Scientific Management Theory

Scientific management is to define “one best way” to do the job. The most important and famous contribution was made by Frederick W. Taylor.

Frederick W. Taylor:
He was the father of scientific management. He was working at Medivale Steel Company when he realized that there are no virtual standards of doing a job. Workers do their jobs the way they want to and use different methods to do. A carefree culture regarding accomplishing the job was prevailing there. He was disturbed to see the workers’ inefficiencies. He observed that workers’ output was about 1/3rd of what they actually can give. And he also noticed that the jobs assigned were not according to workers’ aptitude and potential; means there was carefree assignment of jobs among the workers so there was a total wastage of efficiencies there.
Seeing all this Taylor implemented his 4 Principles of management to correct the situation and these are:

Develop a science for each element of an individuals’ work, which will replace the old rule-of-thumb method.
Scientifically select and then train, teach and develop the worker.
Heartily cooperate with workers so as to ensure that work is done in accordance with the principles of science that has been developed.
Divide work and responsibility almost equally between the management and workers. Management takes over all work for which it is better fitted that the workers.

He spent more than two decades in devising scientific rules for almost every job to be done. He claimed that these four principles would result in the prosperity of both the workers and employees. Because then there will be right utilization of skills and abilities of the workers and they will be more satisfied with the job they do which will match their aptitude.

Now we will see how did these scientific principles really work? We will take a look at the experiment conducted by Taylor in this regard. Workers loaded pigs of iron (each weighing 92lbs) onto rail cars the daily output average was 12.5 tons. This output was when the workers were not doing the jobs efficiently, right workers were not on the jobs and the techniques were random not a specific one which could beast do the job. Then Taylor applied his scientific method. He selected right people to do this job who had the skills and abilities which could complement the job well. Then he told the workers one best way to do the job, he gave proper tools and told appropriate techniques which can help in doing the job efficiently and motivated the workers with significant wages. This worked as Taylor had thought, the output increased to the level of 47 to 48 tons per day.

After the successful implementation and results of his scientific methods, his ideas spread all around the world and many people followed his ideas.