Frederick Winslow Taylor: Father of Modern Management

Modern management is the collaboration of people and machines to create value. In the early days of industrialization the innovators of machines and the innovators of organization and management were engineers. Engineers, after all, were the ones closest to the machines, and this fact placed them at the interaction of workers and machines. This certainly helps explain Frederick Taylor and his invention of "Scientific Management".

Taylor began his career as the first management theorist, consultant, and "guru" as an apprentice foreman and common laborer, positions from which he quickly advanced to chief engineer. Taylor's early resume, however, belies the fact that he was born into an affluent Philadelphia family. His direct observations of men at work led him to develop what we would call "motivation" theory, although this is a psychology term that would not be imported into the management vocabulary until later. Taylor's own point of view, although benign towards workers, saw human labor very much analogous to machine work--- something to be "engineered" to achieve efficiency. His theories on management would be promoted worldwide (and maybe took stronger root in Japan than in the U.S. or Europe) and would be controversial at home. If greater economic development through efficient and productive work was Taylor's own view of his work, the growing Labor Movement would see "Taylorism" as exploitive. Organized labor's antagonism to the American popularity of Taylor's work would eventually lead to Congressional hearings and, pretty much, the demise of "Scientific Management".

Taylor developed his management theories in his book Shop Management published in 1903, making it arguably the first scholarly work on management. Although there were books and published pieces on what could be termed "management" these were more of a "guide to" or trade publication on best practices. Shop Management approached the role of manager as a general role with specific functions with respect to collaborative work. The problem, as Taylor saw it, was that workers were inefficient because: (1) Workers tended to ration their work load or work less than they could, because working faster and harder would mean that there would be less or no work to do in the future. (2) Management failed to structure work effectively and to provide appropriate incentives. It should be pointed out that Taylor is writing before the establishment of a "minimum wage" (the minimum wage became federal law in 1938), so the notion of what is "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" was arbitrary. A day-rate or hourly-rate was a common practice at the turn of the century. Taylor viewed these wage practices as rewarding for attendance, not performance. While another common practice was the "piece-rate" system that paid workers on the basis of output, this generally failed because standards were poorly set, employers cut rates when workers earned "too much", and workers would conceal their real capacity for production to keep standards low.

The solution, to Taylor, lay in discovering the appropriate work standard and fitting wages to the standard. Management should establish specific work targets, pay workers for the tasks and goals met, and provide regular feedback. The main elements of his theory were:

1. Management is a true science. The solution to the problem of determining fair work standards and practices could be discovered by experimentation and observation. From this, it follows, that there is "one right way" for work to be performed.

2. The selection of workers is a science. Taylor's "first class worker" was someone suitable for the job. It was management's role to determine the kind of work for which an employee was most suited, and to hire and assign workers accordingly.

3. Workers are to be developed and trained. It is management's task to not only engineer a job that can be performed efficiently, but management is responsible for training the worker as to how the work is to be performed and for updating practices as better ones are developed. This standardizes how the work is performed in the best way.

4. Scientific management is a collaboration of workers and managers. Managers are not responsible for execution of work, but they are responsible for how the work is done. Planning, scheduling, methods, and training are functions of the manager.

The "scientific" approach towards work led Taylor to investigate work through "task allocation" which meant that a job would be studied by sub-dividing it into discrete tasks, each element of the job would be investigated to discern the optimal efficiency by which it could be accomplished. The elements of the job, properly designed, then, would be reconstructed as an efficient job. The criticism of this approach is that it omits the worker's own contribution to the design of work and, thereby, alienates the worker from the job. Still, what Taylor does is link national wealth and company profits to how effectively work is performed, and he defines a cooperative role between labor and management in wealth creation.

Taylor's system was widely adopted in the United States and the world until its demise in the 1930's as organized labor pushed for a minimum wage based on hourly pay, as opposed to Taylor's contention that pay ought to be based on performance. In practice "Taylorism" too often fell short of a collaboration between labor and management and, frequently, was a mask for business exploitation of workers. The enduring and unquestionable contribution of Frederick Taylor is that management is firmly established as something done by trained, professional practitioners and is elevated as the subject of legitimate scholarship.

http://www.mgmtguru.com/mgt301/301_Lecture1Page8.htm

Historical Theories of Management

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1024