By Fedrick Taylor
Human Relations Theory
By Elton Mayo
Date:14th October, 2010
The Scientific Management Theory (Taylorism)
In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published his work, The Principles of Scientific Management, in which he described how the application of the scientific method to the management of workers greatly could improve productivity.
Scientific management methods called for optimizing the way that tasks were performed and simplifying the jobs enough so that workers could be trained to perform their specialized sequence of motions in the one "best" way.
Before the scientific management theory, work tasks were done by skilled craftsmen who were taught to do their jobs in lengthy apprenticeships. They decided upon how a task should be performed. With the introduction of scientific management allot of this autonomy was reduced and converted skilled crafts into a series of simplified jobs that could be performed by unskilled workers who could be easily trained for the task.
There are four principles of scientific measurement:
1) Study how the job is being performed now then figure out new ways to do it. Gather relevant information (detailed, time and motion). Try out various methods before choosing. 2) Scientifically select, train, and develop each worker rather than passively leaving them to train themselves. 3) Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed. 4) Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.
Although scientific management brought about positive changes, there were also drawbacks.
* Taylorism can easily be abused to exploit human beings. Conflicts with labor unions. * Not useful to deal with groups...