikes in the industries, as workers hated the close supervision done by the managers in the factories (Noble 1984).
The concept of supervision wielded many powers to supervisors who at times mistreated low performers. Behaviour psychologists also argue that external supervision is futile if the individual is not intrinsically motivated
Conclusion
The theory of scientific management is one of great developments in the field of management and it is questionable whether the managerial developments seen today in organizations would have existed if the ideas fronted by Taylor were out of existence.
It is irrefutable that Taylor increased efficiency in the production activities of many organizations. Taylor also led to increased payments for employees among other benefits as the concept aroused a cognitive digression on the best way to motivate and reward workers.
The loss of jobs because of technology is a major indicator that Taylor’s ideas are very alive one century after he brought about those ideas.
References
Bell, R 2011”Teaching present day employee scientific management” Journal of Business Leadership Vol. 8, no. 7 pp. 3-4.
Hughes, T 2004, American genesis: A century of invention and technological enthusiasm, 1870–1970, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Kanigel, R 1997, The one best way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency, Penguin-Viking, New York.
Meacham, C 2005, Management: Encyclopaedia of science, technology, and ethics, Macmillan, Chicago.
Myers, L 2001, “What would Fredrick Taylor say?” International Journal of Business and Social Science, Vol. 2, no. 20, pp. 5.
Morph, M 1983, Eight scenarios for work in the future, Futurist, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 24–29.
Mullins, L 2004, Management and organisational behaviour (7th ed.), Financial Times Press, Pearson Education Ltd, London.
Noble, D 1984, Forces of production: A social history of industrial automation, Knopf, New York.
Sheldon, O 1925, Development of scientific management in England, Harvard Business Review, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 129-140.
Taylor, F 1911, The principles of scientific management, Harper & Brothers, London.
Tsukamoto, S 2007 ‘An Institutional Economic Reconstruction Of Scientific Management: On The Lost Theoretical Logic Of Taylorism.’ Academy of Management Review vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 105–117.