Frederick Winslow Taylor's Theory Of Scientific Management

Introduction

Economy, industries, work, money are all words that influences our everyday life, and that, for several decades. It all started with barter until people begin to create more value for making benefits. In this way, shops and industries have grown and business has become an essential element of our world. Through time, how to manage factories evolved and Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) revolutionized the twentieth century with his ideas and was considered the ‘’Father of Scientific Management’’. He first started to the bottom as a machinist at Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia, and thanks to his effective skills, he quickly rose through the hierarchy and became a chief engineer at the Midvale Steel Company in 1885 (Frederick

Scientific management, which is one of the four main paradigms of the twentieth century, is based upon rational control. In other words, Taylorism is a result of defined methods and procedures, everything is calculated and, in this theory, benefits are an important element of the organization. In fact, the organization was seen as a ‘’machine’’. Before going deeper with the scientific management itself, let’s try to understand why Taylor wanted to bring these new concepts and ideas into the organizations. In his time, Taylor reported that high productivity was rarely achieved. The conditions were not at their best and workers were paid the same price and had a standard rate of pay by the day (Taylor, 1911). Managers were not able to make the best of each worker, on the contrary, workers were lazy. Their thinking was, as noted by Taylor (1911: 20) ‘’Why should I work hard when that lazy fellow gets the same pay that I do and does only half as much work?’’. In this way, it was impossible for the organization to be efficient and to reach the higher level of productivity. Thus, Taylor came with the fact that organizations needed rational method to achieve a better yield. He wanted ‘’to prove that the best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws and principles’’ (Taylor 1911: 7). This was principle fact why he wrote his famous

The division of the labor allowed each person to concentrate on one aspect and to do it in a better way. It was possible to separate mental abilities from physical ones and then each task can be attributed to the right people (Rollinson, 2002). In the older plan, the workman had a lot more responsibilities and needed to train itself alone. Nevertheless, in the new scientific plan, the workman can be focused on his task and the manager took care of the rest (Taylor, 1911). Taylor used a parable to illustrate these concepts: the handling pig iron story (Taylor, 1911). It can be separated in four distinct sections which representing each of the above principles. This story was used to show that, even if at first it seemed to be an easy occupation and anybody could do it, there was always place for improvement. Then, he succeed to highlight the increased productivity for even a basic task of picking up, carrying and dropping pigs of iron (Govekar & Govekar,