Scientific Management: Introduction

Fredrick Winslow Taylor  commonly known as "Father of Scientific Management" started his career as an operator and rose to the position of chief engineer. He conducted various experiments during this process which forms the basis of scientific management. It implies application of scientific principles for studying & identifying management problems.

According to Taylor, “Scientific Management is an art of knowing exactly what you want your men to do and seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way”. In Taylors view, if a work is analysed scientifically it will be possible to find one best way to do it.

Hence scientific management is a thoughtful, organized, dual approach towards the job of management against hit or miss or Rule of Thumb.

According to Drucker, “The cost of scientific management is the organized study of work, the analysis of work into simplest element & systematic management of worker’s performance of each element”.

One of the earliest of these theorists was Frederick Winslow Taylor. He started the Scientific Management movement, and he and his associates were the first people 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, Taylor published "The Principles of Scientific Management." In this, 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. This was very different from the way work was typically done in businesses beforehand. A factory manager at that time had very little contact with the workers, and he left them on their own to produce the necessary product. There was no standardization, and a worker's main motivation was often continued employment, so there was no incentive to work as quickly or as efficiently as possible.

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." In other words, 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. While advancing his career at a U.S. steel manufacturer, he designed workplace experiments to determine optimal performance levels. In one, he experimented with shovel design until he had a design that would allow workers to shovel for several hours straight. With bricklayers, he experimented with the various motions required and developed an efficient way to lay bricks. And he applied the scientific method to study the optimal way to do any type of workplace task. As such, 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 also led Taylor to conclude that certain people could work more efficiently than others. These were the people whom managers should seek to hire where possible. Therefore, selecting the right people for the job was another important part of workplace efficiency. Taking what he learned from these workplace experiments, Taylor developed four principles of scientific management. These principles are also known simply as "Taylorism".

The scientific management theory focused on improving the efficiency of each individual in the organization. The major emphasis is on increasing the production through the use of intensive technology, and the human beings are just considered as adjuncts to machines in the performance of routine tasks.

The scientific management theory basically encompasses the work performed on the production floor as these tasks are quite different from the other tasks performed within the organization. Such as, these are repetitive in nature, and the individual workers performing their daily activities are divided into a large number of cyclical repetition of same or closely related activities. Also, these activities do not require the individual worker to exercise complex-problem solving activity. Therefore, more attention is required to be imposed on the standardization of working methods and hence the scientific management theory laid emphasis on this aspect.