Business

FREDERICK W. TAYLOR

Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915) rested his philosophy on four basic principles:

1. The development of a true science of management, so that the best method for performing each task could be determined.

2. The scientific selection of workers, so that each worker would be given responsibility for the task for which he or she was best suited.

3. The scientific education and development of the worker.

4. Intimate, friendly cooperation between management and labor.

Taylor contended that the success of these principles required "a complete mental revolution" on the part of management and labor. Rather than quarrel over profits, both sides should try to increase production; by so doing, he believed, profits would rise to such an extent that labor and management would no longer have to fight over them. In short, Taylor believed that management and labor had a common interest in increasing productivity.

Taylor based his management system on production-line time studies. Instead of relying on traditional work methods, he analyzed and timed steel workers' movements on a series of jobs. Using time study as his base, he broke each job down into its components and designed the quickest and best methods of performing each component. In this way he established how much workers should be able to do with the equipment and materials at hand. He also encouraged employers to pay more productive workers at a higher rate than others, using a "scientifically correct" rate that would benefit both company and worker. Thus, workers were urged to surpass their previous performance standards to earn more pay Taylor called his plan the differential rate system.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT THEORY

The modem assembly line pours out finished products faster than Taylor could ever have imagined. This production "miracle" is just one legacy of scientific management. In addition, its efficiency techniques have been applied to many tasks in non-industrial organizations, ranging from fast-food service to the training of surgeons.

LIMITATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT THEORY

Although Taylor's method led to dramatic increases in productivity and to higher pay in a number of instances, workers and unions began to oppose his approach because they feared that working harder or faster would exhaust whatever work was available, causing layoffs.

Moreover, Taylor's system clearly meant that time was of the essence. His critics objected to the "speed up" conditions that placed undue pressures on employees to perform at faster and faster levels. The emphasis on productivityвЂ"and, by extension, profitabilityвЂ"led some managers to exploit both workers and customers. As a result, more workers joined unions and thus reinforced a pattern of suspicion and mistrust that shaded labor-management relations for decades

MAX WEBER

Reasoning that any goal-oriented organization consisting of thousands of individuals would require the carefully controlled regulation of its activities, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) developed a theory of bureaucratic management that stressed the need for a strictly defined hierarchy governed by clearly defined regulations and lines of authority. He considered the ideal organization to be a bureaucracy whose activities and objectives were rationally thought out and whose divisions of labor were explicitly spelled out. Weber also believed that technical competence should be emphasized and that performance evaluations should be made entirely on the basis of merit.

Today we often think of bureaucracies as vast, impersonal organizations that put impersonal efficiency ahead of human needs. We should be careful, though, not to apply our negative connotations of the word bureaucracy to the term as Weber use it. Like the scientific management theorists, Weber sought to improve the performance of socially important organizations by making their operations predictable and productive. Although we now value innovation and flexibility as much as efficiency and predictability, Weber's model of bureaucratic management clearly advanced the formation of huge corporations such as Ford. Bureaucracy was a particular pattern of relationships for which Weber saw great promise.

Although bureaucracy has been successful for many companies, in the competitive global market of the 1990s organizations such as General Electric and Xerox have become "bureaucracy busters," throwing away the organization chart and replacing it with ever-changing constellations of teams, projects, and alliances with the goal of unleashing employee creativity.

THE HUMAN RELATIONS MOVEMENT

Human relations is frequently used as a general term to describe the ways in which managers interact with their employees. When "employee management" stimulates more and better work, the organization has effective human relations; when morale and efficiency deteriorate, its human relations are said to be ineffective. The human relations movement arose from early attempts to systematically discover the social and psychological factors that would create effective human relations.

THE HAWTHORNE EXPERIMENTS. The human relations movement grew out of a famous series of studies conducted at the Western Electric Company from 1924 to 1933. These eventually became known as the "Hawthorne Studies" because many of them were performed at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant near Chicago. The Hawthorne Studies began as an attempt to investigate the relationship between the level of lighting in the workplace and worker productivity--the type of question Frederick Taylor and his colleagues might well have addressed.

In some of the early studies, the Western Electric researchers divided the employees into test groups, who were subjected to deliberate changes in lighting, and control groups, whose lighting remained constant throughout the experiments. The results of the experiments were ambiguous. When the test group's lighting was improved, productivity tended to increase, although erratically. But when lighting conditions were made worse, there was also a tendency for productivity to increase in the test group. To compound the mystery, the control group's output also rose over the course of the studies, even though it experienced no changes in illumination. Obviously,