Principles of Scientific Management

Essays Principles of Scientific management

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Category: Business

Autor: jon 28 February 2011

Words: 1613 | Pages: 7

In this essay I am going to show that scientific management is much evident in the activities involved in running of a business for the purpose of producing value for stakeholders. In other words, these activities are called business operations. These activities include labour productivity which many organisations failed to achieve improvement in. This led to a young American engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, conclude that the management practices itself has to change rather than in labour and that these changes had to happen through scientific study and thus this was where the word scientific management was deprived from. Taylor's approach of management was illustrated through the unloading of iron from rail cars and reloading finished steel for the Bethlehem steel plant in 1878(Samson & Draft, 2005, p. 55). In this study, it is shown that with the right movements and sequencings, the workers were able to carry 47.5 tonnes of load a day instead of the usual 12.5. He also worked out an incentive system that paid each man $1.85 a day instead of $1.15, this way of management then caused the productivity of steels to highly increase overnight. His approach has was looked from his perspective which was "study the character, the nature and the performance of each workman" and moreover, to "train and help and teach this workman."(F.W Taylor, Scientific Management,1998,p. 47). In this essay, I am going to talk about his different management techniques. Firstly, his development of a standard method for executing each job. Secondly, his selection of workers with appropriate abilities for each job. Thirdly, providing wage incentives to workers for increased output and lastly, supporting workers by planning their work and eliminating interruptions.

"specifying not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it"(F.W Taylor Scientific Management, 1998, pg. 17) was what Taylor suggested to ensure maximum efficiency from all workers by standardising the work process they had to carry out. His system was therefore to assign one job for each worker instead of many so that they can concentrate on one instead of multitasking so that they are more familiar with the task and thus maximum efficiency can be

achieved. "It told operators, precise cooking times for all products and temperature settings for all equipments, It specified that French fries be cut at nine-thirty-seconds thick. Grill men were instructed to put hamburgers down on the grill moving left to right, creating six rows of six patties each" (Ritzer, 2000, p. 38). This similar method can be seen in MacDonald's where précised cooking times and standardised working process such as the right amount of time to cook the French fries and patties this reflects Taylor's standardising of work processes and his "one best way" of accomplishing tasks in order to achieve maximum efficiency. (Clegg, 2005, p. 19) This is to ensure that a standard kind of meal with regular consistency of fries and burger is served to customers so as to ensure that Macdonald's food is represented well as customers would not want to come back to Macdonald's if for example, when the fries is not as crispy as the time during the previous visit of the customer.

The next point of scientific management is selecting workers with appropriate abilities for each job. As Taylor commented," The man in the planning room, whose specialty is planning ahead, invariably finds that the work can be done more economically by subdivision of the labour; each act of each mechanic, for example, should be preceded by various preparatory acts done by other men." (FW Taylor, 1998, p. 38) He saw that workers who do manual work to be motivated by money whom he termed as, "the greedy robot", and to be too stupid to develop the again "one best way" of doing a task. (J.bratton J.Gold, 2001, p. 104) Through planning, Taylor suggested that all preparation and servicing task to be performed by the unskilled worker rather than skilled one. He believes that through the concept of proper task allocation allows workers to produce optimum solutions to the task. This similar idea, although not exactly the same due to time changes and employees rights, can be seen in Macdonald's again when workers are hired for their cashier experience previously rather than their cleaning experience for a job at the counter of Mcdonald's. This is done so that when it is Macdonald's lunch rush hour, the cashiers hired can do a more efficient job as compared to a person hired with a cleaning experience job instead. Or if they had more talent in a counter job after some experience they should be placed at the cashier as their proficiency would benefit the organisation as there will be increase productivity.

Providing wage incentives to workers for increased input is the third point for the characteristic of scientific management found in

Macdonald's. Taylor believed that managers should provide