Various management control methods have been advanced by management practitioners and theorists in the hope of enhancing organizational productivity. Some of the most discussed methods include Scientific Management, also known as Taylorism, Fordism, and the Human Relations Movement (Mabey, Salaman & Storey, 1998). Most of these techniques deal with the effective management of labor to realize optimal results in the workplace. It is the purpose of this essay to evaluate the presupposition that Taylorism and Fordism management control methods enhanced organizational productivity at the expense of employee job satisfaction.
Developed by Frederick Taylor, the Scientific Management revolved around employee motivation approaches and job design techniques. Taylor had been triggered into action by inefficient working traditions and failure of employees to be committed to the organization (Mabey, Salaman & Storey, 1998). According to him, the core function of management should be the scientific evaluation of all tasks done in an organization, including designing jobs to eradicate waste of time and employee motion. According to Taylor, maximum organizational productivity could be achieved through a series of strategies, key among them the separation of tasks or jobs into their simplest elements, minimization of skills required to perform specific tasks, and the configuration of machines to curtail the movement of workers and materials.
Although the above aspirations could be used to enhance organizational productivity, it can be argued that his approaches infringed on employee job satisfaction. First, his approach to job design symbolized a form of employee deskilling in addition to presenting organizations with new structures of control. Many employees hold their skills in high esteem. The strategy of minimizing skill requirements will definitely have a negative impact on employee esteem. Second, Taylorism enhanced management’s control and influence over the quantity and quality of employees’ performance.
In many instances, such control increases employee frustration and dissatisfaction levels, ultimately leading to the withdrawal of support and commitment on the part of employees. Third, the processes of job simplification and task fragmentation led to employee boredom and dissatisfaction. Finally, the Taylorism approach of configuring machines to curtail employee movement tended to facilitate an adversarial management-employee relations climate (Mabey, Salaman & Storey, 1998). Such factors can only serve to reduce employee job-satisfaction.
Henry Ford built on the fundamental principles of Taylorism to come up with the Fordism approach. Ford is credited for perfecting the flow-line concept of the assembly line (Mabey, Storey & Salaman, 1998). His classical assembly line concept was evaluated as a technique of control of workers as well as a job design principle designed to enhance job productivity. Fordism philosophy also puts extra emphasis on job fragmentation and task simplification in the form of short task-cycle times.
This management control method also initiated an interlinking system of conveyor processions that fed components and materials to diverse work units. It should be noted that Ford introduced a process of standardizing commodities to achieve economies of scale (Mabey, Salaman & Storey, 1998). This discovery is credited for the introduction of mass production of standardized items at discounted cost. Also, Ford came up with the concept of recording job-times to monitor employees’ intensities of effort and performance.
Although the above strategies worked well to increase organizational productivity, they cannot escape blame in terms of lowering employee job-satisfaction. First, the concept of determining the speed of work on the organization’s assembly line through technology rather than a sequence of instructions was viewed as abstract in addition to lacking any human connection. Although this technique is still used today, it lacks the human connection needed to boost employee job-satisfaction by its virtue of treating the workers as robots (Melosi, 1980).
Although Ford’s concept of people management is good in boosting organizational productivity, recording employee job-times was not popular in enhancing job-satisfaction as it was viewed as management’s way of exercising too much control on the employees. Third, the repetitive nature of work brought by job simplification and the concept of assembly line made employees view work as boring and unchallenging (Mabey, Salaman & Storey, 1998).
The job dissatisfaction occasioned by the assembly line technology was expressed in high levels of absenteeism and employee turnover. In both Taylorism and Fordism, the relationship between management and employees in terms of control can significantly deteriorate to bring an increased level of organizational control, a scenario that harms employee job-satisfaction levels. Some of these limitations occasioned a paradigm shift on the relationship between workers and management, heralding a new perspective of management control known as the Human Relations Movement.
List of References
Mabey, C., Salaman, G., & Storey, J. (1998) Human Resource Management: A Strategic Introduction. 2nd ed. [online] Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Web.
Melosi, D. (1980) Strategies of Social control in Capitalism: A Comment on Recent Work. Crime, Law & Social Change, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 381-399.